Your competition doesn’t care “if you feel good today”, “if you your profit margins are eroding” or “if your advertising budget is thinning out”.
Hey, you look tired, why don't you relax?
Your competition doesn’t care if you don’t feel like building links, adding fresh content or aging your domain with trust. The only thing they do care about is outranking you for your main keywords. In fact, if you never discovered SEO to begin with, that would make their jobs easier by having no one standing in between the markets they tackle for their own profit and personal gain.
What Motivates Your Business?
By the sheer nature of design, your competition thrives on exploiting the complacence of others when procrastination, distractions or bureaucratic diversity within your corporate culture obscures the goal of acquiring a top ranking position in search engines.
In fact, they would like nothing more if your website slipped on a banana peel and feel from the SERPs (search engine result pages) entirely; so keep that in mind as motivation daily when someone turns up the heat and pushes your website off the page because you were sleeping behind the wheel.
In a way, you can be thankful that they constantly insist on raising the bar. With search engines as the referee; your website needs an impeccable SEO agenda to stay buoyant and intent on a firm trajectory from where you rank today, to where it could be (above the fold for thousands of relevant keywords).
Search engine rankings are like a commodity, there are only 10 spots available that matter for any given keyword. Those spots will not be top 20, top 50 or anything else anytime soon, and with the number of new websites reaching into the millions each month, there simply is not as much breathing room as there used to be.
This means less room for error and you have to own a focus and carve out a scoop of the market that you can dominate without having to look over your shoulder every few hours and check your rankings obsessively.
In order to compete, your website needs:
- To reinforce itself through tactful internal linking (link keywords to ideal landing pages).
- To understand the mindset of the ideal consumer and have appealing calls to action coupled with enticing value propositions to increase conversions not just traffic.
- Unique relevant content and update the site frequently (if the niche is competitive).
- A method for sharing new discoveries with search engines (rss, sitemaps,etc.).
- Analytics to discern which keywords, traffic patterns and promotions are paying off.
- Links from other sites (links equate to trust, trust equates to rankings).
Mind you, that implementing these types of changes all at once is not as rewarding as administering changes over time to fine-tune relevance, trust and reputability.
Suggestions to build real authority means understanding which metrics appease algorithms, where to put your attention and the most efficient way to collectively execute a tired approach and layer SEO strategies (much like a good game of chess).
There are no SEO short-cuts worth pursuing due to the risk vs. reward modality, however there are things that accrue trust and rankings exponentially as a result of structure vs. a random flying by the seat of your pants approach (which may or may not work).
The bottom line is, you understand the end goal, but need to make baby steps daily to (a) defend your keep or (b) carve out a place for your website amidst the myriad challenges and competitors flanking your keywords and market share from all sides.
