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Jacob Morgan on Social Media, Technology, Marketing, and Life

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Who are You Competing Against Online?

Started by jacobmorgan · 3 months ago

In the online market space, it is important to know what your competitive landscape looks like. This is especially crucial for SEO. If you are going to target particular phrases and keywords that you want your site to show up for, you need to know who is already showing up for them and how good ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • John Rasco

    7 months ago

    Very helpful post, Jacob. Once you identify the main competitors, do a followup search on site:(competitorurl) and you'll see how many pages are on that site. That gives you the second factor you need to be aware of to figure out how to compete effectively.
    reply
  • Jacob Morgan

    7 months ago

    Thanks for the comment John. That is exactly correct. Most people get overwhelmed when they see there are 3 million sites showing up for a particular phrase. However once you dig down to find out how many "real" competitors you have, you realize that the competitive landscape is much smaller. Still tough, but definitely easier than going against 3 million.
    reply
  • Lorna Li

    7 months ago

    Hey Jacob,

    I find questionable benefits using these Google operators. Using intitle: the number of search listings indeed does drop, many of the listings are not relevant at all. For example, if I query intitle: "rainforest" I get all kinds of crap such as a listing for Car Rental in Budapest (Car Rental Budapest - Car Hire Hungary and Cheap Car Rental from budapestcarhire.hu).

    This Google operator is better (courtesy of Kingsley Joseph)
    allintitle: "rainforest" actually pulls up a relevant listing of rainforest related sites. Page one results are nearly identical to the results delivered with a simple query "rainforest", though total number of listings is 422,000, which seems much easier to tackle competitively than 14M listings.

    This is a good example of the weight Google accords keywords in Title tags. However, depending on where you place in the SERPs, this method of determining your competitive landscape may or may not impact your strategy.

    Cheers,

    Lorna
    Green Marketing 2.0
    reply
  • Jacob Morgan

    7 months ago

    Hi Lorna,

    That is absolutely correct, the allintitle: operator is another great way to narrow down the competition and is actually the operator that Dan Thies prefers to use as well:
    http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?sho...

    Thanks for the comment :)
    reply
  • RB

    7 months ago

    I'm pleased to know that I rank well for key words that my competitors are using. However, here's where I am at a stalemate... My blog is an industry-wide blog (I can work in NV just as well as I can in CA). But I'm from CA, Los Angeles to be exact. Should I narrow my key words to my region? Am I hurting myself by not doing so? What do you think? I'd like some feedback here.
    reply
  • Jacob Morgan

    7 months ago

    RB,

    That depends on what locale you are trying to target. If you are trying to target a specific region such as Los Angeles, then I would recommend including something like "Los Angeles Real Estate," as opposed to just real estate.
    reply

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