Who are your online competitors? Do you know? Are your sure? As an agency, we often find that many clients have no real idea who they’re fighting for the top position in the search results.
The problem is the “online” factor. With physical businesses it’s clear cut. If you sell medical supplies, other companies that sell them are your competitors. It’s not so clear-cut with Internet marketing.
Competitive Intelligence (or CI) is something you can’t do without if you’re going to have an online business. It’s something you had better be doing; you have to know your competition before you ever have a chance of beating them. It’s the reason why General Paton read Rommel’s book in World War 2: because he knew he’d have to get into Rommel’s head if he was going to win the war.
If you’ve ever dreamed of being a spy like James Bond, Jack Ryan or Tom Bishop, the intriguing world of competitive intelligence is your chance. Okay, so it doesn’t include cool cars and you don’t get to use lines like “shaken, not stirred”, but you do get to be a spy-ish.
Identifying Your Online Competitors
The first thing competitive intelligence does is define who your actual competition is. Against whom are you competing? Good question.
Your competitors vary depending on where you are in your industry’s food chain. For example, if you’re starting at the bottom as a new website owner selling books, looking at Barnes and Noble as your competitor is unrealistic. In fact, your first competitors may not even be someone who sells books. Instead of competing against other book sellers, you’re competing for placement, with SEO as the main way to wrestle your way to the top of the SERP dog pile.
As we’ve said before, your online competition may not be who you think they are. Your online competitors are those showing in the SERPs for your key terms. Plain and simple. The frustrating part is that your competition can include places you wouldn’t even think of:
- Government websites
- Wikipedia
- Informational websites
These are the three most common competitors for a given search term. Most of the time, they aren’t even selling a product or service; they’ve simply been chosen by us informavores as the best places for information about XYZ. Bummer. Your biggest competition may be the online equivalent of a teacher or library.
The Basics
SEO isn’t just keywords, but it does have a lot to do with them. The idea of optimization is to make sure that your website and marketing efforts stay on topic, and it uses relevant keywords as the foundation to do that. With this in mind, you can do some of your own preliminary research before you ever knock on a marketing agency’s door.
Doing the Research
You already know what your industry is, so think about terms someone might use to find you. Start broad, but then narrow it down as much as you can. For example, a book seller might use:
- Book seller
- Book dealer
- Dealer of rare books
- Paperback books for sale
- Hardback books for sale
- And so on
By the time everything is said and done, you should have a fairly comprehensive list of terms to use. From there, it’s just a few simple steps.
- Choose as many terms as you want to check – the more terms the better
- Put the keyword or phrase in the search bar and see how many results come up. The number of results is your overall competition.
- Write down (or copy/paste into Word) the top three sites for each search phrase you use.
- Use the same keyword search with the “intitle:” command and “inanchor:” command.
- Write down the top three sites that come up in these results.
- Review the list of sites to find the ones that show up more than once. The more often a site shows up, the higher it should rise in your list of competitors.
When you’re finished, your competitor list might look something like this:
- example.com (showed up 20x)
- example1.com (showed up 15x)
- example3.com (showed up 12x)
- example5.com (showed up 10x)
The completed list is a broad idea of who you’re fighting for the top position in search. Are you surprised by who’s on it? If so, you aren’t alone. So are many others.
Spying on the Competition
Okay, come on. It’s not as bad as it sounds. And anyway, it’s your chance to be James Bond, right?
Now that you know who your competition is, the next step is finding out what they’re doing that makes their site visible. You have to measure their threat level, and we do that by measuring the sites.
To do this, first look over their content.
- Is it informative, interesting and high quality?
- Does it stand out?
- How is it different from yours?
Look at their navigation and take in the details. If yours is more complicated, perhaps that’s an issue. You want your navigation to be as uncomplicated as possible but set up in such a way as to guide your visitors to interesting places on your site.
Next, we look over the technical aspects of the site.
You can use Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, or any number of other tools. Run them on the competition. Export the information to an Excel file for easy categorizing, sorting and comparisons:
- How many links (who has the most?)
- Quality of pages with the link
- Page Authority of pages with the link
- Page Authority of ranking competitor page
- Anchor text
- Type of links (widgets, badges, mentions, press releases, guest blogs, etc)
- Social reach (SEO Site Tools (Google Chrome extension) can give you good feedback on a page’s social reach)
- Page speed tests (nice list of page speed tools)
Competitive Monitoring
Once you gain some insight into your competition, you don’t want to lose it, right? Monitoring your competition is part of gathering competitive intelligence. There are plenty of page monitoring tools available.
Page monitoring tools can help you stay updated on any changes your competitor may make to their site. For example: does your competitor have a particularly heavy-duty landing page that’s kicking yours out of the water? Set your chosen tool to monitor changes and send you an alert.
What you get is immediate notification when your competitor changes something, giving you a chance to respond quickly with your own changes (if necessary). Think legal insider trading.
Social Monitoring
Turn on your high-tech cloaking device (browser) and visit their social accounts:
- What are they talking about?
- What hashtags (#key term) are they using?
- What pages on Facebook have they fanned?
- What types of links are they sharing, and from what sites?
- Do they seem to be actively engaging their community?
- Have they posted a new sale?
Finding Where Your Competitors Rock (and You Don’t)
Yes, it’s not all about the competition. If you don’t know already, you need to find out how your site stacks up to the competition. Essentially, you’re running a competitive analysis on your own site. What does your link profile, social reach and online content look like?
Putting the Information to Work
All of this information gathering will help you strengthen your SEO campaign. For example, if your competitor has 1 Million + links and you only have 19, you know link building needs to be part of your campaign.
You now have information about your competitors’ high-quality links and anchor text. Instead of going for low quality links, you can target the high-quality links. Here’s a hint: you’ll have to have tons more low-level links to make up for a few high-quality ones.
If your competitor is heavy into social and a lot of their pages have been dugg, tweeted and bookmarked, you’ll need to look at how your social campaigns compare.
If you’re way behind on page speed, well, it’s time to have a serious talk with your webmaster about how page speed matters in ranking.
Don’t automatically copy your competitors’ strategies. Take a good long look at each one and decide what would be best for your company; not every strategy will work for you.
Conclusion
Competitive Intelligence isn’t anything as glamorous as real spy work. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. We don’t recommend ignoring this step in creating an online marketing campaign; this isn’t one of those “optional” things. Without knowing who your competition is, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it (all things a good SEO specialist should be able to tell you), every campaign is just going to be guesswork.
It’s your turn. Have you done any competitive intelligence for your key terms? If so, were you surprised by who turned out to be your competition? If not, please tell us why you chose to bypass this step. Share your thoughts and experiences with us on Twitter and Facebook, hashtag #competitiveintel