3 Ways to Beat Your Online Competition Once and For All

Basketball summer training camps taught me a lot about effort, teamwork, and creative insults. But when I wasn’t hearing a wisecrack about my less-than-ideal height, I picked up some valuable knowledge. One of these bits of wisdom was the triple threat position.

With the triple threat position, you use proper body alignment to prepare yourself for one of three basketball moves: shoot, pass, or dribble. When you position your body correctly, your defender doesn’t know which of those three moves you will make, giving you the advantage.

In this blog post, you’ll learn more about recent trends in the triple threat position of online marketing: SEO, social media, and web design. Just like basketball, being prepared in all three of these categories will give you the advantage against your online competition.

Beat Competition With Better SEO

There’s no doubt that search engine results drive website traffic. Online customers will rarely cycle through multiple pages of search engine results, so you really want a potential customer to see your company as one of the first results after searching a relevant keyword.

But SEO gets tricky since search engines like Google constantly update their algorithms to keep people from gaming the system. Strong SEO has become increasingly reliant on strong content—the actual substance consumers find when they visit your webpage.

Other SEO tactics—like keyword research, link building, and use of HTML tags—remain useful, but without good content, you won’t keep clients on your page, and Google won’t list you as a top result.

Beat Competition With Better Social Media

Most businesses realize the importance of social media. But few businesses, especially smaller ones, know how to use social media effectively. Simply putting up a Facebook or Instagram page and telling people to like it won’t get you anywhere.

Good social media presence comes down to reinforcing brand identity through interaction with your audience. Once again, creating and sharing compelling content is key here. But what kind of content works best?

Recent trends suggest that video is the way to go. At the beginning of 2015, Facebook reported that together their users view roughly four billion videos per day. That’s a lot of cat videos. But it could be your company’s videos getting views and shares instead.

Whether your post is a video or text, try to balance your social media content between obvious marketing material (announcements, sales, coupons) and non-marketing material. If your audience only ever hears about your weekly sale, they might tune you out or even—gulp—unfollow you.

Beat Competition With Better Web Design

When it comes to web surfing, nearly everyone has an itchy trigger finger. Studies show that many internet users will leave a website within a few seconds if it seems like the site won’t fit their needs. Good web design establishes trust in an instant, and great web design creates intrigue as well.

Popular design changes almost as quickly as fashion, and you may find it hard to keep up with the trends unless you immerse yourself in website design. That being said, certain principles always seem to stick around:

• Establish your brand image
• Use consistent navigation
• Ensure your site loads fast
• Plan everything around the user

As far as the current trends, designers are pulling away from traditional boxy designs. Navigation is now hidden until a cursor hovers over the right spot, or subtle, text-based navigation blends into the background. Big, impressive photos take up most of the site space, and minimalism still rules supreme.

One essential development in web design is the evolution of scrolling. As more and more customers use a mobile device for internet access, designers use smart scrolling to their advantage. The intuitive feel of swiping a smartphone screen means that designers might want to swap excessive clicks for a little more scrolling.

Overview

If you want to present a true triple threat to your online competition, you shouldn’t ignore any of these three crucial categories. With strong SEO content, smart social media presence, and shrewd web design, you will have the skills necessary to win your online market.

Let’s return to basketball for a moment. There’s a distinction between a triple threat position and a true triple threat player. Anyone can learn to make a triple threat position, but if your opponent knows that you never pass the ball, then the risk of a pass no longer exists. Same with shooting or dribbling. To be a true triple threat, a player needs to continually practice and improve in every area of the game.

To truly master these three online marketing approaches, you will need to work at them constantly. A coach can help you get started, but the desire and effort required to win can only come from you.