No matter what business you’re in, you can get many advantages by learning from your competitors. Sometimes, you may find out your mistakes and at times you get to learn new things in the area you’re lagging behind.
Whether it is athletes, executives or entrepreneurs – they all study their niche competition and their core strategies. Just like the sports people, they watch their opponents game before the match to understand their fine points and pin point their flaws to take the advantage on.
Not only the sportsmen, the world practice this. Because it works….
Spy On Your Competitors
It is an excellent idea to cast an eye on your online competitors for your business growth. At times, your competitors would turn out to be your best friends when coming up with a great SEO strategy.
So, find out on Who is your online competitor? Surely, you’ll find out some online folks off the top of your head. However, you can never be sure whether they are your competitors except you perform a substantial research on that.
Obviously, it is highly profitable to spend some time and efforts to correctly identify your business competition. Regularly monitoring your competitors will give you a clear angle of your current status in the market. Additionally, a deep insight will make an excellent baseline to plan and execute a perfect business strategy and eventually soar in the market.
Yes, please ask yourself
Who Are Your Competitors?
Your competitors are the entities sharing the same business niche competing with you for the same traffic, customers and a higher ranking in SERPs. To recognize your real online competitors, you should :
- Devote time to perform a diligent keyword research.
- Intelligently create a complete keyword list
- Give priority to the most potential keywords based on the traffic and check the rankings of your top keywords in Google console to determine how you can improve with correct link-building strategies and on-page optimization.
This will enable you to extract the keywords from your targeted phrases which are the most potential among your niche. They are the topmost ones to focus on. Based on those keywords you get a list of competitors websites that you may wish to follow. Then, you’ll be able to add the competitor’s ideas to your competitor’s list and compare their result with yours. Besides these steps, do a proper research on the online competition.
Your Online Competitors May Differ From the Target Audience
Localization is critical while determining the online competitors correctly. Google search results are tailored to the location of your customers. As you establish where your customers live, you boost your local rankings. Include all the local search ranking factors within your organic SEO strategies. These factors are:
- Geographic keywords
- Consistent NAP information matching to Google My Business location on each and every page
- Gain high rankings on Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google Local guides
- Get positive sentiments on social media pages and reviews
- Add quality content using long tail keywords to get more organic traffic
Besides, you need to frequently check out the Google local listings to find out your online competitors. And, for the listings in different countries, there are various plugins available online that provide you real ranking and you can easily select the browsing country.
Determine The Keywords Used By Your Competitor
Google Adwords keyword Planner is a fantastic tool that helps you discover what keywords your competitors are targeting and improve your SEO strategies.
For a better advantage use the trick to access the keyword planner dashboard by inserting your competitor’s web pages one by another and just pick up the keywords that suits your purpose the best. Analyze the keywords extracted from a particular web page and select them with a search volume that matches your market.
Voilà! Put them on the top of your keyword list..
Use Google Alerts
It’s an easy-to-use tool to establish alerts on whatever you need and how often you want to be notified. This tool is designed to automate your job. It monitors the web for the latest and interesting content based on specified keywords and collects data on your request. It will email you the juicy insights from all over the world.
So, simplify your job and get valuable data or track what your competitors are doing by creating Google Alerts for web monitoring.
Social Media Strategy
First, find out where exactly your competitors are present what social media do they use? Once, you get that you can determine whether you can establish your social presence on those social channels. Following are some of the factors you need to determine:
- Are their web pages active daily
- How strong is their followers engagement
- What type of content do they deliver
Go deep at the social ups and downs of your top competitors to implement their best ideas into your strategy.
Although there are plenty of tricks and traps to have close tabs on your online competition, I’ve penned out some of them above. It is vital to find out your real competitors and then, watch their online activities carefully and conquer them by using their best strategies and implementing them in the most beneficial way.
