How To Determine Your TRUE SEO Competitors (part 2)

OK, so as mentioned in the last podcast, I was going to make a post about determining your true SEO competitors. Thought it would be easier to show with a few images too.

Right, so your competition – if you’re a business or you have a client that is a business, they will have some companies they see as competition. If a they originally operated offline, they will have some competitors that were also running their business offline and these are the guys they tend to want to gun for. Thats fine, the chiefs are happy as they are getting one over their old rivals.

Honestly though – are they your SEO competitors? Unlikely. Even if they are doing SEO, are they going after the same keywords? Apart from the obvious high level generic words, you just don’t know what keywords they are aiming for. So if you’re going after a particular term and outrank them, does that really mean anything? No – they could be working on something completely different.

So what next? Why not pick a search term, put it into Google and see who ranks in the top 10. They’re your competitors because they rank aren’t they? Again – unlikely. You might be thinking I’m going a bit bonkers with that statement but hear me out on this one.

There is (believe it or not), a chance that a site can just “so happen” to rank. Some sites, don’t need to actively work on ranking for a keyword/phrase, and if the number of results found is low – then it’s “easier” to just rank. So again, are they necessarily working on the exact keyword/phrase you are? I doubt it.

So how on earth do we work out what sites are purposely trying to rank for a given keyword? Super mind powers? Threatening to knee cap the webmaster? Witchcraft? Or all of the above? Sorry to disappoint, but you don’t need to go to that level in order to find out.

A simple command in Google will tell you who has got links pointing to their site with the keywords as anchor text. That is the biggest indication that they are doing SEO and link building for that keyword to improve their rankings.

All you need to do, is type the following into Google:

allinanchor:”Your keyword/phrase”

This is what it looks like as a real life example:

Most keywords/phrases will see a big reduction in results, and this is because not everyone is always getting links with that anchor text. Also, by putting the phrase in quotations ensures you are getting the exact same keyword/phrases.

So, you know if you outrank these guys – your SEO is going in the right direction and you can say you really are beating your competitors. Try it out on some of your keywords. How are you doing compared to them? Do you appear in the search results?

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