In SEO, competitors are those sites that can be found using the same search terms. These compete for the same keyword rankings as your own domain and should therefore be known and kept an eye on.
In this paragraph, you will learn how to identify and analyze competitors with the Research Cloud.
For this example, we’re taking on the role of a major sports gear retailer. After entering the domain in the search bar of the Research Cloud and selecting a country, you first get an overview of your competitors: Organic search > Competitor analysis.
At the top, you can see the bubble chart, that shows your top 10 (up to top 100) organic competitors and ranks them according to the number of keywords they share with you, as well as their traffic index. In this way, you can see at a glance which domains you compete with the most and which competitors could most easily overtake you.
Now scroll to the Organic Competitor Visibility, you can see if one of your competitors has experienced a strong increase or decrease. You can also see if the main competitor, is also the one with the most shared keywords, also has the highest visibility of all competitors. By clicking on individual competitor domains, you can show or hide them in the chart and you can also set a specific time period for the analysis.
In our example we can see one big drop for all of the domains in the market. This could be a sign of a general ranking change in the industry and should be analyzed more closely.
So this comparison is especially helpful if there are strong fluctuations in your visibility. If the competitors' curves also fluctuate, a Google Update could be responsible. To investigate, simply click on Google Updates in the upper left corner.
At the bottom of the page, you will find a detailed table view of your organic competitors, including relevance score, shared keywords, traffic index and average position.
In addition, you can also display the competitive traffic, which shows the difference between your own traffic and that of your competitors. For easier understanding, the own values are displayed with colored bars. A green bar means that the own domain performs better. Accordingly, red bars mean that the competitor is leading.
The competitors with the most unique and shared keywords are at the top. You can use the quick filters to manually focus on better or worse ranking competitors.
If you have already identified competitors, you can also simply enter a competitor domain in the Research Cloud search bar to analyze their nationwide performance.
To keep an even better eye on competitors, we recommend adding them as benchmarks to your project. You can learn how this works in the project management article.