Though often people and organizations are excited to do key word mapping, optimizing content and link building, it is important to not forget one very important aspect of building your SEO strategy, competitor research.
List of Tools To Check Your Competitor’s Website Traffic:
- www.semrush.com
- www.alexa.com
- majestic.com
- https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home
Competitor research can help you develop your own SEO strategy, reveal gaps that you can utilize to show up in more search results and offer you some insight as to how to get higher up in the results of searches. This kind of competitor research can help you to save both time and money because you can capitalize on what they are already doing right and find the areas in online marketing they have been blind to that might in the long run drive far more traffic to your site and your business.
In doing your competitor research, if you have a brick and mortar, remember you have more than one competitor; the competitor down the street and the one on-line which could be in another town or state, or in some cases on another country. One you know who your competitors are you can reverse engineer their search terms and gain some competitive intelligence that will allow you to improve on the strategies your competitors are already using. In addition to looking at the competitors who are doing well, don’t be afraid to look at who is showing up on the second and third page of search results to check out who is doing poorly. By analyzing your competitors that aren’t doing so well in the search engine rankings you can avoid some of the pitfalls that are plaguing them and save time and money because you already know what won’t work.
The truth is that with 45% of businesses not even knowing what SEO is, you might find that those who are showing up on the second and third pages of search results have no idea they are even competing on the world wide web, which gives you an immediate advantage. For those competitors who are using SEO remember you don’t just want to make sure you are using the keywords they are, you want to look for the keywords they aren’t using. Often these are phrases someone would put into a search engine if they are looking to solve a problem and don’t know what kind of solution they are looking for. For example if you sell a water filtration system you clients might be looking for thinks like how to detect lead in water. You want to make sure you focus on the kinds of questions that could eventually lead a customer to find you.
In both the short term and long term doing research on your competitors SEO strategy will pay off. Don’t forget to keep checking back on your competitors because their SEO strategy will evolve just as yours will and neglecting to make competitor research part of your longtime strategy could end up allowing you to get bumped down in the rankings you worked hard to get.