Identifying Your Search Competitors

April 2, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 37 views // View Comments

Tips to help you understand and uncover your competition online and offline.

In SEO, being able to identify your competitors is very important and should be a high priority. By identifying your competitors, you will be able to examine a couple things:

Their Keywords. See what keywords they are targeting, and compare how they relate to your target keywords. By looking at their list, you may be able to add or subtract a few keywords from yours.
Their On-Site SEO. See what they are doing from an On-Site SEO perspective. If they are doing well in the search engines you may be able to mimic what they’re doing, and if they are doing poorly you’ll know what to avoid.
Their Off-Site SEO. See what off-site SEO factors may be playing into their search engine rankings. Getting an idea of what external factors may be playing into their SEO will help you make educated decisions regarding your own Off-Site SEO efforts.

The Top 5

In order to keep the process short-and-sweet, I’ll recommend that you limit your list of top competitor’s to around 5. This will allow you to choose at least 1 competitor from each of the categories that I’m about to list.

FYI – I will assume that your competitors have a website (if they don’t, simply give them special considerations if they provide big-time competition).

Identifying Your Competitors

Business Competition

Take the time and list all of the big players in your industry. If you must, utilize your staff to help you think of competing businesses that you may not have thought of.

Things to consider:

What are the products & services that you provide? You may have different competitors for different products and services.
What is your service area? If you service a specific region, identify the businesses competing in your region.
Who is your target audience? Understanding who you’re targeting will help you understand who your competition may be targeting as well.
Are there any newcomers? These “up & comers” guys may be poised to compete for the space you’re currently dominating.

Search Competition

After running ranking assessments for your target keywords, you should get a pretty good idea of who holds sway over the search engine rankings in your niche. If you haven’t run any ranking reports for your target keywords, I’d suggest visiting the search engines and typing in your chosen keywords. The results should reveal some very informative data.

Things to consider:

Did any sites appear in the top search results enough to make you take notice?
Were your competitors listings well-written?
How did your competitors posture their listing titles & descriptions?

When you examine these results, try to take all pride out of it, even if you think the companies that are ranking well for your keywords aren’t as good as yours. The fact is, even if they’re like a mosquito in comparison to your biz, they are still getting the eyeballs on their listings (that you’re not getting). You should take notice of what they’re doing!

Paid Search Competition

Sponsored and paid listings are a different monster altogether. However, if a company is consistently showing up for keywords that you’re targeting, then you may want to consider adding them to your short-list of competitors.

Out of Left Field

As you are going through and examining your competitors, you may want to keep an eye out for competitors who have nothing to do with your targeted keywords. Sometimes, these sites can truly come out of left field.

For example, a search for “amc” yields some interesting results and competitors. This search will yield such results as:

AMC Theatres
AMC Televison
American Mathematics Competitions
Appalachian Mountain Club
American Music Center

Now, nobody would ever mistake any of these organizations as competitors. However, here they are competing for prime search real estate. Some of the sites in this search have nothing to do with each other (and are in no way related), yet they are all competing due to the fact that the brand name initials for all are “AMC.”

A Quick Test

Here is a quick test you can do to help you identify potential search competitors.

Search for your keywords in the in Google, Yahoo & MSN. Use the following point system and see who has the most points at the end. This may help you gather some additional competitor info.

#1 Rank – 10 points
Top 5 Rank - 8 points
Top 10 Rank - 5 points
Top 20 Rank - 3 points
Top 30 Rank – 1 point

Add these numbers up for each potential competitor and enjoy!

Photo Credit: fabbio on Flickr