Who is your competitor when it comes to SEO?
Not who you think it is.
If I’d be right next to you, right now, asking you who your SEO competitor is… who would you say it is?
I’m asking, because many times your SEO Competitor will be: Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
It will NOT be the usual business competitor that you think about.
In business, your competitors are the ones your clients say. The other businesses that your clients have heard about or are currently also considering.
But that’s not the case in SEO.
So, when you’re doing a competitor report, you shouldn’t instantly jump to the conclusion that you can easily select your competitor.
Who is it? – reminds me of that Michael Jackson song.
In the world of search engines, your competitor is who Google says your competitor is.
It’s the list of pages (pages, not entire websites) which are currently ranking TOP 10… for the current keyword you’re thinking about.
The competitive clarity index in Squirrly SEO takes this into account, and measures your results against the actual SEO competitors.
Other tools (most other SEO tools, including SEMrush) measure keyword difficulty against how much money your competitors spend on Google Ads.
Which has little to do with SEO, and instead of providing you with SEO data, they provide Ads competitor data.
The ones you think of as “competitors” will change from case to case.
But when it comes to SEO, here’s how you can pin them down (we teach our clients about this first time they start RankJumps agency services, because they give our team the business competitors when we ask):
- Use the method of searching for a keyword’s position on Google that I show here. (number 3 in the list) Not following those guidelines, will give you distorted results.
- Read the SERP (search engine results page) and look at the first 10 pages currently ranking for your keyword.
If you want to go deeper into researching your SEO competitors, you should try and identify those who seem to be really good at SEO.
You can look at things like: what SEO Live Assistant score do they have on their content? How many social signals? How is the URL structured? Is it short, or is it long? Do they use keywords in the URL? Do they use some special website architecture?
If you search for many of your targeted keywords, and the same website shows on all of them, you can look more in-depth to find out more about the optimizations they do.
This can provide you with lots of great ideas for your own SEO.
Wait… how many SEO competitors are there?
As a rule of thumb: as many as the keywords you target with your SEO strategy.
Of course, if your briefcase contains many very similar keywords, things will get repeated.
But for different keywords, it’s best to start using a VPN method like the one I mentioned to see who the competitors are for each keyword.
HSEO: SEO that you can do from home:
