Identify Your Top Five Competitors

Today you're going to choose which competitors to review in depth. To keep this week's tasks manageable, we recommend that you limit the number of top competitors you examine to five. This allows you to choose at least one from each of the three categories in the list that follows, and it leaves you with enough bandwidth to really dig in and dissect their strategies. If one of your biggest competitors doesn't have a website, then give them an honorary mention on your list. But for the purposes of this week, we want you to choose five competitors with at least some web presence. Your review will be the most meaningful if you select your “Big Five” from the following categories:

Business Competition Even if you know who the major players in your field are, you should check with your sales and executive team members to get the backstory that you may not be aware of. For example, there may be different competitors for different products or target audiences. There may be a “new kid on the block” who's poised to enter a space that you're currently dominating. Or your company may have just lost a big job to someone in particular. Ask your colleagues to prioritize their competitors based on current issues, goals, and grudges.

Search Competition With last week's rank check fresh in your mind, you should have an excellent grasp of who's who in the top spots. Who did you see in the top ranks frequently enough to make you take notice? Whose listings were not only visible, but also well written? Whether these companies hold a candle to your organization in real life isn't relevant here. Even if they're just a blip on your business radar, if they're attracting the eyeballs that you want, you need to find out how they're doing it. Paid Search Competition Even though sponsored ads and organic listings are different animals, they are displayed in direct competition to each other in the search engine results. So if there is a company out there who is showing up in the sponsored links for your targeted keywords, you may want to add it to your Big Five.

Search Results Competition

The Left Brain and Right Brain have different ideas about monitoring who is taking those coveted top spots in the search results. The Right Brain says, “This is one of those SEO tasks that you can let flow over you. Search for your target keywords, browse the results, and you are likely to see some patterns emerging.Maybe there is a certain site that never shows at number one but has lots of results on the second and third pages of the search results. Maybe another site is consistently in the top five for several of your top terms.

You would be right to include these among your Big Five search competition.” The Left Brain says, “When I used to grade papers in graduate school, I sometimes noticed my standards getting stricter and stricter as the hours passed. Pity those kids with tests at the bottom of the pile! The same thing can happen when you use a ‘hunch' approach to choosing your competition: After an hour of reviewing search results, your opinions are likely to creep.That's why I think you should choose a simple numerical evaluation method:Your potential competitor gets a point for every time their site shows up in the top 30 for your keywords and five points for every time in the top 10. Check your searches, add up the points, and there you have it:Your search competition rises to the top.”

As you're going through your search and PPC competition, be on the lookout for “left field” competition. These are listings that are displayed for the same keywords that you're targeting but have no connection to your organization's focus. For example, the directors of the Green Acres Day Camp in Toronto are going head-to-head with trivia sites about the old Green Acres TV show. Whether you choose to review one of these sites is up to you. But if you're finding a lot more “left field” competitors than you expect, you may need to rethink your keyword choices.