Be smarter than the competition: Learn the importance of analyzing your industry landscape from Katie Cunningham of Adept Marketing.
The key to getting the top SERP spot? Knowing what’s happening in your entire industry. And sometimes, to do that, you need to spy on the competition.
Video transcription
I’m Katie Cunningham and I work for Adept Marketing as an SEO manager.
Today, I am speaking on how to spy on your industry so you can beat out your competitors. And it applies to everybody. Everybody gets a little bit siloed and has those blinders on so that they are only looking at the keywords they want to be tracking and ranking for.
Instead, they should be taking a step back, thinking from the customer’s eyes, thinking about the industry as a whole, and doing a full research project to understand what’s happening in your industry.
Create a roadmap
I would recommend they go back and create a project. I’m treating this as a research project, but you can do it ongoing as well.
Go back, identify what solutions and problems they need to find for their next priorities and plan those into their roadmap so that they can get this data and stop working on assumptions and can actually get things strategically implemented based off of data.
Get the data you need
We use STAT for rank tracking and to get our first-party data analysis. We do a lot of research beforehand and find those keywords that we want to set up tracking for within the topics that we were interested in.
So, we put them into STAT then pull them out using their API to export it. And that’s our first-party data source that we’re slicing and dicing, that only we have, no one else has it.
Develop your content strategy
I’ve done this for mainly healthcare industry so far, and it’s helped us define what different topics we want to go after for answer boxes — all that type of stuff.
It’s to find a content strategy, but it also helps us get buy-in for things like, say, AMP (because that’s been a buzzword everybody’s using right now). We helped see if that really was something they needed to be doing and putting their resources towards or if that should be down the road.
We’ve also helped them prioritize the next steps with their local and physician data. Local is huge in the healthcare industry and we need to show them, not necessarily how they’re ranking, but how do local packs show up, what are the searches people do, so that they can get internal buy-in to prioritize resources for that.
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