How to Spy Your Competition
We have learned how and where to collect your niche idea. If you haven’t read it you can read from this post, How to Find Profitable Niche for Your Website. After collecting your niche idea, do your keyword research, read about it on this post in case you haven’t read it, Keyword Research for Building a Profitable Website.
Now, you have had some niches ideas along with several keywords related to those niches. At this phase, I suggest you to create a kind of niches and keywords list, Ms.Excel will be handy for this purpose. You will need the keywords list to create your website contents, create your articles around those keywords. However, before you start writing the contents, there is one step left, research your competition.
It is very important for us to do competition research since we want to target keywords that are not only profitable and have enough demands, but at the same time it should be “rank-able”. It means we have to be sure that we can get our web site ranked high on search engines for our targeted keywords. And to be able to do it we should analyze our competitors before we decide to target certain keywords.
It is almost impossible for you, especially if you are new and a single fighter webmaster type, to be able to get ranked high on search engine for super competitive keywords like loan, debt, or credit card. You will fight with the big players who have a lot more experiences, skills, tools, and even a team or two to make their website rank for those kind of keywords.
That is why we need to target low competition keywords so we don’t have to fight head to head with those big dogs. Let’s get started.
First, you will need few tools to do this competition research. Don’t worry those tools are free. You need firefox browser and Seoquake plugins. You can download seoquake plugins from this address: http://ff.seoquake.com/. This plugin will give you certain data you will need to spy your competition.
Now go to www.google.com and search for your targeted keywords you have collected before. Use this query: “your keyword”. I know there are many debates whether you should use quote or not around your keywords. However I prefer use quote in this case since it will eliminate ‘non targeting page’ from the results. However I also use non-quote query for comparison purpose.
We will also use other queries to get better data on the keywords, they are inachor:”keywords” and intitle:”keywords” queries. You will need to create a column on your excel keyword list you made before, add those four columns. You’ll need it to store your queries results.
I will use Insomnia Cure for this case study. Please note that the numbers below will change day by day and also depends on your location (data center). If you are in Australia then you will more likely get different figures then people in the US.
At the time I write this post, here is the result I get for keyword (no quote) queries:
Put the result number 4,650,000 on your keyword (without quote) column.
Now, change the query to “keywords” (with quote). Here is the current result: 68,300. Put the number on your “keyword” column. Next, change the query to inanchor:”keyword”, and the current result is 57,300. Put that number on the appropriate column. Then change the query to intitle:”keyword”, and the current result is 28,400. Put that number on your column.
Do those steps above on all of your keywords on your list. I know it’s time consuming, but you have to do these steps if you want to get better results.
In general, the higher the result numbers usually the harder it is to rank for that keyword. Not always the case, depends on the keyword and the competition too, but it will give you a basic comparison that will be helpful for your research.
Now, let’s start analyze the competition. This is the time where SeoQuake will be really helpful. Look at the data below each result. I cut the image for convenient purpose but you will see similar image if you install seoquake toolbar.
The first factor you need to pay attention is their Page Rank (PR), from the image above we can see the PR is 5 . I know some people say that pagerank is useless, not important, and similar. However, it is still give us some rough data about their link popularity since page rank is based on the inbound links. Higher PR means the website/page get more links (quantity and quality applied).
If you see the websites result on Google page 1 are mostly have high PR, more then PR4, then you know that you will have a hard time to beat them. It is not impossible, you just need more works and times, and for some people money as well, to be able to beat them. If the PR of the most websites found on Google page 1 are low, less then PR3, then it will be easier for you to get your website rank on the page 1 google result.
Once again, this is not always be the case, since actually there are a lot of factors used by Google to rank a website on their result page. However, it is still helpful to make a rough estimation about your competition.
The next think you need to look at is their indexed pages. The more pages indexed usually means more authoritative they are. Again, it is just to give us rough estimation, not always be the case.
Next, look at their link popularity. The more links they have usually the harder it is to beat them. I will take more steps on this level. I will also look at the pages/sites that link to your competition.
If you click the Link button on the SeoQuake bar it will open a new window to yahoo search that will give you a list of the pages and sites that give links to that site. In this case I will analyze their pagerank and the topic related factor. If most of the links come from related topic websites, it will be harder to beat. The higher the pagerank of those links, the harder it is to beat.
I will cover link building topic in the future, however, for now, all I can say is, you need to beat your competitors inbound links, in the quality and quantity perspective. Get more inbound links from related pages, get higher pagerank links, and so on.
Now, look at their domain age. Google uses this age factor on their algorithm. The older a domain the harder it is to be beaten on the competition. Click the whois link on your seoquake toolbar for this purpose you can see how old your competitors sites are.
Then you need to look whether it is a single page or a homepage. If it is a homepage, most of the time, it will be a lot harder to compete then if it is a single page since homepages tend to attract and have more links. If it is a homepage, it is also an indication that the website owner dedicated his effort around that keyword. Means, harder to compete.
Next, see their content. In simple words, you need to beat their content, in quality and quantity. Write more and better and longer contents and you’ll be on your way to beat them.
I suggest you to include those factors on your keywords table to give you a complete data about your competition. Yes, it is a hard work, I know.
Now, with the data you have created you can see the rough estimation about your competition on each keyword. I suggest you to try choosing lower competition keywords first, try to get your website rank higher on those low competition keywords before you start to think about higher competing keywords.