Knowing your SEO competition is the key to success in Google search. Whether you are aspiring to improve your site rankings or launching a fresh website, you’ve got to research the web to find out with whom you are going to run the race.
Only one line up or down on Google SERP may cost you thousands of clicks and customers. That is why site owners examine their SEO competition thoroughly, select effective keywords to bid on, and track organic ranks to stay afloat.
How to research your online competitors?
Offline and online competition may vary a lot. The former is limited to the physical location and possibilities to handle a definite number of people coming to the site. The latter differs in a way that there is no limitation on the number of people who can find the site and check what’s in it.
Any business has vast opportunities to expand its outreach immensely, optimize the sales funnel, and deliver top-notch services with online marketing tools. And one of them is an SEO competitor analysis tool to find your immediate online rivals.
At the example of Rank Tracker, let’s explore how to find and track SEO competitors. At first, you need to install the tool and create a project. Paste in the URL of your site and the main keywords it ranks for.
The Rank Tracker of the Link-Assistant collects basic data about the domain strength, top-ranking pages, and top keywords for which they show up in search. Let’s see what to look for in your business opponents.
1. Find Competitors For Your Target Keywords
Step 1. Go to Project Preferences and select Competitors.
Step 2. Hit the Suggest Competitors button. A pop-up window will appear with your main keywords. Hit Next and the tool will research domains that rank in the top 10, top 20, and top 30 for the same keywords as yours.
Step 3. Look through the list of ranking pages and select those that match your occupation and scale. Hit Finish, and the selected competitors will appear on your list of SEO competitors.
You will be able to switch keyword tracking on and off for any of them at any time.
Here, quite often you will see large stores ranking first. You don’t need to add Amazon, YouTube, or Wikipedia just because they rank with this one page for your keyword. Choose those sites that resemble yours by business type, blog content, and domain strength overall.
2. Find Your Domain Competitors
Step 1. Go to the Competitor Research module and switch to Domain Competitors.
Step 2. Your project URL will be in the search bar, select whether you want to find competitors as a whole domain or as an exact URL similar to your page.
Step 3. In the top left corner, choose whether you are investigating desktop or mobile search and the number of search results ‒ up to 20, 50, or 100 URLs.
At the top of the dashboard, you will see the number of keywords present in SEO PowrSuite’s index for the target domain, as well as an estimation of potential monthly traffic they may draw.
A special widget shows how all the researched competitors overlap on the axes by keywords and competitors. Below there are lines showing:
- Your unique keywords
- Competitors’ unique keywords
- Intersecting keywords
- Total keywords of your competitors and
- Organic traffic
You can double-click on any column header to filter in ascending or descending order.
Alternatively, use the filter icon and add a condition to sort out those competitors who meet some criteria relevant to your tasks. Hover over the domain and press the appearing icon to add it as a competitor.
3. Find Your SEO Competitors By Topic
That’s dead simple, in the Competitor Research module, move to the Topic Competitors and type in your topics in the workspace. Again, choose whether you are looking through the desktop or mobile searches. Finish the setup for the tool to find the competitors.
In this dashboard, besides the keywords statistics, you can see the number of backlinks each page and domain has. From this competitor research, you can estimate how much effort it may take to outperform each of them.
You can see that not every page on the list might be your competitor. And for some of the competitors, it will be really difficult to beat them, because of the number of backlinks they have or the number of keywords these pages already rank.
4. Find Keyword Gap With Your Competitors
One truly profitable trick from following your competitors is to find new ways, new topics, and approaches to develop content. One such trick is to research keywords and find gaps between you and your competitors.
In your project, switch to the Keyword Research module and hit Keyword Gap. This search will supply a list of keywords that you missed out, but your competitors target. Think about how you can embed these keywords into the existing content or create new pages for them.
This can be a whole pack of fresh ideas to steal like an artist. All you need to do is adopt them and invent creative forms to present them in your unique way.
5. Research Keyword Competition
Before you start optimizing content, you need to pick the most effective keywords. How do you do that? Use the traffic estimation tool in Rank Tracker.
It provides valuable stats for keyword competition powered by Google Analytics and SEO PowerSuite’s database. Check SEO/PPC stats, keyword difficulty, keyword effectiveness, check if competition for the keyword is high.
Fast filters and sorting features will help you manage the keywords in bulk. Match them into groups and map to landing pages.
Each group will have estimations of potential traffic, difficulty, and costs. These data will give you a clue how much effort it will take you to outperform your competitors.
Track SERP History And React To Changes Immediately
When it comes to SEO competition, then It is extremely important to track SERPs for your main keywords. Moving up or down several lines on the first search result page costs a lot of traffic and conversions.
That is why you’ve got to do your best to reach the top and stay firm in this position. The SERP tracker lets you record and analyzes all changes on the SERPs to identify weak spots.
Step 1. Go to Preferences > Rank checking mode.
Step 2. Enable the Track multiple results for keyword. With this feature, the tracker will discover not only organic listings but also rich results popping up for every keyword, such as featured snippets, featured videos, site links, etc.
Step 3. Enable Record SERP history. You will get top 30 results recorded for every check-up. This feature allows observing how top competitors behave on top pages.
The Rank Progress and SERP Analysis functionalities add a whale of fascinating data to look into: top competitors keywords and URLs, backlink profile strength, fluctuation for keywords on SERPs, Google updates, visibility of pages and keywords, etc.
Wrapping Up
I hope you now you are familiar with the benefits of tracking your opponents and what can you learn from them.
You can always add or remove competitors, enable or disable tracking for them. All in all, researching SEO competition is a fascinating source of insights and new creative ideas.
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