How to Spy on Your Competitor's SEO Without Getting Caught Ep. 134

Did you know that doing a competitive review from an SEO standpoint is really important to your SEO strategy? It is! It's not about finding out what they're doing to copy them, but rather, understanding how well optimized their sites are so you can be strategic in your approach and outrank them. Learn how to find out what keywords they're ranking for, if their SEO elements are better than yours, if you need to adjust your content to rank higher than theirs, and more. Also, find out how often you should be researching your competition to stay ahead of them. 

Transcript

Shure MV7: 0:32

Hi, and welcome to the simple SEO podcast. Today we are gonna have fun. We're gonna talk about how to spy on your competitors SEO without getting caught. And if you're thinking Spy, Rachel, I don't wanna spy, I don't wanna copy, I don't wanna, we're not doing any of that. We are looking at their. SEO strategy and determining what's working and what's not working, and how we can create a strategy for us to outrank them. So I always tell you. Your SEO keywords are dependent upon your competition, your niche, the domain authority of your site and their site. Like that's why I can't give you a list of keywords for your site as much as I wish I could, it would be the most amazing bonus when somebody joins Simple SEO content. If I could be like, here's a list of keywords that you use for SEO, and you never have to think about them yourself. But because we all have different niches, I can't do that. If I only taught SEO for people in one niche, I could do that. But then I also would be creating an issue or situation where everybody was targeting the exact same keywords and I had given everybody the same keywords. And so you would be training against your competition, and that would be a disaster. So what we're gonna do instead is to really learn. How to compete safely and effectively and fairly, but giving ourselves a competitive advantage by taking a look at what they're doing. So if you've ever gone to Google and you've searched for a keyword that you really want to rank for and your competitor ranks higher than you, this episode is gonna help you. So what we're gonna do is talk about like. How we do this and what we do. And so like I said, it's not just that we're copying them, we don't ever copy somebody. We can use the information that we find to inform our decisions and our strategies. And we did this all the time when I was at the agency. So you know, I worked for a large agency that was based in Manhattan. I oversaw the SEO and content teams for about five years. The last five years I was in the corporate world, I was with this agency. We did competitive reports on almost every account that we took over because it was really important to understand. Where the client ranked and where their competitors ranked and what their strengths were and what the competitor's strengths were. More than that, we wanted to look for the weaknesses because you can exploit the weaknesses. If your competitor is really good at one area, but bad at another area, it is a competitive advantage for you. So we wanna look at this. So what can we do? How can we figure out what they're doing, what you're doing, and how we adjust this and how often do we need to do this? So I recommend you do this when beginning your SEO, so that you can use this information to set your strategy. You also want to review periodically. You want to make sure that you are aware of what your competition is doing so that you don't find yourself surprised by somebody suddenly outranking you and taking. Traffic that you've worked so hard to achieve. This is why SEO is not a set it and forget it strategy. It is something that we do want to look at, we do want to review, and we do want to make sure that we're updating our content on a regular basis. So I would say if when you do your competitive review the first time. You don't really have anyone in your niche who is actively doing a good job with SEO, then I would say you probably only need to do a quick check maybe every six months. But if you are in a niche where other people are doing SEO and they are getting some results, you're gonna need to keep a closer eye on them and what they're doing and just kind of see where things stand. So what are you gonna. What you're going to want to do is take a look and use different tools. So the things that are gonna matter are gonna be your domain authority and their domain authority. So, you know, you can use Moz Bar, you can use, um, keywords everywhere. Uber suggests some of the other plugins that we have to find out what the domain authority is of their site and your site. So if their domain authority is about the same as yours, let's say you're both 10, you're fine. You're gonna be. Pretty much seen as equal from Google's standpoint. But if you are 10 and they're 18, Google's going to tend to rank them higher because Google is going to tend to think that they are a more authoritative site, they're a better result, et cetera. So we're gonna wanna look at that and really just kind of understand. Now, if you have the higher domain authority, that's great. It's gonna make things a little easier. If they have the higher domain authority, it's gonna be a little bit harder for you because you're gonna need to now work on boosting your domain authority. You can use a tool like Openside Explorer, some of the other SEO tools, just go with Google and search like backlink checker. You can use a backlink tool to find out what backlinks they have versus what backlinks you have, and then you can see what type links they're earning and you can then work on that. I don't want you to ever pay for links. You know that we've talked about that before. We don't pay for links, but maybe it's time to focus on. Guesting on some other podcasts or writing a blog post for someone else, or sharing more content on Pinterest so more people find it and use you as a resource. All of those are ways that you can build links to your site and generally speaking. The more links you have, the better the links are, the higher your domain authority will be. If I start to see a situation with a client account or with my own website where somebody else is ranking higher than me, that's usually the first strategy that I take on, is to try to boost the domain authority of the website by doing some additional link building. You don't, like I said, don't ever buy links. You wanna think of them as something you need to earn. That's where digital PR really comes in handy. Partnering with. Um, programs partnering with different, um, journalists becoming a source, you can sign up for something called source of sources. SOS. It is the replacement for Harrow that I've talked about over the years. Harrow was help a reporter out. It got sold. It's now become a paid product, but SOS. Is now founded also by Peter Shankman, who was the original founder of Harrow. You can sign up for that one. It's a freebie. Just Google, SOS source of sources, and you'll find the information for that. That's one where you can very quickly respond and reply and potentially be picked up and linked to. As a source, which can help boost your website's domain authority. The other thing you can do is pitch yourself on podcasts. It's a great way not only to build your audience, but also to boost your domain authority. So if you're seeing that, you know you're doing your competitive review and you see that their domain authority is higher than yours, if it's within five or 10 points, go ahead and try that route. If you are seeing that the people you wanna compete against are like. Domain authority, 50, 60, 70, and your domain authority. 10. You need to pick different keywords, my friend.'cause you're not going to beat them. And it's going to take you years of link building to get to that level because those are very, very highly authoritative websites. So if that's what you're seeing, you need to look for different keywords. You're like, you're in the wrong pool, you're in the wrong pond, my friend. We gotta change where we are'cause we're not gonna rank in that world. Okay? So that's the first thing to kind of understand. The next thing I want you to look at. Is their content versus your content. Like look at it very realistically, if you are both ranking and let's say you're both ranking and they're in position one and you're in position four and you wanna be in position four, and your domain authority is pretty similar, it's within a couple of points you. Probably have a good chance. There's probably a reason though that Google is ranking them higher than you. So now let's look at your content, yours versus theirs. What do you have? What do they have? What keywords are you using? How are they done? Do they do a better job of meeting EEAT? Experience, expertise, authority, and trust? Do they have more anecdotes in it? More stories, like what information do they have? Is there post longer? Are they using better formatting? Are they better optimized? Did they follow everything on the SEO checklist? And maybe you've only used your keyword in two or three places. That can be something you can do. Take a look at that. Use your tools to see, you know, what is their title tag, what is their meta description? Um, take a look and see what is the image file name. Are they optimizing their image file names? Do they have alt texts? Like what are they doing? And then what are you doing? The other thing you can do, if you use chat GPT, you can go in and you can ask it. And if you're one of my students, it's built to do the do this for you. The Ai SEO assistant that I created for you. Put their page in and your page in. And ask it to tell you what to change on yours, and just say, think like an SEO expert. This page is out ranking my page. Put in theirs, then put in yours. Make sure you let it know which is which. What can I do to have a better chance of ranking higher than this page? Like, what am I missing? Then it can give you some ideas as well to make it a little easier to, um, compete. The reason we wanna spy on all of this is to really understand what is our niche? What is our market look like so that we know how to adjust our strategy. If you are the only one in the market who is doing. SEO and doing it right then, it's easier. You have the competitive advantage, but if others are already doing it and they're doing it well, then you may be playing catch up. And so your strategy changes a little bit. Now, once you go through this, if you've gone through this and you've done your competitive review and you're not quite sure what it means or how to analyze it or what strategy to craft. Join me in simple SEO content. Ask me all the questions. I will help you with this. If you're in there, you're a paid student, you've got access to me, we've got our q and a calls, like I'm here to help you put this strategy together to beat them. You don't have to try to figure this all out on your own. I know it's a little hard to figure out on your own. I can only give you. So much information here on the podcast and in the blog, but there's so much that we can do, and my SEO tool that I've created, my little GPT guy can help you with. So much of this really showing you what to do. So you pull together all the information and then you use it to craft your strategy. I need to create this type content. I see this type content gap. I see this type thing. Oh, hey, this one is doing a lot, but they're getting it wrong. So that's good, but I need to know that I'm paying attention to them because they are doing this and they are trying. I have a client who had this situation for a long time, for many, they've been with me, gosh, seven, eight years. In the very beginning, we were the only ones doing SEO. And so it was easy. We had lots of results, lots of, um, traffic. It was fantastic. And then we had a couple competitors who were like, huh, why does that guy always show up? And so they started doing SEO, but it was very easy from doing the competitive research, it was very easy to see that while they were doing it, they were not doing it right. And they were outsourcing it. They were outsourcing it to somebody who was offshore because. The title tags and the meta descriptions did not make sense. They were not written by a native English speaker, and a lot of the content that was being created was not high quality. It was not going to work. So it was like, okay, yes, they are doing SEO, but they're doing such a poor job of it that they're hurting themselves. They are not going to be a concern to you from a competitive advantage unless. They get a better consultant and they figure out how to do this the right way. So we did keep track of them and we did look at them. We still look at them periodically every like three to six months, but so far they're, they haven't figured out that they're spending money and they're not getting results. At some point they're gonna figure it out, but for now, it's an advantage for us. So that's what I want you to understand, like. Who am I really up against in my niche for the keywords that matter the most to my business? What are they doing? Are they good at SEO? Are they bad at SEO? What type content do they create? How does my content really. Really compare to theirs. Are my title tags and meta descriptions better? Are theirs better? You know who's better optimized? Because all of that is going to make a difference for you in the long run, and I want you to succeed. If you've tried to do SEO before and it hasn't worked, or you're not sure if it's worked, you know, these are some of the things that you can do to make sure it works in the future. And like I say, just join me in simple SEO content. I will make this so much easier. It is the easiest way to get this done. And honestly, SEO is the best way to recession proof your business. Because once we do this and we have the traffic coming every week, you don't have to worry about ads, you don't have to worry about social, you don't have to worry about all these other things because you're. Website is getting steady traffic. You're generating leads, you're getting enough people coming in, your business is growing, and it takes care of all of this for you. So if you've been sitting here thinking, I really wish I had a way to do this. I don't know that I have the money to do it, but I really want to be sure and take the free webinar. You can find that on, um, on my website, on the freebies tab, etched marketing.com/. Freebies, get yourself signed up. There's a discount If you go through that funnel, it's a funnel. You know that you have a funnel, I have a funnel. We all have funnels. Go through that funnel, get access to the discount. There is an option now where I have very low price point, um, monthly payment plans available for you. I partnered with Klarna because I had people asking, Hey, can we do this? Can you offer this? So I did do that. It does cost me a little bit more, but you know what? It's okay if it's the difference that gets you into the class so that we can start working on this together and makes it easier for you. I'm okay with that. Sign up, take the class. Join me in there, and then. Come ask questions. When you ask questions and you join the lives, or you watch the replays, you do better. So come join me in class, ask your questions, and let's work on this together. So if you're ready to spy on your competitors SEO, without getting caught, it's gonna help you really be more strategic in what you're doing. Alright, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week.