How to Start Dominating a Competitive Market

Heavy competition tends to scare off smaller players, like affiliate marketing solopreneurs.

But the thing with competition is that if it exists, it means there's money in that particular niche.

Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many people vying for dominance.

Yet it also makes it hard to break in if you're new and your budget isn't all that high.

With SEO in particular, breaking into some of the more competitive searches can seem almost impossible.

Big companies with big marketing budgets have more resources for building links and creating content than you do.

But with the right strategy, you can rank for some of those big money keywords, pushing out established players and bringing traffic your way.

To do that, you need to analyze what your competition is doing.

Then, find ways you can outdo them.

In a recent post from the TopRank Marketing Blog, search marketer Kevin Cotch explains how you can conduct competitive landscape analysis, then use those insights to create “10x content” that blows your competitors out of the water.

Competitive Landscape Analysis

After choosing the keywords that you want to target, you should do a more thorough competitive analysis to see what the currently ranking sites are doing.

By analyzing what each competitor and ranking domain is doing already, you can find commonalities to use for your piece of content.

Common elements to analyze when doing a competitor analysis are title tags, meta descriptions, H1 heading tags, common keywords used, page authority/external links pointing to the page, content length, pagespeed, and internal links pointing to the target page.

Running a competitive analysis on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a keyword will allow you to understand what elements are important to rank your piece of content.

The analysis also helps when you are setting expectations with key stakeholders about the timing on when the piece of content might start ranking/performing to expectations.

Create 10x Content

Content marketers know that creating 10x content is much more difficult than you might initially thing.

I want to avoid saying go create great content, because most people don’t fully understand what great content is. Instead, focus on creating content that you are proud of and what you think your audience will enjoy.

Each piece of content should serve a purpose to solve problems that your audience is experiencing.

10x content doesn’t only have to be blog or page content.

Start thinking outside the box with videos, infographics, interactive eBooks, or podcasts that can also be optimized. By focusing on other types of content you can create more engaging content for your audience.

Once you publish your 10x content, make sure you slot time to come back and review how it is performing in search.

Use a tool like Google Search Console to see what search queries the page is getting impressions for to either reoptimize or rewrite the content to get even more visibility.

You can find more tips for breaking into competitive niches over at TopRank.