Search Engine Optimization can be quite a head-scratching experience if you don’t know where to start. Typically I begin with competitive research when tasked with doing some SEO for a brand, but this isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. Some brands’ products are unusual, one-of-a-kind, or seemingly have no equal on the market, so it can be challenging to research what other brands are doing to appear at the top of search results.

What is SEO Competitive Research?

I am sure you have heard the colloquialism “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel” more times than you would like to, but in the field of SEO, you seriously shouldn’t. Your competitors have done much of the heavy lifting and perhaps even heavy spending to get where they are in search results. However, carefully examining their techniques may lead to some positive results if you emulate what they are doing. So why not research what they are doing and how they are doing it? That’s precisely what SEO competitive research is all about.

Identify Your Competitors

To start your research, you must make a list of companies competing with your brand for market share. Be sure to take down all of their pertinent information, such as their web address, who their audience is, how long the company has been active, etc. There is no right or wrong way to do this as long as the company is relevant to the products or services your brand is trying to peddle. The format is just as you want it to be. I usually make a spreadsheet that ultimately only has a few columns. Still, you may find it helpful to make notecards or even make the rudimentary beginnings of a deck/slideshow that you will clean up for a client later. This information will serve as a mini-profile for each company that you can look back on later and determine whether each company is a direct or indirect competitor.

Direct Vs. Indirect Competitors

This is a very crucial distinction to iron out at the very beginning of your SEO process. Getting this wrong can detrimentally affect the success of your SEO efforts, so pay attention and be analytical. A direct competitor sells similar products, market to a similar audience, and usually have the same price range. An indirect competitor sells different products but still in the same category; they may have differing price ranges and meet the exact need of the same customer. 

Here is an example: Your client is a CBD dog treat company who makes treats that calm a dog down in times of anxiety. A direct competitor would be any company that also makes CBD dog treats. An indirect competitor would be brands that make other calming devices for dogs, such as thunder jackets or calming beds. You could also say an indirect competitor would be companies that make different types of dog treats, such as dental or training treats. 

The main idea here is that when researching competitors, you should stick to researching your direct competition because, chances are, the indirect ones are doing things that are drastically different from you. They would likely never appear next to your brand’s results in a search engine.

For more on direct vs. indirect competition, here is an entire article from HubSpot.

Analyze Meta Data

Now that you’ve got your list of direct competitors, it’s time to analyze what they are doing. You can do this in several ways, and I like to do all of them to give myself a game plan before I do all of the tedious typing for my site.

The most basic way is to type in searches on Google that I would use to find my brand or product and see if my competitors show up. After the search is complete, you’ll notice that your exact words will appear in bold in each result’s meta descriptions. Use these results to your advantage, and hunt for keywords that your competitors implement that you can use when creating your metadata.

Another thing I like to do is look at what their meta titles and descriptions are on all or most of their pages. This can be accomplished using the Google dev tools to look at the page’s source code. If you’re not willing to sift through a bunch of code, maybe consider using a browser extension such as SEMRush to simplify the process. Reading all of this will give you a good understanding of how your competitors came to be at the top of results, and again you can emulate their language.

Finally, I like to see if a company uses structured data markup and how they implement it on their site, especially on product pages. This is a little more of an advanced topic because you will have to read some JSON-LD markup to see what is being done on a site, but you can use validator.schema.org to make reading a website’s data a lot easier. You’d be surprised at how little some big-name brands are not utilizing structured data markup to better explain their content to search engines, especially because you can literally make your products shoppable in Google image search for free!

Avoid Fundamental SEO Mistakes

One of my core SEO tenants is never trying to trick search engines. You will lose every time. Every once in a while, I meet a client who thinks that they are the very first person to think of that “one weird trick” that will supercharge their SEO and instantly bring them to the top of search results. Well, my friends, do not fall into this somewhat common pitfall while doing your own competitive research. You may be tempted to see other companies’ brand names and use them in your titles or meta descriptions.

I silently scream inside anytime this move is suggested to me by anyone. Simply put, if you are not selling that brand’s items, DO NOT put their name into your metadata. Millions of people are searching for specific brands all of the time on the internet. If they were to click on your site looking for that brand’s products and they find none of them, they will leave. This will contribute to a high bounce rate on your site, and search engines will notice this. In time your website will not appear in search results because it is not a useful page.

Always remember that search engine companies’ products are absolutely accurate search results. They wouldn’t use your website as a search result because it is essentially a lie. It would make their product unreliable and worthless in the long run.

Be True To Your Brand

Sorry for the dramatics, but with most things in life, it is better just to be yourself. When you are doing research for your brand, you are finding the best way to explain to a robot in words what a website is genuinely about. Computers can take you quite literally, so please tell them what your brand is about. Web crawlers reward the accurate with lots of traffic, so it behooves you to think carefully about your product and question the moves you are about to make.

Have something to contribute, have questions, or think I just plain got it wrong? Leave a comment down below, and I will be sure to respond if and when I can!