What is Ethical SEO and Competitor Monitoring

SEO has grown to be a vital strategy for boosting website visibility and generating organic traffic. It is crucial to stay on top of the game and make sure that SEO practises are not only efficient but also moral given the ongoing evolution of search engine algorithms.

This is when competitor research and ethical SEO come into play. Businesses can improve their internet presence while upholding integrity and openness by comprehending and utilising ethical techniques.

We will explore the ideas of ethical SEO and competitor monitoring in this post, as well as how they might help businesses in the current digital environment.

Primary Competitors

Let us begin by defining the competitors. Almost every business considers at least a handful of other businesses to be key competitors—those who provide comparable goods and services, are similar in size, and so on. It is critical to regularly monitor the SEO efforts (or lack thereof) of these rivals, regardless of whether they are using ethical SEO strategies. If they have not engaged their SEO firm or have not begun conducting SEO in-house, you will have peace of mind knowing that this channel is yours for the time being.

If your rivals initiate an SEO campaign, whether with or without the assistance of an outside SEO firm, you may learn a great deal about their sales and marketing strategies by analysing the keywords they target. Additionally, you may check to see whether they are doing ethical SEO methods in their campaign.

If your competitors begin an SEO campaign with or without an outside SEO service, you can learn much about their sales and marketing tactics by evaluating the key phrases they target. And you can also investigate whether they are using ethical SEO practices in their campaign.

Your Online Competitors

It’s critical to remember that searchers are unlikely to choose between you and the key rivals you’ve identified. They will evaluate any organisation that meets their specific requirements and appears in the search results for their search keyword. This is why you should widen your definition of competition online to include any firm that provides similar goods or services to yours and outranks you for any of your targeted keyphrases.

If your in-house personnel or SEO agency watches not just your search engine rankings but also the firms that show above you in search results, you may often find forward-thinking rivals you were previously unaware of—your major future competitors.

Violations

This takes us to the critical question of ethical search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is still a relatively new notion for most businesses. Even the most reputable businesses may make errors in this field, either by selecting the incorrect SEO provider or attempting to avoid employing an SEO agency entirely by bringing it in-house with well-intentioned but inexperienced employees.

For instance, BMW’s German website was recently briefly removed from the Google index due to gateway pages, which is not regarded as an ethical SEO technique. It’s reasonable to assume that your rivals are not exempt from infractions as well.

Bad Firms

There are notable examples of otherwise smart and established companies hiring an SEO service that put them in a worse situation than before they pursued SEO–by removing their site from major search engines for violating the engine’s terms of service, for example.

Not long ago, there was a well-publicised example where most of the Las Vegas SEO service clients were penalised. Almost all of the clients claimed that they were not informed that the firm was not practising ethical SEO and that they were therefore at risk.

SEO firms are generally divided into two camps–those called “White Hats” (those that use ethical SEO practices and will never knowingly violate a search engine’s terms of service) and those called “Black Hats” (those that do not use ethical SEO practices and that will attempt to unravel the latest algorithms and exploit any loopholes to achieve rankings at any cost).

Neither approach is invalid–it is not against the law to violate the terms of service of a search engine. Moreover, black hat techniques can be quite effective. However, the tactics are risky, and anyone hiring an SEO service that wears a black hat and does not use ethical SEO practices should be apprised of this risk upfront.

Internal Resources

Firms are often tempted to avoid hiring an SEO service by performing SEO in-house, and the project almost always falls onto an already overburdened IT department. The problem with approaching SEO from a strictly technical mindset is that the strategies employed, such as the keyphrases targeted, will not necessarily be in line with the goals of the marketing and sales departments.

In addition, an IT resource will usually approach SEO from a purely technical standpoint without being aware of ethical SEO practices, which can lead to trouble. Penalisation is a very real possibility, and it is hard to get back onto an index once your site has been removed.

Monitoring

A thorough SEO service will monitor the handful of competitors that you deem crucial and the sites that appear higher than you for any of your chosen search phrases. This may be somewhat controversial, especially to any SEO service or webmaster that uses tactics forbidden by the search engine’s terms of service. However, many white hat SEO service firms consider it an obligation to their clients to routinely monitor the sites of any competitor found on the engines to be sure it is using ethical SEO techniques.

There is a reason that every major search engine has a form to report sites that do not use ethical SEO tactics and who violate the terms of service so that these sites can be subsequently penalised or removed. Spam filters cannot catch all violations without also removing a large number of good sites. Search engines rely on their users to help them to keep their indexes clean and free of sites not using ethical SEO tactics.

There are many techniques to spam an engine, far too many to list. However, a good SEO service not only knows all these techniques but also knows how to identify them when it sees them so they can be reported to the engine accurately.

The End Result

Business is business, and your interests often run directly counter to your competitors. When you report a website that is not using ethical SEO, it will likely be removed. This means there is one less company you need to worry about in the online arena, at least for the time being.

If the site in question outranked yours, you also get the added benefit of seeing your rankings improve as the violating pages are removed provided, of course, that you are using ethical SEO techniques and steering clear of violations yourself, or you may be reported by a competitor of yours or its SEO service