You know your competitors, and youโre not going to let some damned SEO tool tell you different!
Hey, Iโll give you the first part, but there are a lot of reasons that the results from a tool like True Competitor might not match your expectations, and that could be a good thing.
Iโm going to dig into five of those reasons:
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Youโre living in the past
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Youโve hit a brick wall
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You canโt see the trees
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Youโre stuck in one tree
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Weโre just plain wrong
First, the toughest one to hear โ the world is changing, and youโre not changing with it.
1. Youโre living in the past
Look, I know Big Wally at Big Wallyโs Widget World said your Grandmaโs meatloaf was โjust okay, I guessโ at the church potluck in โ87, but you need to move on. Even if youโre not quite-so-literally stuck in the past, you may be operating on an outdated sense of who your competitors are. Especially online, the competitive landscape can change quickly, and itโs worth re-evaluating from time to time.
2. Youโve hit a brick wall
Quite literally โ youโve run headlong into your own brick-and-mortar wall. As a business with physical locations, your competitors with physical locations are absolutely important, but from a search perspective, they may not represent who youโre actually competing with online.
Take, for example, McDonaldโs โ you might expect the competition to include Wendyโs, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fast food chains with physical restaurants. Meanwhile, here are the second through fourth results from True Competitor:
While DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats donโt have traditional, physical locations, these are the places where McDonaldโs online customers go to order, and they represent a significant amount of organic SERP real estate. From an SEO standpoint, this is reality.
3. You canโt see the trees
You can see the whole forest from where youโre standing, and thatโs great, but are you missing the diversity and distinctiveness of the trees?
This is easier to show than tell. Letโs take a look at big box retailer, Target. True Competitor returns the following top three:
No big surprises here, and no one should be shocked that this list includes not only brick-and-mortar competitors, but online retail juggernauts like Amazon. Letโs take a deeper look, though (the following are competitors #8, #7, and #22 in our current data):
Target isnโt just up against the whole-forest, big box retailers โ they also have to contend with niche competition. Their competitors in the video game space include not only brick-and-mortar retailers like GameStop, but competitor-partners like Sony and Nintendo (which both sell hardware and software directly online).
Not every grove of trees is going to have the same needs and growing conditions. Your competitive landscape could have dozens of ecosystems, and each of them requires unique research and likely a unique strategy.
4. Youโre stuck in one tree
On the other hand, you could be stuck in just one tree. Letโs take Ford Motor Company as an example. Savvy marketers at Ford know theyโre not just up against legacy automakers like Chevrolet and Toyota, but up-and-coming competitors like Tesla and Rivian.
That niche is incredibly important, but letโs take a look at what the SERPs are telling us:
These are Fordโs #1, #2, and #5 competitors, and they arenโt automakers โ theyโre automotive content producers. Does this mean that Chevy and Tesla arenโt Fordโs competitors? Of course not. It means that those automakers are infrequently appearing in SERPs alongside Ford. Ford is competing with mentions of their own products (makes and models) in leading online publications.
5. Weโre just plain wrong
Hey, it happens โ Iโm not here to claim that weโre perfect. SERP-based competitive analysis has a couple of limitations. First, as discussed, SERP analysis doesnโt always reflect the brick-and-mortar world. From an SEO perspective, thatโs fine (if theyโre not ranking, weโre not competing with them for search share), but there are other essential pieces to the puzzle.
Second, our SERP-based analysis is based on national results and does not reflect regional or hyperlocal competition. Some regional businesses do have national competitors, and thatโs worth knowing, but localized perspectives are important as well.
Maybe itโs a good thingโฆ
What if a tool like True Competitor only returned information that you already knew? I guess you could pat yourself on the back and move on with life, but what did you learn? To me, the entire point of SERP-based competitive analysis is to challenge your expectations and your point of view. If the results donโt match what you expect, that mismatch represents opportunity.
More likely than not, it doesnโt mean youโre wrong (unless youโve let vanity and personal history get the best of you) โ it means that youโre missing a perspective or a niche that could be important. If you can see that missing perspective as money left on the table, then youโve got a good chance to pick it up and walk away with a bit more in your pocket.
The Competitive Analysis Suite is now available to all Moz Pro customers, and weโd love to hear your feedback via the โMake a Suggestionโ button in the app.
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