One of the first things before doing website SEO optimization to achieve better positions in Google search results is to find out who your competitors are and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
In this article, we will answer the following questions:
- How to find out your competitors online?
- How can you spy on competitors?
- How to research online competitors?
- What competitor analysis tools are available online?
Why do you need to know your competitors online?
When you know the advantages and disadvantages of your competitors, you know what steps you need to take on your website to rank higher than them in Google search results.
Investigating competitors will require time and effort. But it will pay off if you want to get more customers and expand your business.
Your competitors have the same target audience as you. This means that when searching for products and services online, your potential customers will first see your competitors at the top of the search results. Most people who search for goods or services on the Internet only open those websites that are in the top 3 positions in the search results. But position isn’t the only thing that affects which result a user clicks on.
Whether your potential customer clicks on a link in the search results that leads to your website is determined not only by how high you are, but also by:
- Does the meta title contain a keyword related to what he is looking for?
- Are they interested in the meta description?
- Whether the product / service appears as a Google ad or in organic results (some people don’t click on the ads, but some on the contrary, click on it first, whether it’s an ad or natural results).
Since all of the above factors are related to user choice, it is important to know your competitors and research how your competitors market their products and services online so that you can fight for your target audience.
If your competitors are at the top of Google’s search results and they’re doing well, it means they’re doing something right and it’s worth finding out. Once you know who your competitors are, you can start gathering information about them:
- What keywords your competitors use
- How your competitors rank in Google search results
- What are the prices of their services or products
- Whether and what social media accounts your competitors have
- Do your competitors use paid Google Ads, etc.
If you get answers to these questions, it will help you determine which keywords to optimize your website for or place Google Ads ads on, what social networks you are targeting, and what products or services you can promote.
So how do you find out about your competitors online?
Start with keywords
First, start researching, write down all the keywords that come to your mind after which people might search for your services. Then enter your keywords into the Google search engine and see who ranks first on the first page of search results. Use the Google Chrome incognito window to do this.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_raw_html]JTNDdmlkZW8lMjBhdXRvcGxheSUzRCUyMiUyMiUyMGxvb3AlM0QlMjIlMjIlMjBtdXRlZCUzRCUyMiUyMiUyMHN0eWxlJTNEJTIyd2lkdGglM0ElMjAxMDAlMjUlM0JoZWlnaHQlM0ElMjAxMDAlMjUlM0JtYXJnaW4lM0ElMjAwcHglMjIlMjBzcmMlM0QlMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRmRnd2ViZmFjdG9yeS5jb20lMkZ3cC1jb250ZW50JTJGdXBsb2FkcyUyRjIwMjAlMkYwNiUyRm1la2xlc2FuYXMtcmV6dWx0YXR1LWl6cGV0ZS5tcDQlMjIlM0UlMEElM0MlMkZ2aWRlbyUzRQ==[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]When you search for your products or services on google, you’ll see who your fiercest competitors are (companies that rank higher than you in Google search results for the same keywords).
People can also search for your services by keywords that don’t come to your mind, so be guided by the data. This data can be obtained using tools such as Keywords Everywhere, which will help you identify similar keywords by which people search for your services or products on Google. You can also use the Google Keyword Planner.
Once you’ve found your competitors and you know the keywords people are searching for your products or services. The next step is to research each of these websites that are on the first page of search results. There are several tools available to do this.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Competitor research tools
Ahrefs
One of the best tools for both researching your own page and competing websites is Ahrefs. On the Ahrefs platform, you can even compare your website to competitors’ websites and tell you what you need to improve on your website to outperform your competitors.
This is a paid tool with a subscription fee, but it also has a 7-day trial that costs $ 7, during which you can get a lot of information.
With Ahrefs Site explorer, you can learn a lot about your competitors, such as how many visits your competitors receive from Google’s search results, how many inbound links lead to their website, and what keywords your competitors use and how many the more traffic they get from Google Ads Paid Ads.
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MozBar
This is also a very useful tool for researching competitors. It comes in two versions, paid and free.
You can add the MozBar extension to your Google Chrome web browser. This allows you to see Domain Authority (DA) results when visiting pages (0-100).
MozBar calculates domain authority based on the number of inbound links and the number of domains that link to a given page. The domain authorship index shows how influential a particular page is in the Internet environment. The higher this score, the better your chances of getting higher in Google search results.
MozBar helps you determine the authority of your domain compared to your competitors. MozBar will also give you suggestions on how you can increase the domain integrity of your page.
Just as Ahrefs can see in this tool what inbound links lead to your competitors’ pages, you may be able to find a page between them that also links to your website to increase the number of inbound links. It is important to choose quality resources to link to.
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Bezzsumo
Buzzsumo is a tool that lets you learn about your competitors’ content marketing. Bezzsumo offers a free plan and several paid plans.
With this tool you can get a new idea for content that will be related to the theme of your website. Content plays a vital role in both marketing and SEO.
Bezzumo is an opportunity to compare the content of your website with the content of your competitors’ websites, as well as see which content of your competitors the most people share on social networks and which is more popular. It will give you an idea of what people are interested in in relation to your industry and give you ideas for creating some content. You can also compare the performance of your content to that of competing content.
Another option offered by Bezzsumo is the ability to compare up to 10 competitors’ Facebook pages and find out at what kind of news followers are most involved.
You can also receive notifications when a competitor publishes new content.
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