Monitoring competitors in the Google ranking ring

Google competitor analysis plays an important role in digital marketing. But few people explain exactly how this helps business and what is the value of such information.

Find out the demand for the product 

Let's imagine that you make cool dog food. To understand whether there is any interest in this product at all and whether it is possible to make good money on it, let’s look at the analytics. Simply counting how many dog lovers there are in your city will not be enough, because not everyone is interested in organic food. Some people prefer to prepare food for their dogs themselves, while others have pets on a special diet.

To assess the audience of a product, special search analytics tools will help - for example, SEMrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking. 

An analysis of how much and how people search for “premium dog food.” This query was entered into Google 1,600 times in a month. To this we add other formulations - “natural”, “organic”, “holistic food” - and requests indicating breed and age. Different variations of queries are indicated in the “Similar Keywords” column. We are adding search results that you can view by city. Source: netology

When confirming demand for a product, you should find out who is creating the offer.

We identify competitors

To identify your online competitors, you need to search them properly on Google. By “correctly” we mean the fact that when working with search engines, you need to take into account a number of nuances so as not to waste time searching for information about competitors who are not competitors.

Not all sites in search results for a query are business competitors

Even for a commercial request, the search results may contain non-commercial results - data from Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, other directory sites, as well as articles in the media.

Google search results are sensitive to user location

If you have a local business, it is worth considering that the list of direct competitors in the search results will depend on the location of the person making the request. For example, if you search for “best barbershop” while in Dnipro, you will get a list of salons specifically for this area.

For a local business, it is better to pay attention to local competitors.

We recommend running a search on Google Maps - it will be more accurate. To do this, you need to enter a basic commercial query into the search engine, indicating the city and region - the results will display a map with a list of competitors.

To get a horizontal slice of the market - information on all competitors, in the competitor analysis tool you just need to enter the domain of one of them - we will get a list of those who are fighting for the same audience with the same product. Just as with search results, you need to pay attention only to direct business competitors, manually excluding directories, media, social networks and other inappropriate pages. Next, we select 5–10 close competitors.

Using the SEO analytics tools discussed above, you can find out the number of keywords for which the site is promoted, total traffic and the most popular pages.

Let's take a closer look at what can be gleaned from information about competitors.

What already works for the same business

To understand how your target market works, you need to understand what works best for your competitors: analyze what products or services they focus on and where they attract the most traffic.

Let's say you want to open a hair salon for children. You know, plus or minus, which salons cut children's hair in your area. People come to the coolest of them from other parts of the city - the digital promotion strategy brings real clients to them. You can lure them to you by convincing them that you are better. But first you need to understand how competitors do it. And SEO analytics will help with this - in particular, keyword analysis.

What does it give:

• understanding the range of services that such a business can provide: in our case, this is not only haircuts for children, but also ear piercing - “Imaginary” ranks well for all variations of the request “to pierce a child’s ears”;
• insights based on audience requests: for example, that haircuts for kids, braids, princess hairstyles, the 75 system for ear piercing are popular, and also obligatory cartoons during haircuts.

All this is a Klondike of ideas that are already working.

SEO analysis of competitors brings discoveries that relate not only and not so much to the site, but to the experience of interacting with the brand as a whole.

Which competitor pages attract more traffic?

In addition to keywords, we can find out which pages of our competitors are the most popular.

This way we’ll find out what kind of pain our competitors have felt among their clients and why competing companies have created pages that attract maximum traffic.

In addition, the ranking of the most popular pages will help you choose topics for content that will be useful and interesting to users. 

Who's talking about competitors?

It is worth studying the strategy of external promotion of competitors: PR, link building, promotion in social networks. Setting up notifications via software will help you systematically monitor external manifestations. competitors' brands.

This will allow you to find out:

• what media, blogs, forums and social networks competitors use for promotion - most likely your target audience lives there too;
• the dynamics of mentions - how often they are talked about, how much effort is put into it - you will need to strive for approximately the same indicators;
• a list of sites, media and blogs that are friendly to mentioning brands in your niche - this will be useful not only for developing PR relationships, but will also help in selecting sites for link building.

Special tools will help you track mentions of your brand, competitors, and any conversations about your business. Most often they are paid and operate on a subscription basis. For example, Brand24 and Awario track mentions on Twitter, YouTube, articles, podcasts, forums and blogs like Reddit.

In this case, you need to carefully select sites. They should be close to your topic and attract the target audience. For example, in a thread about choosing machine oil, a comment about dog food will look like spam. It is worth writing each comment manually, taking into account the request that is discussed in the article or on the forum. Such comments will attract users and not clutter the page.

What's the result?

A well-conducted SEO analysis of competitors will answer important questions:

• is there a demand for the product;
• who competes with the product being promoted and their scale: how large the sites are, what queries they are promoted for, what traffic they attract from search;
• what competitors focus on when promoting, what services, products and topics they offer and which of them are the most popular;
• How well-known are the competitors, who writes about them, what sites they cooperate with.

Such an analysis will help beginners navigate the market, and experienced players will find areas of growth. The main thing is to choose the right tool and look for information for a specific task, and not just “data for the sake of data.” Then competitors will turn from an obstacle into a godsend.