Category: Digital Marketing

Have you ever wondered how the others are higher up in traffic or have more visibility while you are offering the same or even superior products/services? 

Well to put this right, these others know where the traffic is coming from and most importantly how to maximize it! 

1. Why Tracking Competitor Traffic Matters

Analyzing the traffic that your adversaries manage to obtain DOES NOT mean that you will have to succumb to them in everything. 

It means looking for ways to enhance your own approach. 

Once you understand which of the keywords or back-links or some piece of content delivers their traffic to the organic section you begin to see the ways that work and position your site accordingly.

2. Classifying the Sources of Traffic (Organic, Social, Referral)

As for me, the most critical thing in advance competitor analysis is the differentiation of the following types of traffic and the geography of the target audience. 

•  Organic traffic – if there is one kind of traffic that every website wants the most, it is this one. It is free, and it is usually the traffic that comes from search engines like Google. 

In other words, with this kind of traffic generation, advertising is not raked over. So, if you have managed to obtain high ranks without paying anyone, you have obviously mastered SEO well.

•  Social traffic – Traffic served through social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn usually comes as part of paid advertisement. 

This type of traffic is capable of causing spikes of traffic within a very short time, but managing it to stay for long can be quite a challenge.

• Referral Traffic: There is also a scenario when the other site has a link to yours and visitors come to your website through that link. 

Acquiring a backlink from such a site is considered a vote for Google; thus the more quality backlinks you acquire, the better your SEO.

Having access to such resources enables you to ascertain the origin of traffic towards your adversaries, and the opportunities present to you.

 Perhaps they are dominating social media, but struggle with organic traffic acquisition,right ? 

And that is why we need those right keywords!

3. Tools to Track Competitor Website Traffic

This is where the real fun begins! 

It becomes more straightforward to keep track of competitors’ traffic sources by utilizing the appropriate technologies. Thankfully, there are moral technologies that can be used for this work: 

– SEMrush: Do you want to figure out why your rivals are ranking for some keywords? SEMrush provides an overview of the keywords that they rank for as well as their carried traffic. 

– Ahrefs: This is a useful tool used to analyze the backlinks of an opponent. You are able to ascertain the websites that are linking to your competitors in search of ways to enhance your backlink plan. 

– SpyFu: If you also want to check out the paid ways they have, you can do that by using SpyFu to spy on their PPC activities and organic traffic statistics.

All of the above allow you to view some data which is available to the public hence you are playing by the rules. 

Begin by investigating their high-level keywords and/or top-ranking articles. 

✅What would you write to achieve a ranking for such keywords but with a more enhanced content?

4. Ethically ‘Stealing’ Competitor Traffic

Now that you possess the statistics, how will you go about “stealing” portions of that traffic from the opposing competitors (with all ethical considerations taken into account)? 

Here is the order of operations:

•  Have a Similar Keyword Targeting Plan – If any of the keywords sought by competitors are relevant to your business, seek to rank higher than the current rankings. Provide more in-depth content on that keyword. Provide comprehensive answers, illustrate the section and make sure the page is responsive.

• Enhance Finish for Backlinks – Work out who was linking to her competitors and why. Are these any linking opportunities relevant to the content which you have produced but is superior? Hit them with something they will love.

• Develop Superior Content – When a well performing article from the competition is already available but you sense its potential is much higher, go and build something optional. Look closer to the query, include examples or make additions that have not been presented before.

• Capitalize on Your Advantages – Do they have any deficiency in terms of social traffic or referral traffic? Get into those strongholds where they are weakest. For example, if they do not bother a lot with social media, use that as your advantage and become the content provider for that segment.

5. Best Practices for Ethical Competitor Traffic Analysis

To put it bluntly, there are principles that should be known. This is not about finding loopholes or bending the rules. 

You are collecting information that is already available in the public realm; the intention is to enhance one’s own domain and not that of anyone else. 

So, here are some things to think about in order to keep things on the solution side.

– Refrain from Using Black-Hat Strategies: No data scraping, data hacking, or data corruption. Only use solutions that offer permitted access to genuinely accessible data.

– Work Towards the Betterment of Your Site: It’s not about bringing anyone down, it is about raising your site up. It’s taking action in the marketplace, not dirty fighting.

– Do Not Deceive Others: When you contact websites to obtain backlinks, you must deliver value to them and build real connections. Don’t bother them or lie to them

In this article, we realized the importance of measuring the competitor’s traffic because it will certainly give you an advantage in playing the SEO game. 

Whether it is through SEMrush or Ahrefs, or just looking at their keywords and backlinks, you can play up your strategy without crossing the ethics line.

And now, it’s your turn: 

What exactly motivates you the most in terms of analyzing competitor traffic and what do you find most troublesome?

Share your views, and follow for more hacks!

To learn more check out my YouTube video on Ethically Stealing Your Competitors Organic Traffic: https://youtu.be/lvN_27szkBk

You have a great product but sales are not adding up? You have the resources but not the experience? You might be in need of a digital marketing agency.

Services offered by digital marketing services include a wide variety of services including, but not limited, to inbound campaigns, social media management, web design and consultancy. 

Some agencies focus on specialized solutions but there are also some who offer the whole package as well. 

Let us look into the duties that most digital marketing agencies undertake, regardless of specialization.

Knowing your Business

To have an understanding of your baseline and where they should start, they will do research on your company, your products and target market. Knowing more about you is an important stage any decent marketing agency does. 

They can’t sell what they don’t know and it’s also a way for them to generate genuine ideas from your company’s strengths and vision. 

Evaluating your Marketing Efforts

You might have an internal marketing department but some companies still hire outsourced agencies to either overhaul the marketing strategies or supplement marketing efforts during special campaigns. 

Some also form partnerships with agencies for skill development. If a company from Hong Kong focuses on SEO marketing, Corporate SEO training in HK can be done regularly to make sure employees are up to date on the latest practices.

If you do not have in-house marketing, agencies will assign a team who will handle your company and will keep in touch with you regularly. Even if there is no existing department in charge, people from the agency will still conduct interviews with the most knowledgeable person from the hiring company.

It is the agency’s job to properly assess the previous marketing efforts, what’s working, what’s not, identify the problems and come up with solutions. 

Improving Brand Awareness

Various strategies like SEO and content marketing can easily boost your brand into being more recognizable. If you want to know more about this strategy, Vishwasthakkar.com offers SEO training specifically tailored for your business.  

Improving visibility is one thing, but they also work to improve your reputation and your user’s loyalty. The best brand awareness strategy can put you on a user’s top of the head brand when the need arises or even when just related topics come up.  That is power. 

Delighting your Audience

Marketing agencies establish a status of expertise by making sure they can deliver. Widening your reach means increasing your customer base. It does not necessarily mean targeting more people, but more of targeting the right people more effectively. 

A competent agency does not only focus on numbers, but on quality of exchange between your online persona and online users. Whether your company focuses on social media, website, emails, or cold calling, your agency will implement strategies for those to work effectively. 

Generating Leads

Like the previous duties of an agency, lead generation can also be achieved through different combinations of marketing strategies. From being a website’s visitor to being a customer, agencies build the bridges that can close the gap in between. 

Being one of the most important metrics used by marketers to measure success, lead generation is usually included as a goal of every marketing plan. 

A marketing agency can do a lot of things for you, but most importantly, they give you the chance to focus more on your passion rather than the selling side of it.

You can comfortably direct your effort on your line of expertise when you’re confident that the marketing side is handled by an expert as well.

With the surge of the digital era and having every product and service being marketed online, the need for digital marketing professionals has been growing steadily. A lot of marketing agency start-ups have emerged, taking advantage of such opportunities. Well, who wouldn’t want running their own company and being your own boss, right? 

Contrary to popular belief though, being the big man also has its setbacks. Like every other business for profit, diving into the market on your own has its own pros and cons. 

PROS

Potential Income. Possible margin of income for businesses, especially those involving services are already high since they factor in labor and expertise. Adding the possibility of catering to multiple clients at once, these can easily push the potential monetary gains at a higher ceiling.

Personal Satisfaction and Growth. What most people underestimate is the feeling of fulfillment from a successful project and the confidence one gains for overcoming every challenge in between. The feeling of achievement and self-improvement is a win in itself. 

Flexibility. The ability to choose the amount of time you invest in your company and the place on which business takes place are very strong points to make you consider going independent. You can have freedom of lifestyle or make the work hours most suitable for you. Setting the workplace as remote also gives you the privilege to work from home, an arrangement that a lot of us find convenient and practical.

CONS

You are on your own. Since you have now become the boss, you are now to figure out every aspect of the business by yourself. I’m not saying that you are a one man team because obviously you will hire people under you but to some extent you need to learn and understand the whole business process. 

Handling People. One of the business resources that is most difficult to handle would be manpower. From filtering applicants, to ensuring they do their tasks and meeting deadlines and output targets, these are all achieved only by properly managing your team and that is a whole separate set of skills from just being good in marketing.

Demanding physically and mentally. While we mentioned flexibility in time invested, time committed can also be an issue. Since you assume the most responsibility, there will be times when you would need to devote more time than what your paid employees do. As time passes whether you become a success or not, stress build-up may cause health concerns.

Something that we can consider both a pro and a con is that your agency’s success relies heavily on YOU. Risks involved can yield the worst outcome or the best rewards. 

After weighing the positives and negatives, it might still be intimidating to start an agency on your own. Luckily, there are companies like vishwasthakkar.com that conduct training sessions to guide you. Headed by Vishwas Thakkar, a digital marketing strategist in Hong Kong, they boast years of experience in the field. You can learn the trends first and study how marketing agencies currently work so you can arrive at a better conclusion.

Twitter was established in March 2006. According to Statistica, as of 2Q 2021, Twitter had 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide. Getting the attention of just a fraction of that number can easily set your business for success.

However, the nature of Twitter makes it hard to use for content marketers due to its short content half-life. Your content gets half of its interactions within 30 minutes. If it does not get that initial engagement, it is highly unlikely that it will get it some other time in the future, as millions of new tweets would have flushed it out of the timeline or searches by then.

It takes careful planning to make your Twitter content calendar effective at drawing engagement and helping with your overall goals. Let’s take a look at some things that can help you:

Mentioning other users

If you’ve ever seen celebrities tagging each other to start a discussion, you’d know that this simple mention easily increases your content’s reach. You want more eyeballs on your content to spotlight your brand. However, when mentioning other users, make sure you are not doing so in an inflammatory way, lest those eyeballs look at your brand negatively!

Leverage trending topics

Anyone who’s ever checked trending topics will see those posts that include all hashtags in an attempt to direct more attention to their content, which is often spammy. Thankfully, because of that shorter half-life, they easily disappear in the tags. Spam aside, you can leverage trending topics to reach audiences who may not be aware of your brand but are interested to know more about a particular topic. Make sure the content you are tagging is relevant to the audience so that you will not be muted or blocked.

Unleash the humour

Aside from content aimed at converting leads, you can also inject some humorous tweets into your calendar to build that following, which you can then convert at a later date. Search engine optimization training 101 would tell you to write content for humans, and if there’s one thing to remember about humans, it’s that they don’t like marketers. Most social media users do not like when brands fill up their feed with content that blatantly aims to sell to them, but they do enjoy humorous content and may even be inclined to share them with their followers.

These retweets and quote-retweets may even get you to the Topics section, where you can reach even more users. Keep your branded content to less than 20% of your posts, so that followers will not be inclined to unfollow.

Use graphics and captions that draw attention

Twitter is especially useful for users who are on the go and want to see what’s happening at a glance. They do not go to Twitter to click to read through all the blog posts linked. They will click on those links if the first touchpoint–the graphics and the caption–makes the story seem interesting enough to disrupt their scrolling.

Twitter was famously known for the Twitter crop, which may result in important elements of your post being lost unless users click to see the whole image. To avoid this, design your content keeping the dimensions of the platform in mind, and add a strong caption to go with it.

Twitter can be a powerful part of your content marketing strategy if used properly. For micro-moments and smaller pieces of content, use this platform to drive more engagement to your site.

Building a brand takes several things into consideration. In this increasingly digital landscape, you want to be visible online, but more importantly, you want to be visible to the right target market. You also need to learn to pivot if the original business plan does not work.

With plenty of key metrics you want to track and metrics others suggest you track, it can be overwhelming to get started. Focus on these five tips first.

Establish your brand voice

Every type of content you publish moving forward will need a consistent brand voice tying them together. Having a clear brand voice will make it easy to onboard new members of the team. It will also help you relate to your target audience. In fact, your brand voice should be aligned with the target audience you want to target, so they should be determined together.

Play around with free social media channels

Creating accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tiktok and many other social media platforms is free. Take the time to establish all these in the early part of brand building, because you also need to protect your brand from individuals who might try to use your name in the future.

Once you have those channels set up, turn them into active lead generation channels. After some time, you will notice that certain channels may be performing better than others, and this will give you an idea of where you should focus your attention and marketing budget moving forward.

Have a clear SEO marketing strategy

Brand building relies heavily on your SEO marketing strategy, especially in a climate that is highly competitive. You may have an established brand voice and a fully-functioning website, but with no SEO marketing strategy in place, all of these will go to waste. You need content to help you improve your SEO, and you need to know what that content should focus on.

Work on your timing and delivery

Successful comedians agree that timing and delivery make or break a good job. And this is happening in real-time, in front of a live audience. There is no room for mistakes. Be as meticulous as a successful comedian when it comes to the timing and delivery of your content.

Know when your audience is most engaged, and know what channels work effectively for them. Some may be more responsive and engaged on Instagram over the weekends, while others might be preferring Facebook during weekday break times. This knowledge is something you acquire after assessing your target audience’s behaviour, but you may also refer to industry standards to establish a baseline.

Never underestimate the power of email marketing

As mentioned earlier, creating your social media accounts often come free. The challenge is reaching your audience or subscribers because this is often where platforms like Facebook take their profit. Even if you have a million followers, your content will not necessarily be seen by all of them unless you pay for boosting.

Email marketing, on the other hand, can be seen by each and every recipient of the email. Your goal for email marketing is to make them open the email and engage with its contents. Building and growing a subscriber database can give you good returns, so make sure you are offering great content they will want to receive more of.

Brand building means doing everything in your power to put your brand out there, in the best light possible. Incorporate SEO in your marketing strategies, be consistent, and be patient.