Find Your SEO Competitors to Build a Winning Strategy

Even if you are new to SEO, you probably know that finding your SEO competitors is critical to shaping your search engine optimization strategy. While you likely know who your business competitors are, your actual SEO competitors can be very different. These are the sites that target the same keywords as you, target the same audience, and solve the same customer need. Read on to learn how to find your actual SEO competitors.

How to determine someone is a search competitor.

To be an SEO competitor, a site needs to meet three criteria. They need to target the same keywords as you because that determines if they show up in the search engine results pages you would like to appear in or appear higher in. They need to target the same audience as you because if you are targeting people in California with an income of $50k and below, and a site is targeting only those who live in New York and earn $100k+, they’re not really your competitor. They also need to solve for the same problem as you. This means that if a person was to go to their site and make a purchase or complete a form, the person would no longer have a need for your services or products.

How to find your SEO competitors.

The first thing you’re going to do is identify your target keywords. Once you have a list of relevant keywords, cluster them into topics. For each target keyword, analyze the search engine results page (SERP) and identify which sites appear for each keyword. For example, if you see Bob’s site in search results 100% of the time for a specific topic, or cluster of keywords, you know they are an SEO competitor.

Another way to find SEO competitors is to use an audience research tool like True Competitor by Moz. Knowing your target audience will help you identify competitors. If you run your own affiliate business, you know who you are targeting, but if you work for a company, you may need to confirm with other departments exactly who you want to target, what specific criteria makes up a target persona. You will use your audience information and an audience research tool to determine competitors. This approach can be faster than conducting a SERP analysis, but you will typically need to pay for the tool.

Summary

Knowing who your SEO competitors are is key to beating them for rankings on search engine results pages (SERP). Identifying SEO competitors will help you build a strategy and determine what you need to do to rank highly on the SERP, reach more prospects, and drive more revenue. SEO competitors are those sites that target the same audience and keywords as you and solve the same problems that you do. You can find your SEO competitors by using an audience research tool or conducting manual research on the SERP. Once you know who your competitors are, you can improve your site content and build a strategy that will help you win the ranking war.

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