How to start a simple competitors analysis using SEO techniques

When you have a business idea, one of the first questions you should ask is who are your competitors?. In truth, some entrepreneurs limit competitors list to the best-known companies on the market or even some people, blinded by the emotion of a good idea, make the mistake of saying that it’s unique and that there are no competitors. Sadly, this is often, a death sentence for many startups; not knowing the market and competition.

Knowing your competitors is essential to define strategies for your startup and also to learn best practices and how to apply them.

We want to give you some simple tips to discover competitors. SEO techniques are commonly used to get a better ranking in search engines, but they can also be used for other purposes such as discovering who can compete with your startup in a given market.

Let’s start by defining something, there is a basic term in SEO you should know and is keywords; these are the words that people normally use to find certain things on search engines. You should begin by defining what are the words that describe your business; these can be your products or services combined sometimes with your city or country or specific details such as colors, flavors, seasons etc. Now we will give you some simple ideas on how you can discover competitors using these keywords.

Search for your business as your customers would do

Go to Google and try to find your business as one of your customers would do. Think about how they would search what you offer and use the keywords that describe your business. Among the results, you can begin to find the first competitors.

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There are tools to evaluate your site and identify possible SEO improvements. SpyFu allows you to evaluate your site from the keywords point of view for free.

After entering SpyFu you can write the domain of your website or competitors that you have previously identified and in the results, that we recommend you look fully, there is a competition section. The free version will show you the first 5 competitors, both organic and paid ones.

Organic Competitors are those you find in the normal search results from Google and Paid are those who are in programs like AdWords.

Besides this simple list, you can see an analysis of keywords that have in common the site analyzed with the main competitors.

You can use the tool for several SEO tasks like finding valuable keywords and a lot of useful statistics. We invite you to explore SpyFu because is extremely useful.

These simple processes also allow you to find indirect competitors, like companies that may not offer the same product or service as your business but competing for the same keywords.

Don’t forget that whatever business model your startup is, chances are it has direct and indirect competition. You should carefully find and analyze your market and competitors. Especially when you are looking for funding, it is very difficult for an investor to believe that your business idea has no competition at all; many of them may assume that you did not do proper research.

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Originally published at blog.toky.co on June 24, 2016.