How do I find my client's real competition?

[amit2076]

A recently acquired client keeps insisting that his major competitors are online fashion magazines, fashion news sites and insider bloggers but the site he owns is basically a fashion encyclopedia. It contains facts and catalogues and even a dictionary of fashion concepts. According to me, these latter are his benchmarks and not his competition

His major competitors, according to me. are people competing on the first SERP pages for terms like "fashion history", "fashion icons", "fashion biographies", etc.

Am I right? How do I convince him that these are his real competition.

This is really going to determine the direction of my keyword research.

[amit2076]

hmm these are good ideas. Thanks ben.

[Francisco_Meza]

Slap him upside his head and say, "Whatcha talkin' bout Willis?".

If that doesn't work, go with symbols' response.

[BenFox]

Get screen shots of 3 fashion sites and place them on a single image next to a screenshot of his site.

Get users/mechanical turk to pick the odd one out. If you can find 200 people who believe his site doesn't fit then maybe he'll listen.

It might be possible to create word clouds from the title tags of his competitors and seeing how similar they are to a word cloud of his title tags (you'll want to remove brand names). This visual clue might help.

Alternatively you could use a more scientific method and look at the composition of his title tags and calculate a similarity between his titles and those of his "competitors". If he's got 30% similarity to vogue and 80% similarity to examplefashionsite.com then you've got a pretty strong argument.

Have you tried seeing who ranks around him for his top 50 traffic generating search terms?

[amit2076]

Thanks sym. That's good advice.

So the right way to find the competition would be simply to target the top 10 domain results for each of his major keywords? Is that correct? Is that how I should go about finding the competition?

[symbolphoto]

Well i think you need to help them understand the difference between the traditional realm of local people competing with them and possibly their storefront and with the new online search realm of people finding them via searches.

If they are a traditional business where people find them via their physical storefront and through other traditional means, then that will prove more valuable to them.

However, i'm assuming they hired you because business is down. If that's the case, you just need to make the case for using non-traditional methods including online search which will boost their sales. In which case, you really need to define what their keywords are before you find their search competition.

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