Every business should aim to be the best they can – both online and offline. However, it’s the online world which can be a little trickier when it comes to knowing who your competitors are and what can do to outperform them.
Whether you’re looking to get ahead or looking to stay ahead, you need to check out these 4 Online Competitor Analysis Tips!
1. Update Your Website’s Content Regularly
Content is by far the most important criteria for search engines. Sites that update their content on a regular basis are more likely to get crawled more frequently. You can easily provide fresh content through a blog that is on your site, rather than trying to add new web pages or constantly changing your existing on-page content.
Remember: Static sites are crawled less often than those that provide new content.
2. Reliable Web Hosting
Web hosting isn’t just about putting a website online for the world to see. It’s now become crucial in creating a positive UX and a contributing factor for SEO.
When it comes to web hosting, reliability means that your server performs with very good uptime i.e. no outages. For instance, if somebody visits your website and receives a server error, they are likely to leave your website. The same goes for search engine crawlers.
Bonus: try hosting your website with a local hosting provider to get even more benefits from simply ‘hosting a website’. You can check out what our reliable Australian hosting services offer on our website.
3. Create & Submit Sitemaps
Sitemap submission is one of the first things which you can do to make your site discovered faster by search engine bots. In WordPress you can use a Google XML sitemap plugin to generate dynamic sitemap and then easily submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster tools.
4. Avoid Duplicate Content
Copied content decreases crawl rates – simply. Search engines are very smart and can easily pick up on duplicate content, resulting in less of your site being crawled or even a search engine banning your site or lowering your ranking.
You should always provide fresh and relevant content if you want to rank well in search engines and provide the best UX to your website visitors.
Content can be anything from blog postings to videos, and there are also many ways to optimise your content for search engines. Using those tactics can also improve your crawl rate. It is a good idea to verify you have no duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content can be between pages or between websites. There are free content duplication resources available online you can use to authenticate your site content.
5. Reduce Your Site Loading Time
Reducing load times is a big task, however, there’s always some low hanging fruit up for grabs. Some quick and easy ideas to reduce your site load times include:
- Remove unused images on your website, or reduce the sizes of the image/s in use
- Remove unused plugins which are only taking up storage space on your server
- Implement lazy loading on your website so that users aren’t waiting for the entire page to load before they see any content
- Install an image compression plugin tool – if you’re using WordPress, then Smush is a great option
6. Block Access To Unwanted Page Via Robots.txt
There is no point letting search engines crawl useless pages like admin pages, or back-end folders as we don’t want them indexed and ranking in Google anyway.
A Simple edit on Robots.txt will help you to stop bots from crawling such useless part of your site.
7. Use Internal Linking Like A Pro
Internal linking is when you link one of your website’s pages to another of your website’s pages. Doing this highlights the importance of more of your website’s pages, can help pass link juice from one page to another, and also helps search engines to crawl deep pages of your website.
A simple example of a way that you can do this, is when you write a new post. Once you have written your new post, go back to related old posts and add a link to your new post there – or vice versa. This will not directly help in increasing Google crawl rate but will help bots to effectively crawl deep pages on your site.
We hope this has helped your website get a little extra love from search engines. Need something more? We can help! Contact DigitUX today.
