How to find your real SEO competitors
Identifying and researching competitors is absolutely essential when it comes to SEO.
How to find your real SEO competitors… Competitive research and analysis is an essential part of your SEO strategy. You may have an idea of who your business competitors are, but your real SEO competitors are those who target the same keywords, appeal to the same audience and meet the same consumer needs.
Identifying and researching competitors is absolutely essential to a good SEO strategy. And to achieve this, you need to know who your competitors really are. So how do you know if someone is a search competitor?
Essentially, it must meet three criteria. They target the same keywords as you, they appeal to the same audience and they meet the same consumer needs as you. In other words, if your target audience follows them, they don’t need you anymore.
There are essentially two approaches to identifying your competitors.
Top-down approach to research competitive
So let’s start with this one. The very first thing you’re going to do is contact other departments. Depending on where you are and the type of vertical you work in, you’ll want to talk to sales, support, customer success, other marketing areas, even engineering, and ask them to provide a list of their perceived competitors.
The next step is to consult an audience research tool.
And then you’re going to want to find the overlap between the two lists, right? So, from the list that your department and colleagues say are your competitors and the list that your tool says are your competitors, you’re going to want to find the overlap.
The advantage of this method is that it helps you get buy-in because other departments will recognize parts of their work in the result you’re going to present, and make better connections with them. And it’s very fast. You can do it in a day, or even less, depending on how long you have to wait for information from other services.
There are other aspects that are not so good. For example, it won’t be the most accurate competitor research you’ve ever had, and you won’t be able to explore competitors by theme.
However, this is the best solution for high-performance sites. So, if your site has been online for a while and you’re ranking for some of your target keywords, this will work very well for you. And opting for the bottom-up frame may prove excessive.
A bottom-up approach to competitive research for SEO competitors
But if you’re starting a new site, or if you really, really want to dig deep to find out who your competitors are, you’re going to want to use the bottom-up approach.
The very first thing we’re going to do is identify your target keywords, then group them into small themes.
For each of these keywords, we’ll download the SERP results, the top 10, the first page. And we’ll analyze the presence of competitors for each of your topics.
So if, say, Amazon appears in 100% of your keywords for subject X, you know it’s very important to you. Then you can go even further and identify the SERP features that are present in each theme.
You’ve already downloaded it. You already have the data. Just dig a little deeper and you’ll discover whether it’s best to attack these results with infographics, articles, videos, any other format.
This method is very precise, but can be very slow. The bottom-up framework is really good if you’re starting a new site, or if you’re not sure that the approach you had before is working.
