What are the best practices for identifying your competitors?

identify your competitors

Creating a keyword portfolio entails far more than simply knowing your business and products. It involves putting you to identify your competitors — the room you occupy, and who ranks above and below you in the SERPs. You must also understand competition and semantic searcher motive and what you can do to encourage both skilled searchers and those with a common interest in your niche. This article provides seven critical strategic planning ideas for identifying your competition to conduct better keyword research. Identifying your competitors is one of the most powerful methods for competing in a cramped area and gaining a significant ownership stake in the company in your business.

Why Is Competitive Analysis Necessary?

  • Do you ever wonder about any of the following?
  • Increase the traffic exponentially by using just the tools at your disposal.
  • Finding high-volume keywords that other SEOs haven’t even targeted in your niche
  • Identifying the keywords that provide your rivals with the highest ROI
  • Taking on increased keywords and succeeding

Locate the competitors

Even if you already know who your market leaders are, you should be aware that they are not the same as your quest competitors. It is preferable to discuss the latter when searching for valuable and crucial topics to cover. Consider ash refs and backlinko.com to demonstrate the distinction between the company and explore rivals. Ashraf make money selling SEO software, while Backlinko’s creator, Brian Dean, earns millions SEO of sale courses. Even though he is not a real business rival, we compete for several of the exact keywords, and we are vying for the same market. It helps you to identify your competitors.

Conduct a ‘related’ search on Google.

The following is related to Google’s search engine discovers websites that are similar to yours. Type related:yourwebsite.com into your browser’s address bar. If you’re searching for alternatives for a specific part of your website, such as a blog, you can use a directory or subdomain. It should be noted that this approach can be hit or miss. If your site is relatively new and does not yet rank for a large number of keywords, you might only see a few search queries. In any case, make sure to review the sites before proceeding to the next level carefully. Ignore them if they don’t seem to be competitors.

Potential of organic traffic

Examine the keyword density for this keyword versus the projected traffic to the top-ranking page: Although the keyword receives just 7.2K searches each month, the top page receives nearly 25x more organic traffic. It is because it ranks thousands of other similar keywords, also known as long-tail keywords. Many of these are less popular methods of looking to identify your competitors. Traffic to the top-ranking pages is a much more accurate indicator of a keyword’s evaluation of the proposed than search volume. We suggest that you always verify this before deciding whether or not to go for a keyword.

Analyze the rating complexity

It is not always simple to rank for the exact keywords as competitors. There are various reasons why they will have an easier time ranking for a keyword than you. So, until you choose a keyword, you should always consider the ranking complexity. However, it would help if you did not base your scoring intensity solely on any keyword complexity parameter.

Links from other websites of high quality

Backlinks are an established ranking element. Keyword Difficulty (KD) considers the number of links to the highest pages but still not their content. Before selecting a keyword, search the backlink profiles of the top-ranking sites. You’ll also find that, while a page has several websites connecting to it, many of them are reduced, which in case, outranking the area might be simpler than you expected.

How to Conduct a Keyword Competitive Analysis at the Page Level

Running a keyword competitive analysis at the page level (rather than the domain level) will assist you in identifying holes in existing content. It is where the page falls short of covering anything that search teams might be interested in. Filling in the blanks will enable you to:

  • Increase your ranking for long-tail keywords.
  • Obtain a higher ranking for your primary keyword.

For example, if we look at the top results for the keyword “guest blogging,” we’ll notice that most of them have a description. As a result, the first step is to locate competing pages in two ways: Look up the desired keyword on Google. Your competitors are the top-ranking sites. In Keywords Browser, run the “Traffic sharing by pages” analysis. Tragically, we did not include this in our content marketing guide. We won’t list long-tail keywords like “what is guest blogging” because our posting doesn’t answer the query.

Final thoughts

It’s not a bad idea to go through the keyword competitive analysis process again and again. It’s a great way to discover topics you may have overlooked. Alternatively, while identifying your competitors, you can set up keyword notifications to keep an eye out for new keywords they’re ranking for—and probably targeting.

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