Learn who your competition is and how to beat them at their own game
For businesses of all kinds, knowing your competition is lesson number one. I carry out competitive research for all clients subscribed to my pro SEO service and here are my tips for learning from your peers and doing it even better. Scroll down for a video from SEMrush, the platform I choose for providing SEO services.
Where would you be in this peloton?
When you first launch a business, you may not already know who you’re competing with or you may have a clear idea already. Either way, It’s unlikely you’ll have much insight into their marketing activities or how well they perform in the digital landscape.
If you want to get ahead of them quickly, it can pay fast dividends to get to know this information early on.
When you don’t know who they are
When you have no idea who you’re competing against, SEMrush (and other tools) can use your data to find out who looks similar to you. This isn’t an exact science but, with your human intelligence, it can really give you a huge head start. If you don’t have SEMrush or anything else then simply make a list of the top five or 10 keywords that you think your customers might use when looking for you and type them into a search engine one by one. For example, say you’re a dog groomer, type into Google ‘dog grooming near me’ and see who comes up. Do that for a few more keywords and make a list of who comes up time and again. Those that come up the most often are your top competitors. Note: watch out for sponsored results (ads) because they may pay to get top search results but might not actually be a close competitor.
When you’ve got your list
So, you have a list, either because you already knew or you followed the steps above. Now what?
This is where SEMrush and others come into play the most. It’s hard to get this data any other way. At this stage, the data is free as long as you sign up for an account. So what can you find out?
Domain authority — this metric tells you how much search engines trust your website. It’s made up of lots of other measures such as how many sites link to yours, how much traffic you get and how well structured your website is. Usually a new site may have a score of 0 or 1 - it takes time to build this.
Search traffic — simply put, you can see how many visits your competitors receive to their website each month. If you compare that you what you currently get, you’ll know the size of gap you have to close.
Backlinks — part of the way domain authority is measured, backlinks tell you how many other sites link to the site you are looking at. The higher the number the better (though this needs to be monitored for quality too as spam links can harm your domain authority).
Organic keywords — this metric shows how many keywords rank in the top 100, top 50, top 10 and so on. The higher the number the better. Note that keywords will only get ranked if you meet three criteria: ensure that they are relevant within the context of your website; customers are actively searching for those terms; and you are getting traffic based on those terms.
You can also get much more detail on all of these metrics if you want to.
What else can I do for free?
This is where you need to put in some legwork and use your human intelligence to make judgements. I start by looking at their website and their social media with the following aims:
What stands out on their website?
What hits you as soon as you land on their homepage? Do you think it would appeal to your customers? Why? Is it something you would like to replicate? What is it about their design that looks good?
What functions do they have that you could copy?
Often more established businesses will have created ways of presenting services or products to customers that you haven’t yet thought of. Make a list of what they’re doing that impresses you and work towards incorporating those features where you think it will work for you and your customers.
What offers do they make that you could copy?
Look at what they are actually offering: their pricing, service options, lead magnets* and other aspects of their business that you can copy or improve upon.
How big are they on social media?
First look at the follower numbers and the rate of engagement (how many likes, comments, shares, reposts etc they are getting). This will tell you first of all what the gap is that you need to close. Social media (love it or loathe it) remains a vital part of modern marketing. [If you want to learn more about this, a good place to start is my guide for business owners.]
How do they use their social media?
Look at their posts over the last month or so and see what they are doing that a) you are impressed by and b) their audience also likes. Consider the style and type of posts (video, thought-leadership, salesy, text-based etc) and think about what you would like to create for your own business.
Alright but I want to go hard, what’s next?
If you’re up for it, you can invest in paid tools from SEMrush in order to get inside what’s happening in five main areas:
Search — how they are getting found; how well they show up on search engines.
Keywords — once you know their ranking keywords you can target the ones you want the most by adding relevant content to your site.
Backlinks — who links to them (this will enable you to build a list of prospects that you would like to link to you).
Site performance — how well their site performs for visitors; Google quality scores; detailed traffic information.
Social media — you can even get inside intelligence on social media performance so you can benchmark your own creation against your competition.
Sounds expensive…
I’m not gonna lie, it’s not cheap. The basic plan is $139.95 a month.
And, this is where I get the chance to plug my services to you! I provide the complete package described above (plus ads reporting and detailed analysis and explanations) for a licence contribution of £22 a month plus my time (usually 2-3 hours a month for minimum six months). If you want to talk about investing in pro SEO please contact me. Note that I only take on new SEO clients where I have complete access to the back-end of the website (preferably Squarespace websites).
What to do with all this data?
The important thing is, rather than getting hung up on paying out ££ for pro services, if you start by following my steps you will end up with a list of competitors and a good idea of:
The gap between where you are and where they are: so you can plan how to close that gap.
What they are doing well: so you can copy** what you like and ignore what you don’t.
The next step is to make a plan for the work that you need to do to improve your digital presence. Try to make at least one improvement every month (or more frequently if you can). You can hop back into free SEMrush at any time to check out how you are doing on those top scores.
Here’s the video from SEMrush:
Notes:
*Lead Magnet = an item on your website that customers have to part with their contact information to access.
**Copying = please do not plagiarise other websites. Not only is this unethical it can get you penalised by Google. When I talk about ‘copying’ I mean learning from them and improving on what they already do well. It’s a form of flattery!
