What's a good way to get started with competitive research?

[AndyKubrin]

Hi all,

SEO noob here. I'm doing an audit for a firm that makes specialized accounting software. It's a relatively new firm, with a barebones website.

My client has identified three direct business competitors. In addition, I see indirect competitors (such as product reviews) on the SERP for a relevant keyword phrase.

I want to provide actionable advice for my client. What information should I present? I'd like to help my client understand:

• Why my client's competitors are outperforming them on the SERPs
• What my client needs to do to overtake their competitors

What information should I present to my client?

Thanks, all.

[AndyKubrin]

Hi Chris,

In the end, I made recommendations to my client, based on their potential impact and ease of implementation. I recommended they add plugins to enhance security and speed up page loads. I recommended they set up a Google search console account and submit their sitemaps. I recommended they set up their analytics views to filter out visits from employees and others with a relationship to the business.

On the content side, I recommended they do keyword research and start building content optimized for variants of their main phrase. I also recommended some link building steps.

My client is new to SEO, but quite intelligent and a good listener. I think they'll do well.

Thanks for your advice.

Best,

AK

[Chris.Menke]

Andy,

The answer to your question has a lot to do with the specific keyword, or search term, you  used in your competitive search.  It is not uncommon for a client to misunderstand the difference between their off-line competitors and their online competitors. Online competitors can be specifically related to a target keyword.  For example, page-one search results (i.e your strongest online competitors) for " widgets" would be different than your competitors for the "wingdings" search term--even though they may be similar products or synomical terms.  That's to say, it's easy to identify the online competition for a search term--it's every site that shows up between where your (client's) site shows up and google's #1 spot.

The choice of keyword with which to compete online is more difficult but there are tools to make it a little easier. The tools may show you that "widgets" has 100K other sites optimized to compete for the top spot and that "wingdings" has only 50 websites optimized to compete for the top of that search result. In that case, it's easy to see how you might choose to tell your client to optimize their site for "wingdings"

There are two potential catches with that choice, though. One is that "optimization" is not a black or white thing. "Optimization" is what develops a site's capability to compete with other sites for specific keyword(s). Optimizations can be good or bad or more or less in their effort to create the perfect content formula that google's ranking algorithm will place at the top of the results, so the competition is quite like a moving target. The other catch is the issue of how many people actually use that term when they go to google and search for your client's product. It can be very possible that the reason so few sites are optimized for "wingdings" is because most people, in fact, use the search  term "widgets." Why optimize for a term that few people search for?

So, to get back to your questions. It's kind of hard to say otherwise than it takes a knowledgeable SEO to help an uninitiated client understand how keywords and competition work online as well as to propose options the client can take to overtake their competitors for said keywords. Finally, I would say, it's very hard to sell an SEO project to someone who doesn't understand what it is. At the very least, they have to understand keywords, they have to understand search engine competitors, they have to understand the value of SEO, and they have to understand that they are probably going to have to make a good-sized investment in their website to affect the changes that will move the needle against their competitors.