Oh it’s frustrating, isn’t it?
You know you should be investing in your firm’s digital marketing strategy (SEO, PPC etc.). You know your competitors are doing ‘something‘ online, but figuring out exactly what, takes a lot of time and money. So you throw caution to the wind and hire some generalist SEO agency to start from scratch.
They do some work, you see some improvement but your competitors still seem to have the upper hand in search or lead generation online.
There is a better way!
Rather than starting from scratch, we analyze and track your competitors’ digital marketing strategies. This enables our clients to more quickly rack up search gains and traffic increases – here is how:
#1. Know who you actually compete with online
Sometimes the firms you compete with for new buy or sell-side prospects are different online than in person. You may be competing against a firm you never see in a client’s boardroom. Knowing who these competitors are is a foundational element to supercharging SEO or PPC strategy.
#2. Know where you rank relative to these competitors
With SEO specifically, search engines like Google use a number of ranking systems to influence search results. These ranking systems include trust score, citation score, page count, backlink count and more. You need to understand how your website scores in relation to your competitors in order to beat them. Surprisingly enough, many M&A firms in particular score very low on the trust score and page count scale. You do not need a set of perfect scores to win great keyword ranking, you just need to be better than those you are competing with.
#3. Understand competitor keyword strategies
Are your competitors attempting to rank for a slew of broad keywords, or investing heavily in dominating a single keyword, phrase or geography. If you are being outspent in one area, we can identify other open fields of opportunity to establish your firm within.
#4. Reverse engineer competitor strategies
If we identify who your real competitors are, understand how you stack up to them and can draw conclusions about how they are spending marketing dollars we can in effect, reverse engineer their strategy and/or improve on it. This is where the magic happens.
In conclusion – should you consider working with a firm like Merger Labs that incorporates a deep understanding of the competitive landscape in M&A and has an element of competitor tracking integrated to the service model – it pays dividends.