As we all know now, major search engines will not bother with your website if they deem it irrelevant, not up to date, stagnant or can’t quite place what you’ve got to offer. And if your site is invisible in search, you are left with the options of paid advertising be it via search, display CPM or other contractual arrangements to maintain a respectable market share.
Imagine having some kind of power over your online future and a way of staying ahead of your competitors! Not in some kind of half-hearted or meaningless way, but a truly useful way that allows you to see who you are competing against, what they offer, how they win business and how you can win it back.
This is precisely what you need to increase your company’s percentage share in an already mature and saturated market. If the market isn’t growing any more, you need a larger percentage of the available business.
How to gain those market share percentage points.
There are a number of ways to increase market share. These include strengthening customer relationships, using innovative technologies and products, having a happy and dedicated workforce and knowing your competition.
Digital Growth can not assist in the first of these; the last however, we have down to a tee.
Find your Competitors. The first task at hand is identifying your real competitors. 95% of the time when we ask clients to identify their competitors they relay a list of major or obvious competitors, then a lost of local companies that they want to do better than. Most of the time these are pretty accurate lists but most aren’t usually aware of who they compete against in the online space. Sometimes who you think your competition are, may not be your real rivals at all?
Beat your Competitors. You may have a unique selling proposition, your product may be innovative, value for money, and you may advertise, but do any of those work towards increasing your internet market share?
You have no possible way of knowing what your online market share is. You may have access to your Adwords stats, even to the site analytics (if so, well done!), but you can not know about your competitors. How much of what you got do they sell? How do people hear about them. What do customers type into the search engines to find them and convert? How do you compare? Is your website optimised, have you written the right pages and are they built using the key phrases real customers use?
Meaningful actions & processes to gain online market share.
Digital Growth use specialist tools that grant visibility of all this information and more. Our review service reveals to business leaders what your competitors are doing, how you compare and what needs to change. We will know exactly who your online competitors are, how they rank in search engines, what key phrases are used on their web pages to attract certain traffic and convert it into sales. We can get specific info on what key words are worth for both paid and organic research.
An SEO audit will determine how your web site’s pages themselves may be working against you, highlighting what your IT or developer should change in order to help you climb higher.
Search engines also favour web pages with the right links from the right sites. As such they are more likely to rank a site with good inbound links higher than others as these links provide search engines with an insight into how well received your web site is in your industry compared to your competitor’s.
Digital Growth gather real data on the sites that link back to your competitors and you by means of a deep link analysis. Serious customers who want to genuinely win market share will often opt for a specific review of their link profile vs their competitors, with all the short falls. They will then seek to increase their online exposure with fair, diligent approach to gathering relevant, fair links from the right web sites.
Sounds like a minefield? It is, but don’t worry. After Digital Growth report on all the above, we will guide you, your staff or your agents through the meanders of SEO, or, if instructed, resolve any problems we may identify.
All this is one step forward to increasing your market share. But it starts by knowing what the shortcomings are.
Monika Izabela Goss.
Digital Growth
