As the saying goes, “Know yourself, know your enemy, and win every battle,” and this phrase is a good hint at a key aspect of a good SEO strategy: knowing your search competitors.
A search competitor is a search for competitor sites that are in the same field as your own and have search visibility. Search visibility is the visibility of a website in search engine search results. You need to know who your opponents are in the search engines (understand their strategies) because that's where SEO takes the most effort.
Even if you know who your traditional industry competitors are, keep in mind that they're not "search" competitors if they're not competing for the same keywords as your site.
How can you easily find real online competitors? There are many ways (using a search engine) as well as free and paid tools to help. Here are six quick and easy tools to help you with your competitor research:
Get Ready: Identify Your Keywords
Before you start, you need to know the key terms (and rankings) your site is targeting. If you do not have a keyword list or ranking list, it is recommended to use Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Moz Keyword Explorer to collect keywords. If you need to know how to collect keywords, you can read this keyword research guide. However, not all keywords and phrases are created equal: pay special attention to phrases with medium and medium average search volume (meaning a high or moderate number of searches for a particular keyword in a month) and an achievable difficulty Grading. Once you've identified key search terms, it's time to find your competitors.
1. Google Search
This is the most primitive way to find online competitors, completely free to use directly. Now that you have a list of popular keywords, it's time to search which pages are ranking in the top 10 on Google for those keywords. For example, selling custom sofas, searching for this keyword will see the top six rankings:
google search
Tip: The results you find depend on your location and how Google personalizes your search, however, you can build your own Google search URL to avoid personalizing your search . E.g:
https://www.google.com/search?q=example+query&pws=0&gl=gb&hl=en
q=example+query - this means you are searching for "example query"
pws=0 - this is invalid personalization .
gl=gb - this means you appear to be searching in the UK.
hl=en - this means you are searching in English in the browser.
If you want to go a step further, look at the numerical correlation of the results of the Domain Authority (DA) analysis. A large search engine ranking weight was developed to measure the power of an entire domain or subdomain to predict rankings. Learn how to calculate domain authority using this link.
View a website's DA by using MozBar, a free Chrome extension.
Website DA
Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to easier rankings. Pay special attention to domains that score higher than yours, so as a next step, try to research why they are higher than yours.
In addition, you can find competitors in paid search results as follows:
Search engine bidding
Remember that the two sites mentioned above with the "AD" tag are not organic search results. In this case, these brands are bidding on the keyword "custom sofa," so non-bidding sites won't show up for the relevance of the page to the search term.
2. Google "Related": Search Operator
Another way to use Google to find online competitors (less time consuming than manually entering search results for the target keyword) is to search via the "Related" operator, followed by the domain name. It helps you identify sites that Google thinks are similar to you and may be your competitors.
You need to type "related: [your URL]" in telemarketing list the search box. In this example, I searched for sites related to "argos.co.uk":
related search operator 4
Note that the "related:" operator may only work in certain industries, and generally for larger sites. That said, it's fast, and it's worth trying to discover any similar sites, and potentially identify those you might have overlooked.
Check out Google's list of search operators for more information.
3. STAT (paid)
STAT is one of the ranking tools we use every day. In order to discover who your search competitors are, you first need to set up keyword tracking. Insert your domain name and keyword list and let STAT retrieve it for about 24 hours (at least a full day to get ranking information). Once the information is available, go to the "Competitive Landscape" tab - there you will find search competitors based on the keywords you gave STAT.
In this section, you can track the "voice sharing" of searches to see which domains are valuable, which are not, and which may be potential threats: