Businesses generally know who are their competitors on the open market. But that is not necessarily the competition your website has to contend with when ranking in search results.
In the area of search engine optimization your competitors are any websites that can be found by using the same search terms as yours.
Example: A hairdresser in Karlsruhe can, among other things, advise you on cosmetics. Therefore, his website can be found, for example, by the query "Karlsruhe cosmetics". Using the same search term, you can find a pharmacy selling cosmetics in Karlsruhe. Thus, the two companies are competitors for this search query.
In contrast to benchmarks, organic competitors are shown in the Research Cloud and are identified for each domain based on keyword overlaps. This means that you were not chosen. If you still want to be observed in the Search Experience, you can easily be added to the project as a benchmark.
Here we are talking about organic competitors. They can be found in the Research Cloud under the Organic Search/Competitor Analysis.
A bubble chart shows the performance of your competitors. The X-axis shows the number of keywords that are shared with competing domains, and the Y-axis shows the Traffic Index for the domains. The size of the bubbles corresponds to the average traffic value. With the help of a chart you can see at a glance how many keywords you share with competitors, as well as their traffic and domain value. Strong competitors with high Traffic Index are a threat due to well-optimized websites. Weak competitors do not use their optimization potential and can be simple targets.
Example: amazon.com on 11.08.20
The lower chart displays a list of all organic competitors. With the help of quick filters, the best and worst ranked competitors can be shown with one click.
The relevance score shows the relevance of the respective competitor. This calculation is based on the number of your own keywords, general keywords, and unique keywords of a competitor.
The bars in the Traffic Index and average position columns compare the domains to each other. The top value relates to the selected domain, and the bottom one is for the corresponding competitor's domain. Green color indicates that your domain is performing better than the competitor. Red color means that the competitor is more successful.
Competitive Traffic Index shows the change in its own index and competitor's index. If the displayed value is negative, it means that the Traffic Index has decreased in comparison.
Compare Domain |
If the analyzed domain needs to be compared to a specific domain, there is a button names “Compare Domain” at the top of the page in almost all areas of the Research Cloud.
Based on the different KPIs, keyword differences, potentials, and keyword gaps could be identified here.
The spider chart provides a detailed overview of the comparison of different KPIs. The exact values are shown in the adjacent table. Areas with a green background show the higher value, and with a red area - the lower value.
In addition, relevant unique keywords and shared keywords can be displayed here in order to identify possible keyword gaps and to determine the number of matches.