It stands to reason that if your competition is highly optimized you will need to out-do them in order to achieve better results on Google and the other search engines, doesn’t it? So, don’t make the mistake one of our prospects made recently when he emphatically denied that the businesses that were currently defining his target market weren’t his competition because they didn’t do exactly what his business intended to do.
This takes us back to a recurring theme in SEO: what you think your business is doesn’t matter as much as what your prospects are looking for. His mistake misled our prospect to think that our expertise in his actual competition wasn’t meaningful because he didn’t recognize his competition. This mistake led him to believe that anybody offering SEO was the same as anyone else. His intended audience was already finding his competition enthusiastically. This was frustrating for us because there was no way that we could help him move his project forward in the right direction. It was clear that no one could.
To make the most of your SEO budget make sure that your purveyor can help you understand your competition in search. With everyone from printing companies to off-shore non-native English speakers offering SEO services you need to have some real criteria to make a good SEO buying decision. Understanding the competition is a very good start.
Even better is to work with someone like sem[c] for your SEO. We’ll help you compete effectively.