Know Your Competitors: 4 Simple Steps for Understanding Your Competitive Landscape

These are your competitors — even if they don’t offer the same services, target different business sizes, are in a different city or you simply know them and don’t consider them a threat. Why? Because, when people search for your services, these are the businesses you will be seen next to.

As potential clients scan the SERP pages, they will be making conscious and unconscious decisions about each listing, whether it matches their search intent and whether they want to click and learn more. Having clear messaging that establishes your value and difference alongside these competitors needs to be an important part of your marketing strategy.

If your business is not page one in your local service area for your primary service offerings, you need to invest in SEO as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Then there is the situation where NONE of the SERP listings have anything to do with your business. Many times, terms in one industry can mean something completely different in another, or have an unrelated pop-culture meaning. If this is happening, you are probably focusing on the wrong keyword(s) for your business.

Step 2: Find Your Keyword Competitors

Searching your primary term or two will tell you about your most direct competitors or those who use the same terminology for their products or services as you do. But what about the outlier, the disruptors, bigger companies that offer your service set and more, smaller companies that provide a specialty niche service? Looking at a larger keyword list can help you identify these competitors. For this you will need a tool, but don’t worry, there are some good free ones to get you started.

1. SpyFu
2. Moz
3. SEM Rush

The full versions of these tools can be costly, but each has free offerings to compare domains, find keyword gaps and more. The free versions show you a fraction of the total data  available and have a limited number of reports per day. But even with those limitations, the results can be helpful.

You could also find a marketing partner to help with the analysis. At BigOrange Marketing, we use a variety of these and other paid tools to help clients understand their competitive landscape.

Step 3: Map It Out

Similar to step 1, now you are going to search in Google Maps. We like to create  a map of our own, using My Maps. Add your business and all your competitors from any source. If you have multiple service areas, you can even create layers to easily toggle these to show or hide. Create a separate layer for your locations. You can color code competitors as well if desired. Here’s a simple one we did for a Dallas Fort Worth area business.