Research Your Competition for SEO
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If you plan to start a new website commercially or enter a new business niche, you’d best be prepared to do some research. It’s one thing to build a hobby site as a labor of love, but if you want to make some money and aren’t familiar with the competition, you might as well be going into battle blindfolded. So how do you get started?
First, you need to know who your competitors are. They may not be who you think. If you’re starting from scratch, you shouldn’t be going after the McDonald’s or Wal-Mart equivalent in your space. These are the 500-pound gorillas. You know what I’m talking about: they have been around forever, they have huge websites with lots of content, they have incredible brand penetration so everyone knows who they are, and they have tons of money to throw at any new initiative they deem necessary.
I’ve seen more than one SEO professional describe the idea of going after that kind of site when you’re just entering a space as “fighting outside your weight class.” So let the George Foremen of the world take on the Muhammad Alis, and find yourself some good featherweights. If you’re really new to the space, you may even learn something.
Internet time speeds everything up, so if you’re brand new you’ll want to find several successful sites that have been in the space you want to enter for a relatively short period (say two years or less) – not the ones that have been at the top of Google forever. Ann Smarty recently wrote an article for Search Engine Journal in which she advises looking at youthful competitors’ sites for several reasons.
- You’ll have an easier time figuring out their link building strategy, because there will be fewer back links to sift through.
- Successful new sites should have fewer “legacy” techniques; they got their good position using techniques that work now, not three or five or seven years ago.
- Since these sites are probably using new techniques, you may see a few you haven’t seen before, which should help further your SEO education (and quite probably your knowledge of the new space you’re entering).
This article will give you an overview of how to approach doing competitive research. There are a number of tools out there that can make the process easier; I will try to focus on what you can do for free, with minimal tool use, since many tools for competitive analysis will charge a fee.
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