Neat Competitor Research Tip

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Hello , welcome to SEO's Not Hard . It's me , ed Dawson , hosting , as usual , and today I've got a quite what I think quite neat competitor research tip for you . Now , first up , this wasn't my idea .

This is not my tip . I'm not taking credit for this . It was actually created . Well , I came across it by a guy called freddie chatt , um , who is um . He was the guy he created the summer of seo that keywords people use was one of the sponsors of the summer of seo , a series of e-commerce related tips , um , that were put out over this last summer .

Um , and I think several thousand people went through that kind of free course . Um , and freddie's a great guy and if you're not following him , I do say go find him on twitter . Find him on linkedin . He's very he puts a lot of stuff on linkedin .

So I came across this tip of his on linkedin and I thought it was so good that it was worth a share , basically , um . So this , this is this is a tip to basically how to improve your traffic when you're doing competitor research . So it's quite normal . Most people do it . I do it as well when I'm trying to look at creating new content .

I will look at this sort of the search term I'm going to target and you , you look at what um competitors are ranking there . Now most people will tend to look at the top one , two , three results , um , and see how those sites are ranking and what they've done and what content they out there that they've got , and see them as the ones to beat .

Now the issue is a lot of the time , those sites that are ranking top like that , will be very high authority sites . So if you're using ahrefs domain authority as a rank , as a way of ranking sites in terms of their authority and we're talking really here about backlink authority then those sites are probably ranking because of that backlink authority .

Now , if you are new or nowhere near as big as those sites you're competing against , you're not going to have that backlink authority .

So what Freddie suggests is that you actually go through the top 10 results , look for the da of the domain authority of all of those sites and concentrate on looking at those with the lowest da , the ones with the lowest authority , because those sites are ranking not because of their authority but despite their lack of authority .

So there's something those sites are doing content-wise that is allowing them to compete with these kind of big behemoth sort of huge authority sites .

They're still getting in the mix with them despite not having that authority , which suggests there's something about their site structure or their internal linking or their content itself that is giving them a boost and getting them up amongst those big behemoths . And you know this is similar , I mean , with broadband code . We were a great site .

Yeah , okay , we weren't a minnow , but we were competing with multinational companies . Like you know , our competition were uSwitch and Money Supermarket . I mean , money Supermarket in the UK is huge . It's listed on the London Stock Exchange . It's worth about a billion pounds . It's you know it's . Its stock is huge . It employs thousands of people .

They were one of our main competitors and we competed with them and other sites as big as that on a regular basis . And okay , we might not have had as much traffic as them across all the niches and all the things , and probably they even had more broadband traffic than us , I've no doubt .

But we were a much smaller company , just a handful of people , and we competed against them . We were one of those minnows . So it is possible to compete against high domain authority sites with good content , not just content . Obviously the links will be part of this as well , but you know it's not all about links .

So here what freddy's is saying is look for those opportunities where sites with lower domain authority are ranking in the top 10 against those sites with big domain authority . And this can also be interesting to do , even if it's not the exact keywords you're going after .

If you're just doing general research , if you're ever doing anything , and you notice a small site ranking against big sites for a term , have a look at that small site , have a look at the page , have a look at , pair their content to the bigger competitors , see why maybe they are ranking .

It might give you clues as to how you can improve your own site as well . And then , as well as the content . Also , look at the backlinks especially . Look at the backlinks especially look at the backlinks to those individual pages .

So it might be that this high domain authority site although , yeah , it's , it might be ranking some of its content based on its overall domain authority .

The page that is ranking might not have a lot of external links of its own , whereas the site with a lower domain authority might have just a few extra or a few good backlinks pointing that particular piece of content that's help elevating , helping it to elevate .

That site with a big domain authority might have just a few extra or a few good backlinks pointing that particular piece of content that's helped elevating , helping it to elevate that site with a big domain authority . So , yeah , I just thought that was a really , really great tip that freddy's put out there . Um , do go find freddy on linkedin .

He's got a whole little article about about this theory of his . And yet always , yeah , just because a search term key phrase you're going after has huge sites ranking for it , do see if there are smaller sites ranking . It shows you where the actual benchmark you've got to get to to get onto page one is .

So , yeah , I hope you find that useful and I'll see you in the next episode .

Before I go , I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywordswords People Use , that you can book a free , no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have .

You can also ask me any SEO questions you have . You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up . Once again , that's keywords people use , dot com slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode . Hope to chat with you soon .

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People use calm to get an instant hit of more SEO tips . Then find the link to download a free copy of my hundred and one quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode . Don't get in touch . Have any questions ? I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel 5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom .

Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard .