Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me! Do you feel your value as an SEO rising?
If you’re jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap, you can find the previous three steps here:
- Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
- Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
- Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy
DEFINING CATEGORY COMPETITORS
Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.
We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric. For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only.
I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up. True. That’s part of it. But because we’re going to do some serious dissection in Step 5, we’ll want to make sure we get the right competitors to dissect and compare ourselves against.
We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you're working on large enterprise-sized sites).
What I mean when I mention defining competitors by categories is this: If I am working on a site all about celebrities, my competitors might be OMG, TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc. But that’s only at the high level. My keyword categories from step 2 might cover subtopics like celebrity photos, celebrity news and more. Each of those subtopics has someone who is dominating those rankings. It may be the same one or two sites across the board, but it’s likely that each subtopic will have different high-ranking competitors. We want to know specifically who’s doing well for each topic.
HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPETITORS
There are several ways you can do this. If you’ve already got a method you like and want to stick with – by all means do (and if you’re compelled to share your method with us in the comments – you know we love to hear it). I’m going to give you an example of how I pull this data together.
Here’s how I set it up:
Grab a new Excel worksheet and name it something like ‘Competitors’. Create one tab to keep track of your overall site competitors, and if you’re tracking any subtopics on your site (likely the keyword categories we defined in step 2), create a tab for each one of those that you’re going to do competitive research for. We’re not going to do any calculations or fancy stuff with this worksheet – it’s just for keeping track of your competitors in one place. You can use a Word doc or good ol’ pen and paper if you want too.
The easy way to figure out who your competitors are is to type a couple of terms into the search box and see who shows up. So let’s look at that method. Here’s what I see in the top 5 results for [celebrity gossip].
Take note in your Excel sheet of who’s appearing in the top rankings for a couple of terms for each tab/topic. You don’t have to look up the competitors for every term in your keyword group, just pick a few and make note of what comes up.
You can also choose to check the top rankings in all three search engines, or just pick one. It’s up to you. In the end you’ll be looking for which site(s) show up the most often for this keyword group.
Another method of doing this is to use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. The cool thing about the Difficulty Tool is that you get extra insights along with your top competitors. But for this example I just want to get my top-ranked competitors in a downloadable csv file that I’ll just copy and paste into my Excel sheet.
To get this info, type in one of your terms:
Below the difficulty score and authority comparison graph are the top-ranked results...
...and at the bottom of the page you can export the results. I’ll do the same thing for a few more terms that represent the topic I’m researching, and add the results all to the tab for the topic.
In the end I have something that looks like this – here’s my general terms (there’s only two for this example, but the more terms you can use the better idea you’ll get of who shows up in the rankings the most):
I’ve highlighted the sites that show up in the top 5 rankings for both terms and made a note of it on the top. This is a competitor I know I want to target.
Here’s another example of one of my subcategories:
Here I see two sites appearing for multiple keywords. I’ve highlighted them and made note of them at the top. These are competitors I’ll be targeting for my competitive dissection of sites for the Celebrity News subtopic in Step 5. Again, there’s only 3 terms in the screenshot example above – I recommend pulling the data for at least 5-10 per topic.
Note that you can also choose to target 2 competitors or 5 competitors for each category – whatever you prefer (I usually like to do at least 3). The more sites you choose the more work you have to do in Step 5, but the more insight you’ll get back.
That’s the jist of it folks. Now you have targeted competitors defined for each topic you’re interested in. In the next post we’ll look at how to dig into the competitive landscape to uncover site features, content, and SEO strategy that should be built into your site in order to outrank your competitors. This is where we really start to take SEO to another level.
In the meantime, if you use any of the vast selection of SEO tools out there to define your competitors, or just do it in a different way, please share with the readers in the comments!
Go to any of the 8 steps:
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research
Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities
Step 4: Define Competitors
Step 5: Spying On (and Learning From) Your Competitors
Step 6: Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations
Step 7: Must-have SEO Recommendations
Step 8: Prioritize and Summarize
Laura, I'm a bit concerned that no one has explained to you how a blog-post "series" is supposed to work. You're supposed to announce an ambition series (usually, it's more like 4 posts - 8 is already getting carried away), write 1 giant post, realize you've used up all the good stuff, and then never speak of it again.
You're not supposed to ACTUALLY WRITE all of the posts in the series and have the audacity to make them all useful and interesting. If you keep this up, you're really going to make the rest of us look bad. We'll probably have to send the blogger's union after you ;)
Spot-on as usual Dr. Pete.
This keeps up and a very dangerous precedence will be set where people actually begin to expect that they may receive everything they were promised.
Is it time for an intervention?
Perhaps we could have the keys rearranged on her keyboard? Maybe switched from QWERTY to Dvorak?
We'll just paint over the top two lines of the "E", so that her keyboard has two "L"'s. That'll show her we mean business.
Mmm... I think she would be fine with a Dvorak keyboard anyway
You're not going to have jobs soon! :D
Beware of her following seasons or spin-offs!
What you need to do is simply hijack her identity Dr. Pete. You're on the other end of the mozplex's CMS system. Just put a picture of yourself with a wig on backwards and substitute her name with yours.
Wow! Now that's something I'd like to see!
Or not ;)
Hilarious. It's already on! 4 more posts! I can't stop now - I'd be flogged by the SEOmoz community and I have the feeling that would SUCK. ;)
Great post... useful and that can be defined - using a screenplay term - as an anticlimax before the boom of post n.5, which I suspect is going to be one of the most important of the series.
As you I was mainly using direct research in SERPs... since the new Keyword Difficulty Tool appeared (thanks SEOmoz!). I mainly use it to check out the competitors.
My method (like to know what you mozzers use):
In order to have an average data coverage about competitors I usually pick up 3 websites: the 1st, the 5th and the 10th and write down the main metrics information given by KDTool.
I confirm that this step should have to be done for all the main keywords (for instance, if you are an eCommerce, for the main categories keyword).
One exception is for those terms that present outstanding competitors (for instance the omnipresent Wikipedia). In those cases I simply reduce the competitors this way:
10 (the positions in 1st page of SERP) - X numbers of rankings occupied by too strong competitors.
I want to remark something apparently obvious: if the number of rankings is reduced the competition grade it's getting even harder. Therefore, in these cases, pick up and do the same research with your second and third keyword about the same topic.
Hey G. I tend to ignore the Wikipedia spots in the SERPS's and skip past them in my count.
Are you saying you count them as competitors?
No, I'm saying to do as you do.
they have to be because if you are trying to be ranked above them you need to understand how much its going to take :)
Or be really sure you have a blasting product in your hand... and a lot of money to invest no only in web marketing.
Straight forward yes, but one that can trip people up. You highlighted one of the key issues... what type of competitors.
This becomes a very important distinction when dealing with businesses that have offline presence...brick and mortar, catalogers, etc. Absolutely, every business should know who their key business competitors are, but those may not always be who their key organic search competitors are.
I especially like the segmentation approach. Find logical groups, either by intent, target market, product categories, etc., do sample searches -- w/ personaliation off of course ;) -- within each area, then see who the recurring players are.
Even if you get this far, it may be easy to get distracted by the one-offs... one site that appears #1 for one important term. Suddenly you may find yourself running around in circles going after these one-offs. Much better to identify the bigger players, going after those, and then circling back to some of the one-off strategic competitors...assuming you haven't displaced them already from the other efforts.
I learned this "multiple-competitor" approach long ago when I was a product manager for file & storage office products. Thankfully we owned majority market share in most of our subcategories, but it was still challenging to manage because there were some "all-inclusive" competitors that competed across most of the same subcategories, but then there were also more niche, exclusive competitors that tried to dominate just one or two product areas.
You have to be equally aware of both kinds of competitors, and you may be competiting with them both in different ways, with different tactics. That is equally so for organic search as it was for consumer packaged goods.
Hi laura! I have couple of questions.Why didn't you start competitive analysis in step2, when it is so important in determining keyword categories and current ranking potential of the competitors? Why didn't you determine the keyword difficulty of targeted keywords before finding gaps and opportunities? What is the use of filling the gaps when we don't know beforehand how competitive the keyword(s) is going to be and whether it is possible to target it any time soon. I would really appreciate if you could provide downloadable sample worksheets right from step 1 to step 4 and then eventually to step 8 using any single site as an example. Sample worksheets are just like pictures, worth thousand words and higly actionable.
It's great bunch o' questions Himanshu. Duncan Morris (Distilled Partner)wrote an SEOmoz post which brought up a very similar point. His words were before you can do a proper site review, you need to do keyword research
It's a variation of the classic conundrum "Which came first, the chicken or the egg"
And I agree with you. Being able to see Laura's worksheets would rock.
I say before you do anything, understand the SWOT (strenght, weakness, opportunites and threats) of your client and his competitors. Study the competitive landscape. Waging a war without asessing the capabilities of your enemies can be deadly. What if you come prepared for battle with 100 soldiers in an open field and find yourself surrounded by 500 archors. You are already dead. Same is the case with keyword research or any seo task. You have decided the keywords you want to target, you have determined its relevance, CTR, search volume, even come up with content categories, spent loads of time and resources in doing all this but later you came to know that the targeted keywords are too competitive and you can't rank for them for at least another one year.
In my seo process keyword research is done on the basis of client and competitive analysis and is the third step. In fact competitive analysis plays such an important role that I just can't imagine moving forward without it. It always help in speeding up any seo task you can think of, whether it is market research, determining keyword categories, content development stategies, link building strategies or social media strategies. I always prefer first following the tried and tested methods of those who are already ahead of me to save time and then come up with something better to beat the competiton. There are 'n' ways of doing keyword research but the one which produces most optimal results in the shortest possible time is the best one. Faster the turnaround time, more projects you can handle and more projects means more revenue.
Fantastic questions seo-himanshu. Most of this stuff is more of an art than a science - so everyone can paint their landscape in any manner that suits them best. In this case, I start with a target market and their needs before I look at competition because I'm primarily focused on providing what my target market wants (which is how I make money - that's my business in general - and now I'm applying it to Search). Then once I hone in on that, I check out who I'm up against. Otherwise I might just be guessing who I'm up against and be off-target.
For example, if I sell appliances on my site and I go after a target market that wants green solutions, I'll determine exactly what they're interested in and the terms they're using to search for those appliances (are they interested in "green" appliances? energy efficient? energy star? dishwashers vs toasters vs refigerators? colors? manuals? repair? local? etc). If I think that's too competitive of a market to compete in SERPS then I either have to find my niche or get out of the game (if I'm not going to try to be the best in a highly competitive market). :) NOt vryone can win when you have a lot of competition, so personally my view is find your niche or offer something remarkable - otherwise what chance do you have?
Unfortunately I cant provide the spreadsheets - they're the basis for some proprietary assets. But I'm hoping the screenshots can give you some good ideas for how you can track some of these things yourself (and better yet - build upon them), and I'm pretty sure I'll soon be here on SEOmoz asking *you* to share your secrets and worksheets... :D
Hi, Laura, your posts are fantastic, I have just recently discovered them, so I am your latest new fan! If I may chip in a suggestion of my own re. finding out who your competitors are, they are linkely to have AdWords campaigns bidding on your main keywords. Therefore (1) check what "sponsored links" come up too, not just the organic resulst (but remember that that it's technically fraud for you to click on their Google ads, so don't unless you intend to buy from them :) ) and (2) use Keyword Spy, it can tell you both your organic and your PPC competition (there's keywordspy.com, keywordspy.ca and keywordspy.co.uk but they are all the same). Furthermore, Google's related: operator (which I believe returns results is based on co-citation) is not bad for adding to your competitor list.
Just an incidental question... what is the difference (in term of click fraud) if I click on an advert and then I don't realize any action because I don't like what the ad wanted to sell me, and if I click in order to "spy" a potential competitor and therefore I don't realize any action in its website?
I thought that link fraud was about clicking and clicking again on a ad in order to consume its daily budget.
I would say it's all about intent G.
If I'm curious about what lies on the other side of an ad, either to see what the product is or just to see what the landing page looks like, in my book that's OK. But to click an ad so your clients competitor has to pony up? That's a bad.
I hear you... but when I mean 'spying' I mean exactly what you are saying: looking the other flip of ad coin.
That's A OK in my book.
Wow. I am loving this comment stream. Thanks for the keyword spy tip Phillip.
PS - You and I are gonna have to arm wrestle to determine who's the bigger Laura fanboy ;)
I like this step, almost because it was quite straightforward and like gfiorelli said, step 5 is most likely going to be much more complicated.
I usually only focus on 3-5 keywords on the inital run. Once I'm happy with my results for most of those keywords, I start the competition analysis all over again for another bunch of keywords.
Looking forward to the next post Laura :)
Another great post Laura, this is definately important and I will be returning to this bookmark =) (my bar is almost full with SEOmoz posts now!)
It is always interesting finding a businesses' online competitors, just recently I started a project where the client told us who the big 4 competitors were in his opinion (from the brick and mortar world.) It turned out that those competitors were nowhere to be found in the online landscape, so when informing the client of the actual online competition he was suprised.
I really look forward to your next post, and thank you again for taking the time to write these amazing articles Laura.
-Jason
I find the same thing a lot Jason. I've only ever dealt with brick and mortars, and all they are usually aware of is the competition on the ground. Often, this will have little correlation to the online world.
I've seen that more times than I'd like to remember. That's why they pay people like you guys to open their eyes to the world of SERP competition! Although keeping the other [however defined] competitors in sight isnt a bad idea... You never know when they'll hire an SEO.
Interesting how the meta titles for #1, #5, and #10 are structured (difficulty score and authority comparison graph). #1 is the most natural and has all 3 of the keyword phrases. Interestingly, #8 is what I would've have clicked on.
How about Rank checker from seobook.com?
I use it to check my&competitor's rank.
I love the rank sheet, maybe i should do it by myself.
Thanks again Laura, remarkable. Well SEOmoz bloggers now you know the type of information your audience is looking for, this is what we want... Just kidding SEOmoz has been one of my best resources to learn and stay ahead of the SEO and Internet marketing game.
Although this page
https://searchengineland.com/the-link-builders-guide-to-analyzing-serp-dominators-for-link-opportunities-21076
talks mostly about link building it offers also great tools to get the most often appearing competitors in the SERPS.
Great Post Laura, I followed your instructions and like the way you find your competitors. Your method makes it really easy. Something else I noticed, and maybe its because I dont always pay total attention, is, You can get a really good look at the Title Tags your competition is using. I discovered a few Title tag ideas I had never thought of. I guess the same goes for meta descriptions as well. Thank you for opening my eyes to a different yet simple way to find my competitors.
Very nice post Laura! Competitive analysis should be at the top of anyone's list - be it for SEO, SEM or internet marketing in general.
Thank you for the post, I'm really enjoying this set of articles. I can't wait until you've finished writing all eight and I can read them all. :).
This is a really well-written, straightforward article - bookmarked!
Oh man Laura. I am shaking my head in amazement at your posts. If the SEOmoz staff doesn't come to you begging to let them make a pro guide out of them, then allow me to ask you as SEOmoz's unofficial ambassador.
Your 4 posts so far have upended the way I do things and I'm scrambling now to incorporate your ideas. While Philip-SEO above may be your newest admirer, I claim the spot of the most ardent.
Wow, great article and how-to, Laura. This kind of hands-on approach is really valuable for me, esp. when making the point that online/offline competition is often different and that smart companies take a multi-channel view of their competition.
Hey, another way of analyzing your rankings and competition in search engine results pages is to run a SERPs Dominator Analysis to get a better sense of what your overall coverage is versus your competitors. Doing this can also help you find new link-building opportunities to further raise your rankings for key terms/phrases even higher.
Really enjoying the series, as it spurs great conversation. All improving education.
In the keyword difficulty tool you analyse 'celebrity gossip'. The first excel screen grab shows the keyword 'celebrities'. Seems to be a disconnect or should there be no connection b/w KW.
Thank you to share,SEO 4 steps behind it?