What's a good way to get started with competitive research?
-
Hi all,
SEO noob here. I'm doing an audit for a firm that makes specialized accounting software. It's a relatively new firm, with a barebones website.
My client has identified three direct business competitors. In addition, I see indirect competitors (such as product reviews) on the SERP for a relevant keyword phrase.
I want to provide actionable advice for my client. What information should I present? I'd like to help my client understand:
- Why my client's competitors are outperforming them on the SERPs
- What my client needs to do to overtake their competitors
What information should I present to my client?
Thanks, all.
-
Hi Chris,
In the end, I made recommendations to my client, based on their potential impact and ease of implementation. I recommended they add plugins to enhance security and speed up page loads. I recommended they set up a Google search console account and submit their sitemaps. I recommended they set up their analytics views to filter out visits from employees and others with a relationship to the business.
On the content side, I recommended they do keyword research and start building content optimized for variants of their main phrase. I also recommended some link building steps.
My client is new to SEO, but quite intelligent and a good listener. I think they'll do well.
Thanks for your advice.
Best,
AK
-
Andy,
The answer to your question has a lot to do with the specific keyword, or search term, you used in your competitive search. It is not uncommon for a client to misunderstand the difference between their off-line competitors and their online competitors. Online competitors can be specifically related to a target keyword. For example, page-one search results (i.e your strongest online competitors) for " widgets" would be different than your competitors for the "wingdings" search term--even though they may be similar products or synomical terms. That's to say, it's easy to identify the online competition for a search term--it's every site that shows up between where your (client's) site shows up and google's #1 spot.
The choice of keyword with which to compete online is more difficult but there are tools to make it a little easier. The tools may show you that "widgets" has 100K other sites optimized to compete for the top spot and that "wingdings" has only 50 websites optimized to compete for the top of that search result. In that case, it's easy to see how you might choose to tell your client to optimize their site for "wingdings"
There are two potential catches with that choice, though. One is that "optimization" is not a black or white thing. "Optimization" is what develops a site's capability to compete with other sites for specific keyword(s). Optimizations can be good or bad or more or less in their effort to create the perfect content formula that google's ranking algorithm will place at the top of the results, so the competition is quite like a moving target. The other catch is the issue of how many people actually use that term when they go to google and search for your client's product. It can be very possible that the reason so few sites are optimized for "wingdings" is because most people, in fact, use the search term "widgets." Why optimize for a term that few people search for?
So, to get back to your questions. It's kind of hard to say otherwise than it takes a knowledgeable SEO to help an uninitiated client understand how keywords and competition work online as well as to propose options the client can take to overtake their competitors for said keywords. Finally, I would say, it's very hard to sell an SEO project to someone who doesn't understand what it is. At the very least, they have to understand keywords, they have to understand search engine competitors, they have to understand the value of SEO, and they have to understand that they are probably going to have to make a good-sized investment in their website to affect the changes that will move the needle against their competitors.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Subdomain Research Tool
Does anybody know of a research tool that can track the amount of subdomains on a root domain? Maybe there is a way to manipulate a Google search to display the different subdomains that are indexed?
Competitive Research | | iSTORM-New-Media0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Help! New site won't rank locally but should...
any help would be greatly appreciated... picked up a new client, a used car dealer in New Jersey. Have a VERY spammy site before, tons of keyword stuffing and lots of dupe content. also had a horrible design. (www.coopscars.com) We updated the design and the content, made it relevant and unique, fixed title tags, etc. Now he's not ranking for anything locally other than his business name. He's got a decent number of links, we've added relevant citations, his social signals are much stronger than they were... We do lots of SEO for car dealers, and we know that he should be ranking SOMEWHERE at this point - not saying he should be page 1, but he should at least be somewhere in the top 5... and yes, bing/yahoo are different, but he ranks over there... one page 1 for "used cars south river" - so why completely non-existant on Google? just as a test, he put up a free website at www.coopscars.net just last week - and it's already ranking for several local terms. I'm completely confused here - i'm not a noob, I know the tactics we've used on him work for other dealers. Thinking there's got to be something that's blocking him, especially since there aren't but maybe 15-20 car dealers to compete against locally and he still doesn't show up... thought i'd come over here and see if anyone has any ideas...
Competitive Research | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Competitive Domain Analysis
What is the best way to improve this in reference to my competition? My site(s) are formatted well, returning no errors or warnings. I have removed my keyword meta-tag and tested my sites against the keywords that we want to appear under. Now I need to close the gap on the competition.
Competitive Research | | bobbabuoy0 -
Does it makes any difference if i use 's' at the end of keyword.
In terms of ranking and other stuff, how does adding 's' at the end of a keyword works ? For example - 'Custom Cases' in place of 'Custom Case' I am getting different results as well for both. Please advice....
Competitive Research | | viniyog0 -
Analyzing Back Links - Says site A has back link to Site B but when I look at site B I can't find any back link to Site A. Why?
I am new to SEO Moz - It looks like incredible technology. I was playing around with different websites to see where they had back linked to see how it works. Looked at a site called racingsecretsexposed [dot] come and it said that it had dozens of links to www.ndesignstudio.com such as: ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites?replytocom=893 with link anchor text "laying horses" but when I do a search for the company name, or the anchor text "laying horses", or the owner of the company's name on ndesignstudio.com - nothing appears. Why not? Isn't the back link anchored by the text laying horses, which should link back to the racing secrets website? Thanks
Competitive Research | | NewtoSEO900 -
How can I estimate a domain's overall organic search traffic - any tools?
Most of my analysis revolves around looking at rankings for specific keyword phrases that I've identified as important/relevant. But it'd be nice to be able to look at a domain and get a sense for how much organic traffic they get overall. If they're not ranking for the keywords I'm researching but have a lot of organic traffic that would be a nice signal to me that they are probably targeting other phrases more or have a big brand presence or something. Any suggestions? Thanks! Jeff Gibson
Competitive Research | | jeff.gibson0 -
How to gauge competitiveness on niche keywords
I'm looking to create a website selling a specific niche range of products. For example 'hair extensions.' Using opensite explorer it's fairly easy to guage the competition for similar websites focused on this niche only e.g www.hairextensionsworld.com - I just look at their authority, number of incoming links, anchortext links etc. However, I'm finding it more difficult to guage the competition if a large merchant, for example Amazon, has a page ranking for a specific keyphrase I'm after. Often the large merchant doesn't have a lot of external links to the specific page, but nonetheless it has power from being on the domain of the large merchant. Are there any good tools / metrics for guaging the competition of such pages? Page authority I guess is one? Thanks
Competitive Research | | Nicknak0