Reviewing your competition

In local SEO one of the main steps is reviewing your competition to understand the weaknesses of your competitors and building your overall strategy.  There’s a lot we can do to understand our competition. I’m going to focus on the basics for now. And this is just to give you a foundation for which you can expand on, later. Once you’ve identified the keywords you are looking to rank for, you can use those to discover your competition. What we are looking for is an understanding of how successful that competition is, on that keyword that you want to rank for. We want to figure out what their strategy is. Any areas of weakness that they have, that we can improve on our own website. Since our most popular search term, according to our research, is “Cupcakes Las Vegas,” let’s go ahead and type that into Google.

And right away, we’re going to get an immediate overview of the competitors in our space. If your result returns a Google carousel like mine did here, you can make note of some important things. First, we can see how many reviews our competitors have. In this case, they have a fair amount, 19 and 25 reviews. That indicates to me that as we approach our strategy, reviews are going to be very important. If your search turns up very little reviews, then that’s not going to be a primary focus of your SEO strategy.

Next, we can take a look at the category our competitors have put themselves in. Use this opportunity to see if you notice a trend. Here, I notice more bakeries than I do dessert shops. But one of the competitors is showing up number one. And it may not be related to their category. What you’re really looking for is to see if you think that this category is relevant or irrelevant. If it’s irrelevant, you have a competitive advantage.

If it’s relevant, then you can use that to make sure you are also in a category that’s relevant. The next thing I’ll do is look at the results below.  Next, I notice that in positions two and three Yelp is prominently displayed.

It indicates to me that Yelp has a very strong presence when looking at “Cupcakes LasVegas.” So, therefore, Yelp is going to be an important piece of our strategy.  So I need to take a closer look at my competitor as they’re potentially a competitor in the space as well. As I scroll down, you’ll notice that the next two results are direct links to their site. And here’s what I notice that’s particularly interesting. The title of two of my competitors contains the term “Las Vegas.” And so does the description.

And you can see that because it’s bolded. And even further, we can look at the URL. In this case, Sprinkles is using the term ” Las Vegas ” in their URL because they’re specifying a location. Take note of this information because it’s going to become important as you create your own title and description strategies. The next thing I’ll do is scroll up and drill into the actual business that I find competitive. Here I’ll click on another website. What I’m doing now is taking a look at search results specific to this site. I can look at their website. I can see what search terms are popular.

In this case, they bring back their menu. They have a local listing for Burbank, which is a city. I can find their Yelp reviews, and continue looking for other pertinent information that might help me understand the landscape and how they’ve approached local SEO. There are some great tools that you can use to your advantage when doing competitive research. And I’m not going to get into all of them. But one that I will focus on is Open Site Explorer, yet another Moz tool.I’ll go to “opensiteexplorer.com” And you’re presented with this opportunity to add a URL which I will cover in the next article.