Competition Identification
At Paramount Search Marketing, identifying the competition of your website is at the forefront of any SEO project that we undertake. This involves our SEO consultants taking time to align themselves with the industry that your business or organisation is involved in, and scouring the web to uncover two profiles of competitors.
These competitor profiles are:
Business Competitors
These are typically the guys you are fighting with directly for new customers or clients. In example if we were undertaking competitor research for McDonald’s, we might expect to find business competitors showing up in search results and utilising social media such as:
- KFC
- Pizza Hut
- Oporto
- Subway
- Red Rooster
- Hungry Jacks
In most cases, our clients can provide us with a short list of business competitors that they know they compete with, but throughout competitor research we may uncover business competitors you didn’t even know you were up against!
Ranking Competitors
In terms of SEO, these are the guys we want to chase down and overtake in the search results. Ranking competitors are websites that are populating the search results for keywords that your website is targeting. In example if we were doing competitor research for McDonald’s, we might expect to find ranking competitors showing up in search results for:
- Cheeseburgers
- Fries
- Salads
- Take away food
Sites that show up for these terms may be anything from informational sites like wikis (Wikipedia, Wiki.com), video sites (YouTube, Veoh), social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter) and even the avergae joe’s personal blog. They are online spaces that are doing SEO work and Google is rewarding that with rankings.
The majority of the time we will find that business competitors are in fact ranking competitors too. You either need to keep up with them, or allow them a huge advantage in driving website traffic and acquiring more market share than you.
To learn more about the tools we use for SEO, see here about how we go about keyword research.