The purpose of competition is not to blend in, but rather to stand out from your competitors with your unique attributes. That being said, outranking competition on search engine results pages (SERPs) is not an easy job. Merely being “unique” won’t help you outrank competitors.

To that end, in this article, we’ll discuss the most critical steps you can take to outrank your TMS competitors.

Let’s dive right in.

The 6 Critical Steps to Outrank Competitors

Among many other factors, your online presence is the most crucial for your business. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

By focusing on the right areas, you can boost your website’s ranking in search results, attract potential customers/patients, and ultimately scale your TMS clinic.

Whether you’re an entirely new player or have been in the game for a while, here are the different steps you can take to improve your search engine rankings and beat the competition:

1. Perform an In-Depth Competitor Analysis

If you don’t want your competitors to steal all your potential patients, you have to understand who your top-ranking competitors are, what keywords they rank for, and what level of content they produce.

Using SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, etc., you can analyze your competitors’ search performance and other related metrics like number of backlinks, domain scores, monthly traffic, etc. 

These tools will help you identify your competitors’ weak points, the topics they don’t rank for, and the keywords you don’t rank for (keyword gap).

Using this information, you can conveniently capitalize on those gaps and attain a competitive edge over your competitors.

Visit your competitor’s website and identify the local SEO techniques they’re using and crack their content marketing and SEO strategies.

2. Perform Keyword Research

Performing keyword research is a fundamental step for building a solid content strategy. If done right, it can help you outrank your TMS competitors. 

This process will help you uncover the competitive keywords you can use to rank your websites/ webpages on Google’s first page.

Extensive keyword research can help you identify all the keywords relevant to your potential patients’ search intent and create content centered around it. 

Additionally, you can also perform keyword gap analysis by comparing your webpages to your competitor’s websites. This will reveal all the keywords that help them rank, which you’re not ranking for yet.  

Since we’re talking about keywords, there are two main kinds: Short-tail and long-tail. 

Short-tail keywords are highly competitive and consist of one or two words, whereas long-tail keywords consist of three or more words. 

As opposed to short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords are gold, especially for local businesses, because they’re usually easy to rank for, have a good search volume, and attract decent traffic.

Consider  keyword difficulty and search volume when shortlisting keywords. Think about what you can realistically achieve with your current marketing resources and website DA. 

3. Create and Execute a Content Creation Strategy

Google (and other search engines) never compromise on quality. Therefore, you need to have decent content on your website to outrank competitors.

Create high-quality content centered around the keywords you gathered during the keyword research analysis phase.

Furthermore, analyze the type of content that gets the most social signal on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). Tools like Buzzsumo and ContentStudio can help you discover the most popular content along with essential insights like user engagement value, social shares, etc.

Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) section in the organic search results can also help you create content that fulfills users’ search intent.

Last but not least, you can use Google Analytics to identify your top and worst-performing webpages and improve your content quality. 

4. Have a Content Distribution Strategy

Without a decent content distribution strategy, not a lot of people will discover your content.

This, in turn, will prevent you from ranking, which will ultimately result in your posts being pushed back in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Use mediums such as email, social media, syndication, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, etc., to promote your content among your clients and prospects.

5. Optimize Your Website (Perform On-Page SEO)

Another important aspect of SEO is on-page SEO, which constitutes the major Google ranking factors listed below: 

• Decent site speed and page speed
• Mobile optimization
• Security (SSL certificate)
• Correct use of HTTP status codes
• Meta descriptions
• Title tags
• Alt tags
• Internal linking

With on-page SEO, you can maintain the functionality of your website, create better content, and boost the searcher’s user experience. Search engines favor websites that focus on-page SEO because at the end the day, they only care about the users.

6. Acquire High-Quality Backlinks

A high-quality website having a good backlink profile and high domain authority is what you should aim for.

However, that’s much easier said than done, especially if you’re new.

To acquire high-quality backlinks, you need to have a decent link building strategy (if you’re not getting quality links, nothing else matters).

Here are a few link building tactics that will help your TMS clinic gain visibility on search engines, traction from the relevant audience, and a high rank on Google:

• Start guest posting and link back to your website with properly attributed anchor texts.
• Find relevant broken links (links that lead to dead pages), contact the persons/companies that published the content, and pitch your content to replace said broken links.
• Create infographics/other forms of content and offer them to relevant blogs who would be willing to publish them in return for backlinks.
• Build links with industry influencers and bloggers and ask for backlinks and reviews.

The more quality links you build, the more authoritative you’ll appear in the eyes of the search engines, which, in turn will help you rank for even more terms.

Wrapping it Up

On the way to outranking your competitors, don’t forget to take a sequential approach. 

You should know your audience better than anyone, create a solid content marketing strategy accordingly, and always measure your efforts to ensure you’re on the right track.