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How to Find Your Competitors Online and Beat Them in Search Results

by | May 16, 2017 | blog | 0 comments

Who are your competitors in organic search results? Ever wonder if there is a way to use more data or information besides what’s in your head to find your competitors? With so many online tools at our disposal, the simple answer is yes, and I’ll show you how to find your competitors and how to outrank them in search results.

First of all, competitors are often very different players when it comes to online vs. offline. For example, when you think of your competitors for let’s say TOMS Shoes as an example, you may think of other similar shoes or other companies with strong give-back programs. A competitor that comes to mind immediately is BOBS Shoes (a TOMS knockoff).

TOMS vs. BOBS pictured below:

But, when I search for TOMS shoes in Google, here are the results I get:

While TOMS is probably very happy to see Zappos, Amazon, Nordstrom, and even shopping results appear- ultimately they are competing with those sites and stores when it comes to online sales, and not necessarily BOBS.

How to Find Your Competitors Online

Now this was a brand search term example to make things simpler, but what about non-brand phrases?

  1. Determine your target keywords if you haven’t already. I like to create shortlist 10-20 terms that range from tough to rank for to attainable to rank for.
  2. Search for each phrase and look through the results, as you do this, take note of websites you see appearing for several of your search phrases.
  3. Take the list of sites that appeared in search results and spend time looking through their offering to see if it’s actually competitive with your site- if not, you may need to refine your search terms further to be more relevant.
  4. I like to use Moz Toolbar, a free Chrome plugin, that lets me easily see the Domain Authority of each page in search results. Domain Authority is a score that indicates how credible/powerful a domain, or website, is in search results that influences how that competitor will rank.
  5. Once I can see the Domain Authority, I like to compare that to my site to determine which sites I may be able to displace in search results.

Some tools to make this process easier, some that I like to use in combination with the old-school search and analyze method are SpyFu and SEMRush.

How to Outrank your Competitors in Search Results

Now that you have your list of competitors, it’s time to analyze what they are doing right to figure out why they are ranking higher than you. I like to think of this process in three large buckets:

  1. Experience: Take a look around- how’s the quality, the experience, the site load time? Is it easy to use and navigate? Easy to purchase and convert?
  2. Content: I start my content analysis by going to Google and typing in a site colon search with a competitor’s URL, for example: site:example.com. This shows you how many pages and what types of content Google has in it’s index for my competitors. If there are thousands of pages on a competing website, but I only have ten on mine I know that I’ve probably got a long road ahead to beat that site, because they likely have quality content since they are ranking well. I look through the content my competitors have to figure out where they may have coverage that I don’t, where they don’t have coverage that I can fill a gap for, and the overall quality and style of their content. Bottom line, they are doing something right and I’m trying to figure out what that is and how I can do it better… after all, if my site deserves top rankings I should be doing something better than who is already there.
  3. External Popularity: Are people and websites talking about this competitor more than you? Using tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Buzzsumo, I can determine where competitors have quality backlinks (aka who is talking about them/linking back to their website). Finding quality websites that want to link to you is definitely tough, but if a competitor has already found some that you are relevant for, why not reach out and make a new connection?

Now that we’ve covered the basics in not only finding your online competitors, but also starting to think about how you can outrank them:

  • Who are your competitors?
  • What are they doing better than you?
  • And how can you beat them?

I’ll go more in depth on the “how” part in another blog post, but for now you probably have a solid day of analysis ahead of you.

Monika Choudhary

Web Developer

Monika is competent professional with 10+ Years of Experience in the Website Design and Development. She is having a great expertise in developing responsive e-commerce, real estate, social networking, jobs portals, classified, corporate based websites & her expertise includes WordPress, Woocommerce, Magento, Shopify, Codeigniter, CakePHP, Laravel. She is detail oriented, driven worker who enjoys fixing code and creating something beautiful websites from scratch. Quality Work & On time delivery is always her aim. Always trying to achieve client satisfaction level, she will not only work with you to develop an amazing website with high coding standards, she will also ensure it engages with your potentials to drive more conversions and leads.

"What does karma mean to you?"

"To me, Karma is the result of a person's actions and I believe that what happens to a person, happens because they caused it with their actions. Doing things with a good intention is what matters to me the most and that is what I always remember when working for my clients. I have realized that in this industry where there is a lot of competition around, I am working for my clients with a good heart and a positive vibe. That's what keeps me going."

"Who is your dream client and why?

"My dream client would be a company or an organization who passionately wants to build a strong online presence in the digital world. The one that’s easy to work with and that inspires you and makes work not feel like work is the dream client for me. I would love to guide them from the initial stage to build up their recognition through clean and advanced coding on the web."

Leighton Hendrick

Digital Marketing

+20 years of marketing, public relations, communications, advertising and internal and outside sales experience.

Extensive experience in developing and managing all levels of product and offering campaigns including marketing collateral, Web site content, SEO, paid media and social, inside sales call campaigns, sell sheets and management of campaign success metrics.

Demonstrated success in launching new products and corporate brands, developing demand generation programs, and creating internal and external communication pieces.

Exceptional collaborator with the ability to build relationships with trade media and manage large-scale corporate initiatives and events.

Proven ability to create and manage lead generation and call campaigns that result in the successful conversion of new and unique clients. Creator and Editor-In-Chief of IT Compliance Magazine, a quarterly publication with over 2,500 international C-Level readers.

Cassie Boca

Founder, CEO

Cassie taught herself SEO in 2006 when she was working at a small business that needed to increase visibility but didn’t have any budget. She understands the financial challenges startups and small business have in that they have to wear every hat and prioritize what they work on based on what will have the largest impact to the business. There are never enough hours in the day, but consistently Cassie found her time spent increasing rankings in organic search, ensuring locations and contact info was accurate online, building positive reviews, and spreading positive news about the companies she worked at.

In the last 10+ years, Cassie has seen it all, but always comes back to her passion for helping inspirational companies grow. As a consumer, she tries to limit her purchases to companies she believes in (ok, she still goes to Target… she’s a human) because as consumers we have the ability to help companies succeed. If we all purchased from companies that aligned with our personal beliefs, not only would companies step up but we’d see a shift in the brands that we interact with daily. She calls this being a “conscious consumer”… sometimes we think she made that phrase up, but the more time we spend with her the more we find ourselves buying only from companies we know the founders or love their mission.

Enough business talk, Cassie is passionate about connecting with like-minded people, traveling and is a pretty badass skier. She loves to chase winter seeking powder fields, and on a powder day you may even get a FaceTime call from a chairlift or the backcountry.

What does karma mean to you?

To me, karma is the intention behind our actions. Good karma, to me, means doing things with good intent, a pure heart, and positive energy. When starting a company, it was critical that I start it with good karma. In writing our mission statement you’ll see that our mission has the intent of helping consumers find companies they are proud to wear their logo or recommend to a friend…what I call being a conscious consumer. When I realized my intent behind starting this company was coming from a place of wanting to increase visibility of companies putting good into this world, I knew we had to include karma in the name.

Who is your dream client and why?

My dream client isn’t a company any of us have heard of. I’d love to hear from a young startup doing something inspirational, I mean, my passion is for increasing visibility so it’s not much of a challenge if a company comes to me and they are already hugely successful.

If I had to pick a company that already exists, it would be Charity Water. Their mission and vision inspire me so much, I had all of my wedding guests make a donation there instead of buying us gifts. But again, Charity Water has great visibility already so I’d love to find a company that isn’t there yet where I feel we can change the trajectory of their company through the work we do.