EP 5: Competitive Research is Good for the SEO Soul

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Competitive research is an important part of SEO. Well, it has been done in traditional marketing for a very long time. I find that it’s often skipped in online marketing, and that’s a problem. I performed this step at the state of any SEO project and I revisit it multiple times per year for my own websites. It’s important to do this research periodically because the online landscape can change based on the number of factor ranging from algorithm changes and technology shifts for terminology to just new websites arriving online.

A key element to remember is that you’re going to have to mix traditional and online competitors together when you’re performing your research. You might be asking why you would have both traditional and online competitors, and that’s a great question.

Many times the people you compete with in real life are not the same websites you compete with online. This is because not all traditional competitors will be good at SEO and online marketing. As you remove out underperforming traditional competitors, you replace them online competitors. Your online competitors are really important because they can create havoc on your efforts without you even realizing it.

My SEO clients are always surprise at who they actually compete with for specific keywords. In most cases, it isn’t their traditional competitors or even anyone in their industry. It’s sometimes someone completely outside their niche and someone who has just gained traffic for specific keywords that they want to rank for.

I like to do competitive research because it helps frame out the traditional SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities and threats. If you’ve never done a SWOT analysis on your website, you need to do so and you need to do so soon. It provides a lot of really good information. You’ll have a solid understanding of what’s happening around you so you can ascertain your strengths, your weaknesses, and where you need to make short-term and long-term improvements.

This process can be good for the soul and it completely energizes you and inspires you to forge ahead. And the reason is because you’ll realize not everyone is as good at SEO and online marketing as you think. The task of competitive research is going to do 10 very important things for you. And let me list this out.

The first one is you’ll discover who your top online competitors are and you’ll realize they are many times not the ones you expect.

Next. You’ll see what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for. Then you’ll discover your competitor’s top-ranking keywords as well as their top-ranking content. You’ll be able to explore your competitor’s backlinks and referral traffic. You’ll learn more about your competitor’s social media activity and you’ll discover some great keyword options for writing future content.

You’ll also have a much better idea how often you need to write content and how long your content needs to be.

Finally, you’ll be able to see how a good competitor’s on-page SEO efforts are in real world usage and you’ll realize that they all have SEO issues to. Everybody has issues. None of us are perfect. And I really like that statement and I really like to look at that and it’s not just looking at the failures of others but it’s recognizing that I’m not perfect. You are not perfect. No one is perfect. And we all have areas of improvement.

And again, when you start to see this, it helps you feel energized and it makes you want to make improvements and really set your website apart from others.

There are lots and lots of options for tools to help with competitive research. The problem is going to be finding the best tools for you and how your mind processes information and data. I like to find really good software packages and stick with them.

While I can often embrace changing many areas of my life, I can’t do this when I’m looking at data and information. I really need to have some consistency and I really need to have tools that present data in the way that my mind is going to process it.

So I’d like to list out some of my favorite software packages for digging into competitor’s data, their keywords, their top pages, and all that goodness. I’m going to list these out and talk about them now but I’ll also put them in the show notes at SEObits.fm.

So the first one I use as software package is called DYNO Mapper. This software will let you crawl the competitor’s website and will provide you with full list of the URLs so you can look at the different types of content they have. It will present it in visual, online, beautiful different views and then you can export this to Excel or PDF files.

It will even go to the detail of showing you their meta titles and descriptions as well as how many words are in a given URL so you’ll know how long their actual content is. It’s a really, really great tool for just deep diving your competitor, their content, as well as looking at your own content in a new perspective.

So another one I use all the time is called the MozBar. This is – another phrase will be The Moz Toolbar. It allows you to load it into your browser like Chrome and you can see key data points like H1 headers, meta titles and descriptions, meta keywords if your competitor’s website is using that, bolded text for the different elements in the site and different in the pages. It just provides a really good overview.

Now, all of this information you can actually see in source code but to me [0:05:41] [Indiscernible] and I don’t want to read source code. I would rather have them as toolbar loaded into my Chrome browser so it can just quickly show me that information. Like DYNO Mapper, it’s a tool that I use all the time.

Now, the next one is Spyfu. And this tool offers really good visual information on both organic SEO activity as well as pay-per-click activity. It will show you a keyword universe, traffic, trends, and volumes and give you estimates on the dollar value of both pay-per-click and organic SEO traffic. It will show you how many keywords for a competitor are ranking on page one, how many are almost there, and how many are like on pages three through five.

Then you can export this information, which is a really cool tool and it’s just very, very beneficial and helpful as you sit and you try to dig down into your top competition.

So the next tool is SEMrush. And this is an expensive tool. They do have a free trial. But to get the most value, you have to pay for this monthly if you’re going to use it long term. I love this tool. I use it all the time. And for me, it’s worth every bit of money that I spent on it. It’s very similar to Spyfu although it shows additional information like breakouts of where traffic comes from for the competitor, where social media activity steaming from, is it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, the breakout of organic traffic versus social media versus direct and email, just oodles and oodles of information.

And again, I can view the competitor’s top keywords, their top pages. I can export all of this to an Excel and do more data manipulation offline. It’s just – it’s a wonderful, wonderful tool.

So the next one is called Ahrefs. And this company actually gave me a free trial of this to browse through and I really was surprised on how much good information this software had. This one is going to give you a lot of information on backlinks and link profiles. So it’s going to bring forth a lot of information on off-page SEO factors. So, Spyfu and SEMrush focuses more on on-page and Ahrefs is to going to show more off-page.

Now, my last tool is called KWFinder. Now, this is a premium tool that you’re going to buy it’s really inexpensive and it’s so worth the money that you pay for each month. This tool will let you research keywords and see who is ranking on page one and it gives you some information on why they’re ranking. You start to see the inbound links for the page, social media sharing numbers, and domain ranking. So you really get to see a good picture of who is on page one for a given phrase and why they’re ranking there and then what you need to do to be able to push yourself forward and takeover that ranking spot from the competitor website.

So those are my favorite tools. I love them all. I use them all very, very often. Some of them I use daily. Some of them I use every other day. But the point is, is those are my favorites. You might have different favorites of your own. You again, need to find something that fits with you and that works with your brain and how you process data. But the important thing here and the important takeaway is that you need to have tools. You can’t do competitive research manually. You have to have some good software to help dig through that data and present your data that’s important to SEO and that is digestible to you in a very easy to read through and take action kind of manner.

So let’s do a quick recap of competitor reviews and when and where you should use them. I perform competitive reviews when I’m evaluating SEO clients and when I’m building a list of or seed list of keywords for a project or when I want to refresh my website or come up with some content ideas that I’m going to write about moving forward.

If you’ve ever taken my SEO course then you know I push this process a lot within the keyword research and selection lesson. And that’s because it’s super important that you have to have good competitive research done to be able to really have solid keyword research and really know where you need to allocate some time to develop content or strengthen some of your existing content.

I also like to use this process at the end of the SEO project or process and that’s because I want to use it when I’m evaluating ranking and how we have shifted and how we’re doing against the competition. SEO doesn’t happen overnight. So if you’re using this at the beginning of your SEO process or project and you’ve worked on SEO for six months, you’re going to come back and you’re going to want to do it again at the end.

You’re going to use it in a different way but you’re still going to be looking at those competitors and where you rank with them so you have a better understanding of what needs to be done to further cultivate that content that you’re working on or the social media and those inbound links or even those internal links inside the website, what you need to do to continue to push forward.

So as takeaways of this process, you’re going to have three, four components of output. The first one is a seed list of potential keywords. Second one is going to be short-term tasks and goals that you need to execute. And then the third one is going to be long-term objectives. What are those long-term things that are like six months or a year out that you’re going to really work towards and strive towards? And those are both really immediate, short-term and long-term and that will last you for many months, which is why I do believe in this process and I think it’s super, super important.

This could be related to new and improved content or they could be associated with just social media and link building that you’re going to be doing from off-site or internal to the website. The important thing again is that it’s going to touch every aspect of what you’re doing online. It’s not just looking to see who you’re competing with and where they rank. It’s really about trying to help establish a roadmap for you and really helping you understand what you need to do, what you need to execute to be successful.

The takeaway I’d like to leave with you today is an action item. I’d like you to use the free version of Spyfu to discover some online competitors you didn’t know you already had. I want you to dig into them. I’d like you to see what their top keywords are, what their top pages are, and just really get a good understanding for them and where they’re strong so that you can potentially see what you can take away from that and apply to your own marketing efforts.

If you’ve got a little extra time, I’d like you to sign up for the free trial of SEMrush and I’d like you to dig in to the data there. I think if you start poking around SEMrush, you’re going to realize there is a world of information waiting for you and you’re going to realize that this is a tool that you might want to subscribe to for even just a few months as you dig through your competitors you kind of get a roadmap for where you’d like to go moving forward.

So that’s it for today. I hope I gave you lots to think about and at least a few action items. I appreciate you joining me and I’ll be talking with you next week.