Use PageOptimizer Pro To Discover What Your Competitors Are Doing To Rank High In Google Searches
Tools! Everyone loves tools! They help us do our job better, faster, and smarter. In this episode we’re going to introduce you to one of our favorite tools, called PageOptimizer Pro (POP). This powerful tool helps you assess what your top competitors are doing and why they are ranking high in Google. It gives you recommendations on how you can tweak your site with some of the same strategies, and hopefully increase your rankings!
Don’t miss an episode – listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and more!
What You’ll Learn
- There is no secret recipe to ranking high in Google
- You must discover what the top ranking competition is doing to rank
- Using tools like POP can provide actionable information to help your SEO
- Do not ignore the usability and user interface of your site, or your rankings will be impacted
Here is the Transcript for Episode 69 Improve Your Website Ranking and SEO With PageOptimizer Pro;
Jesse Dolan: Welcome back Local SEO Tactics, where each week we bring you tips and tricks on how to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan, coming at you with another solo episode here today. And for this episode, we’re going to be talking about, well, it’s actually one of our favorite tools that we use here at our agency, Intrycks, called PageOptimizer Pro. And a little tease, next episode we got coming up, actually the founder, programmer, inventor main man behind PageOptimizer Pro, Kyle Roof, is going to join us for an interview. We already did the interview, so I can tell you that that’s pretty good. Talks about, basically one of the main contexts is how Google works versus how we think it works. And that’s kind of to the core of what PageOptimizer Pro does, and we’ll kind of get into that in this episode here in a second.
Full disclosure, I do you want to say, we are an affiliate for PageOptimizer Pro. If you go out to our resources page on our website or down on the show notes, we’ll link to it here in this episode, and click on it to go take a look at PageOptimizer Pro or to purchase it, we are an affiliate, so we’ll get a few bucks if you do that through our link. Now, I can tell you that if you go through our link, because we’re an affiliate, a, you’re going to get a bit of a discount, and b, you’re not, well, by way you’re getting a discount, so of course you’re not going to pay more. So just full disclosure there. We are an affiliate for this because we use it.
If you do go to our resources page, localseotactics.com/resources, or up in the top menu, click on resources, just to take a quick sidestep here, if you haven’t checked that out, go ahead and go on there. A lot of our favorite products, tools and services are listed on there. Some of them we just link to because we like them and we want to promote them. Some of them, we have a affiliate accounts set up, right?
So if we’re going to refer you to a product or a service and we get a chance to make a few bucks off it, and in some cases, save you a few bucks, because usually, when you’re an affiliate, they’ll give you some kind of a promotion if you want to push people to it. So we have that on that page. So just to be fully clear, we don’t have anything on that page that we don’t use ourselves. If you’ve listened to our podcast before or watched it on YouTube, we don’t promote a lot of things, that’s not what this show is about. So, if we are promoting things, I just want to make sure you all are aware that they’re things that we actually use and have vetted out ourselves. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be up there.
So, that brings us to this topic at hand here with PageOptimizer Pro. It’s an awesome tool. It’s really part of our SOP for doing SEO, not to throw too many acronyms out there, but it really is something that we use on every project that we do. Those of you that have engaged us for work on your websites, we’ve used it. Anybody who’s talked to us about consultations or where we’ve helped you roadmap what to do on your site, we’ve recommended it. So, anybody who’s engaged with us is either familiar with the results or familiar with the product already. We want to share this with the rest of you. So, we’ll get into it here, and like I said, pay attention to the next episode come out here too. We got a great interview with Kyle. Kind of gets into how PageOptimizer Pro works more, why it was invented, and some great insight from Kyle too. So, check that out.
And if you don’t know who Kyle Roof is, it’s K-Y-L-E R-O-O-F. Give him a Google right now, you’ll pop up all kinds of information about him. Awesome guy, super talented in SEO. Kind of one of the great thought leaders and experimenters right now in the SEO space. So if you’re looking for somebody new to follow or somewhere else to get some information, wherever Kyle’s speaking, whatever he’s involved with, it’s going to be good stuff. Can’t say enough good things about him. So check that out on the next episode.
So here for this one today, we’re going to talk about using PageOptimizer Pro. There are some other tools that are going to do what we’re going to be talking about here, and we’ll mention those. Really at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do here is, you want your page to rank higher in Google, right? That’s what we’re all doing this for, for search engine optimization. The problem is figuring out what you need to do to your page to rank higher in Google. And what PageOptimizer Pro does, it’s not a magic bullet or some secret sauce that’ll do all the work for you. But it does provide a function that is pretty unique in that it helps you understand what is currently ranking high in Google right now for any various search term, and in the various market you’re trying to penetrate here. And it gives you the insights on what is working. So then you can apply them to your website.
So, it can help you break through to the top of the page or near the top of the page if you got some tough competition. Or if you’re launching a new page or a new website, this kind of helps you hit the ground running to make sure that your first draft is fairly well optimized. So, just kind of setting the stage for what this is all about and why it’s going to be beneficial to you.
So, PageOptimizer Pro itself, it’s basically in a nutshell, it compares and analyzes the top competitors for any given search term against your page. So, as I mentioned, there are some other tools that do some great competitive research here to help you out. I’m going to kind of run through some of those. We use these as well. Some of them more or less than others. Some of them we’ve used in the past and some we currently use today. One of the great ones, and we’ll link to all of these in the show notes as well, you don’t have to write these down. You can just go to localseotactics.com, click on the episode here and go down at the bottom, we’ll link to all these. SEMrush or SEMrush, depending on how you prefer to say it, it’s a great tool. They have a lot of different packages. You can do a site audit, keyword audits. You can look at your competitors, get a lot of great analytics.
That’s an amazing tool if you want to explore what your competitors are doing and what’s working in Google right now. It’s very powerful. Like I said, they have different plans. You can spend a little bit of money. I think they even have a free plan still. And then they have some pretty high end agency plans that are extremely full-featured. Check that out if you want to play with that.
Another one is a Ahrefs, and it’s A-H-R-E-F-S.com. Again, we’ll link to all these in the show notes here. That’s another great tool for competitive research, website audits, keyword research, things like that as well. Definitely, if you’re not using one of those two that I just mentioned, maybe check those out and see if either one of those is going to be a good fit for you as well. Some pretty powerful tools for upping your SEO game.
And another one is Moz, M-O-Z. Moz is a great resource for learning SEO, for SEO news. And then they have a great suite of tools as well to help you in your SEO. So check those out. And then again, of course, here, PageOptimizer Pro, or POP, I’ll probably refer to it as POP pretty much from here on out in the episode. And POP is the one we’re going to be focused on here today.
So, basically the thing to keep in mind first is that Google, there’s no secret sauce or secret recipe for ranking high in Google just for what Google wants to see. Really what it comes down to is ranking above your competitors in Google, right? That’s the slight kind of perspective you need to have on this that’s going to change things for you. And what you need to do is understand for any given search term and any given market or city that you’re in, who your top competitors are. Different parts of the US or even your suburbs in your own metro area are going to have different results. You’re going to have some competitors that are in some markets, some that are not in others. And so, what you need to do for each of those markets is maybe change your pages or have a page for each one. There’s no wholesale recipe that’s going to work for everything.
So the first thing you’re going to want to do is identify your competitors in any given market. You can go and do this manually yourself, just do some Google searches, take your keywords that you’re looking to dominate on and just do searches for those products, service phrases, and attach the various markets to that and see who is out there and make a list of the dominant players.
PageOptimizer Pro. If you start using it, it’s going to do some of that work for you. It’s pretty cool. So the way it works if you were to jump right into PageOptimizer Pro, of course, first you have to set up an account, right? Assuming you’ve already done that, you go in and kind of like our free instant SEO audit tool, keep in mind, this is a page by page optimization tool that you’re using here. It’s not for your entire website, it’s for a particular page because at the end of the day, that’s what you’re trying to rank in Google is that page, not your whole website, right?
So, you start with selecting your page that you’re trying to optimize. And then you’re going to put in the keyword or keywords that you want to optimize for, and pick your location. So it’s kind of marrying all those three things together, the page you want to optimize, the keywords you want to be found for, and what market you’re trying to be found in.
Now, PageOptimizer Pro is going to have two different versions, and I’m not going to really dive deep into those different ways to use it. I shouldn’t say versions. There’s two different routes you can go here at this point. Yu can do complete kind of more powerful advanced version or the express or the light, where they make some decisions for you and just kind of spit out the results at the end, which we’ll get to. So, if you’re doing that route, PageOptimizer Pro will pick the top competitors currently ranking in Google, that it wants to compare against. Certain things, certain directories that aren’t going to be applicable are kind of automatically filtered out. You want to be found, I’m sorry, you want to be comparing yourself against like businesses. You know what I mean? So sometimes some of the results get a little skewed, whether Amazon is in there or things like that.
But PageOptimizer Pro, if you go to the express route, it’ll automatically pick the top relevant competitors and run the report for you. Or if you’re doing it on kind of the advanced or manual side, you’ll have the chance to pick your competitors, manipulate the related keywords you kind of want to be associated with and run the tool. For both of these, basically, there’s a bunch of different output methods for this. This is a very powerful, powerful tool, and it can do a lot of things for you. So I’m kind of giving the real simple overview of it because this is not necessarily a PageOptimizer Pro how to. We’re talking about what it does for you and what the benefit is for you. And the end result being to ranking higher in Google. So, not doing a super deep dive for your tutorial on how to use Page Optimizer Pro.
But at this point, what you’ve done is you’ve input your keyword and you’ve input your market, and your webpage that you’re trying to optimize. And it’s going to give you back some results here that’s going to basically compare your website against those top competitors. And like I had said earlier, you’re not trying to optimize your page for what Google wants, you’re trying to figure out what the competitors are doing that Google then favors. If these top 10 competitors for red balloons in Minneapolis are all, let’s just say listed one through 10, they’re going to be doing some things similar that get them ranked in that top 10. And what PageOptimizer Pro does is analyzes that for you and then compares it against your page.
So for example, if they all have three images on their landing page and you have one, PageOptimizer Pro will say, the average for the top 10 performers here is three images on the page, you have one, we recommend you add one to two or three more pictures, right? Kind of get in that zone what the average is. Likewise, how many times were the keywords mentioned? How many times where the related keywords mentioned? Are they used in H tags and headlines? How many H1 tags do you have? How many H2 and H3 tags do you have compared to those performing competitors. It runs through all the on-page metrics that it can see, or not metrics, information that it can see, and it spits you back the metrics on what do you need to adjust it.
It’s going to give you recommendations on what to add. Add these words, add the frequency of these words. Again, add more H tags. It’ll get into font manipulation. You need to have some of this in bold, some of this in italics. You need some itemized bullet point lists on your webpage talking about these keywords. It’s going to go through all these types of information and report back to you on what kind of adjustments you should make. So, it also does give you like a handy score on a scale of zero to 100. So you can kind of visualize where you’re at and compared to your competitors. We usually like to get things into that 80 to 90% mark or higher before we’re satisfied. And sometimes this does take multiple runs of using a tool.
So at the end of the day, what it’ll give you is this content brief with the recommendations you need to make. Now, depending on if you’re a business owner or maybe a marketer, not the person doing the actual adjustments on your page, this can be provided to your SEO person. It’s pretty slick. You can say, hey, here’s the changes we need to make, follow these recommendations and kind of go modify the website. Then you come back and you rerun the results and see, did you zero in on where you needed to be or not?
Now the cool part about this is, this isn’t something that you want to do kind of a one and done. Things change. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the market can change. New things can pop up, right? Video conferencing, Zoom, working from home, webcams, things like that are products and services that have just flown off the shelves or ratcheted up in the searches compared to previous years. And that’s just a quick kind of analysis or a metaphor, if you will, whatever, comparison on why you need to be doing something like a PageOptimizer Pro run maybe quarterly for your business because once you get up there, odds are your competitors, they’re probably doing SEO as well. So if you bumped somebody out on those top spots, they’re going to feel it. Just like you’re going to feel it to the positive, they’re going to feel it to the negative. So there’s going to be some kind of counteraction from your competitors.
Google can change. They’re updating their algorithm constantly, right? So, Google could change something and you fall out of favor or the rankings kind of jumble around. And last but not least, like I said with the whole 2020 COVID, there’s market forces at play. New keywords, new trends, new fads, things could pop up, that kind of change what people are searching for. And again, modify the search results for who’s ranking and what’s popular.
So, for a lot of reasons, this is something you’d want to continually do. We like to do this on the front side for all of our pages, and then have it be something that we do quarterly as kind of an SEO ongoing process, constantly making sure that these pages are ranked, constantly making sure that we’re dominating the competition and constantly checking to see what are they doing that we’re not, and trying to stay on top because once you get up there, the work is not over. You have to stay there.
So, at the end of the day, that’s just a real quick kind of scenario on how to use something like PageOptimizer Pro. Again, there’s other programs out there that’ll do something similar. In our opinion, PageOptimizer Pro is the best for this. We’ve been using it for a couple of years now. Very easy to use, very easy to disseminate the information to other people on your team to get the work done. And last but not least, it gets results. It really does tell you what Google is favoring. What does Google want to see for that search results page you’re trying to rank on?
So, check that out. Go down to the bottom of the page here. Again, go to localseotactics.com, a link to PageOptimizer Pro is going to be there. A link to these other programs we mentioned is going to be on there and check this stuff out and start putting some of these tools into your arsenal. So I do want to mention, briefly mentioned it earlier, but just to kind of officially put it out there, our free instant SEO audit. We mention this every episode, kind of a shameless plug for our own internal resource. But check that out to help you out too. Not that it’s the same as PageOptimizer Pro, kind of different tools for different results. And anybody who’s doing SEO, you know, you have all kinds of different programs you use for various reasons, right? Just like a good mechanic, you’ve got a toolbox, it’s got multiple tools in it. There’s not one wrench or one screwdriver or one hammer that’s going to get all the work done.
So our Instant SEO Audit is going to help you out. Go out, plug in your page, plug in the keyword you’re trying to optimize for. And it’s going to give you a quick checklist of the good, the bad and the ugly that’s happening on your page. Likewise, you can do this to a competitive site to kind of reverse engineer them as well. And that’s going to give you a good headstart on some of the on-page and some of the off-page stuff that you need to do on that webpage to better optimize it. So check that out, localseotactics.com, big yellow button, top right corner, free instant SEO audit. Use it as many times as you want.
And also here, we want to get into our five-star review of the week. Been loving all the reviews that keep coming in. We’re getting on Facebook, Google My Business, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you want to leave us a review, if you’re so inclined, if you find value in the show, we would love to hear from you. This is the way that we know that it’s working. We’ve got plenty of you that have engaged with us for actual services, for consultations. And that’s awesome as well. But getting that great praise, getting a good five star review is immediate feedback for us, it’s tangible. It’s kind of fun that we get to read them on the show for you as well. And then also it helps us, right? When somebody comes to check us out that doesn’t know about us from the show or anything else, it’s just great edification. We really do appreciate that.
So, if you are so inclined, we’d love to hear from you. Go to localseotactics.com, down at the bottom in the footer, we’ve got links to all the various outlets. And if you want to leave a review, we would absolutely love it. This week here, we’ve got a great five-star review from MissMullis, actually ThisMissMullis. And it says, essential for a local biz. I recommended this to my husband since he has a local business and only knows the basics of SEO. This podcast is so helpful. He’s been able to get his presence up and running with no help from me, which makes me oh so grateful. Highly recommended.
Yeah, that’s great feedback. That’s what we’re hoping to do. Kind of not talk super high level SEO over everybody’s head. Real actionable stuff that you can do. If you do know SEO or if you’re just picking it up from day one here, hopefully there’s some tips in our various episodes to help you out that you can apply. So, thanks for the great review, ThisMissMullis. Everybody else, we’d love to hear from you as well.
All right, I think that pretty much does it for this episode. If you have any questions and if you want to get a topic on the show, also go to localseotactics.com. Bottom left, click the button for show feedback, and ask a question, we’ll read them on the air and answer that question. If you’re having a problem, I’m sure somebody else is as well, so we’d love to also hear from you in that way. Appreciate you guys tuning in. Stay on board and pay attention for the next episode, like I said, with Kyle Roof, that one’s going to be spectacular, where we’re going to kind of continue forward on this whole PageOptimizer Pro topic. Until next time, we’ll see you then.
To share your thoughts:
- Send us a comment or question in the section below.
- Share this show on Facebook.
To help out the show:
Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.
- Leave an honest review and subscribe on iTunes
- Subscribe on Google Play
- Subscribe on Stitcher
RESOURCES
PageOptimizer Pro *Use promo code LOCALSEOTACTICS to get 15% off!