Becomming an autority webshop

I have a Magento webshop wich sells certain niche products. The market is small but growing. Te competition is hard, but we are rising in google rankings.

We have a 2 man team to do things. We want to keep things white hat, cause we can't affort to get banned from Google or things like that.

Our biggest competitor has announced he will start a forum. He has allready a lot of users that react on his blog. Do we have to fear this development?

We also blog, but because we are fairly new we don't have a community yet. Only a few users react to our posts, but we see improvement. The blogs do get read a lot.

Do you guys have tips to become an autority site for Google? We can't do everything, so we want to choose a few things, and do these good. On site SEO is allready fairly good.

We cant answer this without knowing your niche. In some niches i would not care in some i would.

As a shop you should ALWAYS identify bloggers that blog about products in your niche and give them items for reviewing or buy post/links from them.

If you like send me your niche by pm.

Magento is a nice piece of wenshop software - congrats

Your competitor is on the right track. He will benefit from it in the search engines and by social media.

I would consider the option to move fast and beat his forum! Second would I lay down a solid linkstrategy and work to increase the linkpower of every link that goes into your shop.

Just because you don't want to blast your money site is not the same as not using backlink tools in your strategy.

Good luck.