Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Competitive Research
Log in to post

Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis

  • Cricket93


    competitor search intent

    Hello SEO gurus 🤓 I’m looking for the most efficient ways to analyze the search intent and relevance of competitors who are ranking for the keywords we’re targeting. While I know Google excels at assessing search intent and relevance, I’m interested in learning how we can evaluate these factors as metrics for our competitors. The goal is to understand their strategy better and find ways to outrank them. Do you have any tools or methodologies that you recommend for assessing competitor content to determine its alignment with search intent and user needs/relevance? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on this!

    | Cricket93
    1
  • sf9090


    seo content optimization

    I am a college student studying Information Sciences and was "hired" by my uncle over the summer to work and maintain his baseball-related website, which he started in 2016. His posts provide very in-depth information but were created without a focus on SEO. I've noticed that a competing site, which seems to have started as an e-commerce site, is ranking higher than my uncle's site for the query "how much does a baseball weigh." Interestingly, this competing site ranks for keywords like "mass of baseball," even though these exact keywords are not present in the post. Given the recent Google updates and changes in rankings, I'm trying to understand: How can an e-commerce site with seemingly less specific content outrank a detailed blog post?
    What strategies can I employ to improve the ranking of my uncle's site for this specific query?
    Are there tools or methods I can use to analyze why the competitor is ranking higher and how to address it?
    I recognize I am not well-versed in SEO, so any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | sf9090
    0
  • thanhdung0906


    tipbongda

    Re: I'm stuck by internal linking. What structure should a football website follow? Silo or Topic Cluster?
    I need advice on my website. My website: https://tipbongda247.net/
    I hope there are answers!
    Thanks

    | thanhdung0906
    0
  • igniterman75


    Hi Guys Selecting the right keywords that a website can realistically rank for is a key to gain top rankings relatively quick.  I am just curious to hear how you guys do it  (the methodology) when selecting which keywords to push? I mean you need to check the competition for each keyword as well so how to check this quickly to see what we realistically can rank for? Cheers John

    | igniterman75
    1
  • Siir


    competitor campaign settings url

    Hello, I am trying to set up a competitor with language slug for my (subfolder) website with a language slug. Let's say my website is something like: websiteholding.com/de/website
    My competitor is: competitor.com/de When I go to Campaign Settings > Comptetitor Sites > type in competitor.com/de > Hit Save Competitor > Then it shows the saved competitor without the language slug as competitor.com I am not sure if this is a correct method of tracking since for my DE website I would like to track the DE page of the competitor, not their global page. Please correct me if I am wrong and help me out on possible solutions? I am quite new to SEO & Moz , so any help on the topic would be appreciated.

    | Siir
    0
  • Katarina-Borovska


    Hi, What tool will do the following: will tell me paid keywords our competitors are using. Ideally, I could narrow down by country. Thanks. Katarina

    | Katarina-Borovska
    0
  • Femamedia


    competitor linking domains

    Hello, We noticed at MOZ that one of our competitor's websites has increased the number of external backlinks from 5k to 25k within a month. Upon investigating the links, we found that the competitor had acquired an old, unknown website with completely different content and external links in that month. The competitor then redirected that purchased website to their own website, instantly gaining 20k external links. This seems to be against Google's guidelines as it is an extremely unnatural way of link building and should be penalized by search engines. However, the website's Domain Authority (DA) has increased by 10 points in that month, and its rankings have greatly improved on Google. So it appears that acquiring an old website with many external links unrelated to your own website is highly profitable. We try to obtain links honestly, but we cannot reach 25k links naturally. Is there any way to report these practices to Google? Does anyone know how to do this?

    | Femamedia
    0
  • amandale


    page score keyword

    I noticed that when I search for a keyword and look at competitor sites, the keyword shows up in the "Body" under On Page Grader. For some reason, the keyword doesn't show up in the "Body" on Wowhead.com. I'm looking at the url and clearly it is in the body. This might be a technical issue and not showing in the body that MOZ is pointing out. How do we fix this? And will fixing this affect page score? Here are some examples of keywords and comparing the page score for competitors.
    https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/f45144a0-2af4-4ec5-a03b-6f605b353d0a/page/p_t87q085z6c

    | amandale
    0
  • PhoebeK


    visibility score

    Top Search Competitors
    The competitors that compete for the same keywords as this domain, ranked by visibility. Other websites that compete with this domain for the same keywords, ranked by visibility. Visibility (What does the visibility rating mean on this report)?
    For example: If you have a visibility of 8.33 on this report and your competitor has a rating of 6.21 or 4.64, is your visibility better than theirs?

    | PhoebeK
    0
  • Femamedia

    Unsolved This question is deleted!

    | Femamedia
    0
  • grayloon


    inbound link linking root domains

    In doing competitor research, there's a specific competitor that has fewer linking domains, but dramatically more inbound links. How do these two relate to each other? I do have a higher domain authority and more internal followed links with them having more internal nofollow and external (both follow and nofollow) links. I'm trying to understand how they can have 3.7k linking domains and 4.8 million inbound links while I have 4.1k linking domains and only 601k inbound links. What really defines an inbound link and what's there relationship between inbound links and linking domains?

    | grayloon
    0
  • SEOBrandBoca


    keyword rankings traffic

    Under the keyword gap analysis under the competitive analysis report, there is a mention of traffic lift and it provides a number. Does the number represent the number of users or the number traffic to expect for that term? Or is it the positions?

    | SEOBrandBoca
    1
  • ksmith88


    domain google

    Hi, Moz community, I hope you are staying safe, I have been trying to search our website in Google by using the whole domain name, but it's not showing up. For example: https://www.example.com/
    https://www.example.com/inner-page.html
    Or if search brand name: Example, doesn't come up But when I try example.com, it comes up along with other pages. Neither the inner pages are being come up in the search nor the home page with https://www.example.com. I have checked with Site:example.com, it is showing all the pages, but it is weird on the other hand that it is not visible in the search, what could be the reason? Any tool to check it? I thought it was because of the latest core update from Google. But, there are many keywords in the rankings, so I am sure the website hasn't been impacted. I checked penalties or issues through many tools and even in the search console, everything is fine. Any help would be appreciated.

    | ksmith88
    1
  • ManM0untain


    silos keywords relevant links

    Hi guys I'm trying to implement silos on a new website. I'm confused. SEO experts say you should first research all your keyphrases (done that) and then only create 1 page per keyphrase. I can see this makes sense if you did e.g. Italian Cooking - then did sub posts like Norther Italian Cooking, Vegetarian Italian Cooking etc - because those sub posts also contain the main keyphrase 'Italian Cooking'. Where I get confused, is they then have pages e.g. Pasta Dough. I can't quite see the benefit of having a sub post that is essentially about something (semantically) unrelated to the main page keyphrase we are trying to optimize on. I could understand doing a post e.g. 'Pasta Dough in Italian Cooking'. That page would be related and I can then see how the links from that page would have relevance for Google. But just Pasta Dough? In 1 siloing example I saw a main topic of Websites. Under that they had things like Website Design, Website Building, which make sense. Then they have 'Online Shop' as a sub-post. It's only related if you know it's related. Am I missing the point here? Is the point NOT to necessarily create pages related to the exact keyphrase, but instead create pages with a view to creating relevant links on those subpages to the main page? I hope someone understands the confusion here. I think my head is still stuck in mininets from 20 years ago 🙂 Any help would be very appreciated, many thanks.

    | ManM0untain
    2
  • kaajshop 0


    site speed

    Hello, thank you for guiding me
    I had a problem with the speed of the site. I do not know how to solve this problem
    this page:https://kaajshop.com/cat/70

    | kaajshop 0
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, The top article in my niche is http://www.webmd.com/diet/default.htm I want to write a better article on the same topic, but on a low budget. The article would be a combination of tools, top 10 diet reviews, and what I already have here. I'm a pretty good authority on the topics.

    | BobGW
    1
  • Constantin2021


    I have been trying for some time to take the online store to the front page, but it is very difficult to go up in google searches for the keyword ( sex shop ).
    Can anyone help me with some tips. Thank you.
    https://www.voluptas.ro/

    | Constantin2021
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I was doing competitive research and our top competitor has a clean backlink profile that includes the Best Of The Web directory. The top people on this Q&A used to recommend them and DMOZ for the only true good directory links. Is this still true or is Best Of The Web less important now? We only are listed in a small handful of directories, and not anything recent besides DMOZ. Thanks, Bob

    | BobGW
    2
  • mark_seomoz1


    Hello everyone! How can I find out what might be a keyword opportunity against a competitor but make sure it's still a realistic opportunity in SERPS generally?* After all, we are not just competing with 2 or 3 competitors. We are competing against everyone! Perhaps there is a part of the keyword research process that helps? I can't help but think there's a wasted effort to just beat a couple of competitors unless you can rank well generally - especially if it's a competitive sector. (*I'm not in the position of making lots of pages as part of a long-tail keyword/ content strategy so I need to focus on just a few and make them count) Thanks in advance. Mp

    | mark_seomoz1
    0
  • AndyKubrin


    Hi all, SEO noob here. I'm doing an audit for a firm that makes specialized accounting software. It's a relatively new firm, with a barebones website. My client has identified three direct business competitors. In addition, I see indirect competitors (such as product reviews) on the SERP for a relevant keyword phrase. I want to provide actionable advice for my client. What information should I present? I'd like to help my client understand: Why my client's competitors are outperforming them on the SERPs What my client needs to do to overtake their competitors What information should I present to my client? Thanks, all.

    | AndyKubrin
    0
  • BruceBarbour


    Hi there. I'm pretty new to SEO and I've been doing a fair bit of training but there is one aspect I have yet to grasp. When I carry out keyword research, I get all these results and I understand the metrics. What I'm not getting is, when a competitor is ranking highly for say "where can I buy fresh turkeys", I assume that that phrase must appear somewhere on the page, but it doesn't. I realise I'm just not thinking about this in the right way. Can anyone offer clarification, please? Kind regards, Bruce

    | BruceBarbour
    0
  • killerseo2020


    I searched for keyword rank for shoreloop.com but couldn't find any.  What could be the problem?

    | killerseo2020
    0
  • acubine


    I'm noticing that on many of my competitor's eCommerce sites, the URL for every subcategory of products is preceded by "website.com/collections/subcategory" rather than "website.com/maincategory/subcategory" Can anyone tell me why this is, and if it is beneficial to SEO to have URL strings designs this way?

    | acubine
    0
  • abbiplunkett


    Hi Moz Community! I'm doing research for a client and trying to gain insights around their competitors website data. Specifically trying to see what landing pages on the competitors site receive the most traffic. Does anyone currently use a tool that shows estimated traffic here? As an FYI, outside of MOZ Pro (which I love), I use SpyFu and SimilarWeb. Right now my client's landing page traffic is mainly homepage traffic and we want to make reccos on where to grow outside the homepage to increase visibility in other specific areas where there is search demand. We have a good idea but I'm hoping the competitor web data will back up those recommendations. Any recommendations here would be super valuable! Thank you in advance for your time. Abbi

    | abbiplunkett
    0
  • shanky1


    Hi, We just build some of our new content pages on our website 1.https://www.practo.com/ray/dental-software 2.https://www.practo.com/ray/dermatology-software 3.https://www.practo.com/ray/homeopathy-software Could someone explain how do I build around a good SEO strategy to compete with others for better positions on the SERP's. I have not done anything apart from fixing proper title tags , and meta descriptions etc and of course putting down relevant fresh content onto these pages. These pages were published about 3 weeks ago - Only this url ranks on the 2nd page as of now for keywords like "dermatology software" https://www.practo.com/ray/dermatology-software The rest of the URL's do not rank anywhere till the 10th SERP too! What could be wrong and where could I have the opportunity to boost the SEO tactics since all the pages which rank above it are just not providing the right kind of product as we are and still they take up the top positions and genuine users miss out on our domain. Thanks . Looking forward to some awesome responses.

    | shanky1
    0
  • grocare


    I have a health niche website ( grocare.com ) Recently I subscribed to ahrefs and moz and found out so many spammy backlinks to my site (which i didn't create). Someone told me this is a common competitor tactic. To create bad links for your website to drank it. My question is - in ahrefs now, there are a LOT of spammy anchors and it seems more backlinks are being created by spammy websites automatically. I have lost many rankings because of this. I tried diluting by creating more normal anchors but it doesnt seem to be working. How do I fix this ? Any help is apprecciated xVrvj1q

    | grocare
    2
  • Jesssherl


    Can anyone shed some light on why this might be? Our website has a higher DA and PA yet the competition rank higher for some keywords. Even though our on page grader is higher or marginally different. **Our Website ** DA - 13 PA - 20 Keywords - 390 Linking Domains - 24 Total Inbound - 37 Follow - 14 Competitor DA - 8 PA - 15 Keywords - 640 Linking Domains - 12 Total Inbound - 79 Follow - 65

    | Jesssherl
    1
  • DmitriiK


    Hello, fellas. I've been trying to find some type of comparison analysis for online SEO related tools and I couldn't find any, which are fresh and overview more than three. I'm interested to see if anybody saw good comparison reviews of such tools, as well as your own thoughts (back your thoughts up with more than just "I like it", please 🙂 The tools I'm interested in comparing are: MOZ Ahrefs Majestic Spyfu SEMRush Raven Wordstream whatever else you use or have in mind

    | DmitriiK
    2
  • AnkitaDwivedi


    The template provided in https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo is missing the 'Audit Data' Tab. Can you please update it or share the Original Template

    | AnkitaDwivedi
    3
  • EdKim


    I am trying to figure out the site structure of a website and the urls of all the pages. Normally this would be easy but a couple of months ago the website went down and I don't think it will ever come back. Any help would be appreciated.

    | EdKim
    1
  • Davit1985


    Hey Mozzers, I would like some input from you guys please. For keywords "car service dc" "dc car service" "car service washington dc" my site ranks in positions 7, 8 . My home page www.dcacar.com and also a landing page for washington dc: https://www.dcacar.com/washington-dc-car-service.html Is there something I can do to rank higher? Should I 301 redirect the landing page to the home page? If you have any suggestions and have experience in such cases your input will be greatly appreciated. Our home page also ranks for almost 20 other very important keywords that drive a lot of business to us. So I am a bit scared to touch the title tag on the home page. 2nd question. It's been almost 2 weeks that the local pack is showing 2 results for the same keywords. We are #3 lost our space from the result. Are you noticing any changes to your local packs? Why are there 2 results and not 3? When I search for similar keywords but in other cities I usually get 3packs even now. Any suggestions on making into the top two? We have 3 times more reviews than the other 2 companies the only thing I see that makes them rank above us is their company names are almost exact match with the keyword. Thanks in advance for your time and help.

    | Davit1985
    0
  • JohnSammon


    Hey Everyone, I've been searching for data on the percentage of people who click on paid vs organic. My last stats which are now outdated show 60% of the people click on organic on average and 40% click on paid. Any help/links would be greatly appreciated.

    | JohnSammon
    0
  • rhysc


    I have a website that we look after, up until January this year the rankings were really strong - the site has a much higher domain authority than the competitors, much more links and much more relevant content (all measured with moz's tools). About 6 months ago the rankings started to dive for national search terms. Now one thing ive noticed is that nearly all of the other sites in the search sell products online where we have no such function - could this be correlated - has anyone else experienced this?

    | rhysc
    1
  • jfishe1988


    Hey guys, I'm baffled by checking my Ahrefs ratings lately. It looks like our rating just went up considerably... from over 1 million to now around 500k. One of my main competitors, however, has a much lower Ahrefs rank (over 3 million) but he does a considerable more amount of traffic than we do... how is this? My domain rating is higher than his by a lot. Very curious how this works.

    | jfishe1988
    0
  • ATShock


    Hi, We have a competitor (with a higher DA) using some content from our product pages word for word on a few of their product pages. It's only a couple paragraphs per product page (including the main product description), not the entirety of the content on the page. It also appears they have scraped some content from another authoritative competitor (and even left their brand name mentioned on it!) I've read mixed thoughts on whether plagiarized content will harm the original site, but am concerned since it is an authoritative site. Should I be concerned since it's only parts of our product page? Thank you all!

    | ATShock
    0
  • Undergrnd


    We are working on a client's PR, and we managed to get them in a news article online. Are there any tools out there that help us measure how many people saw the article?

    | Undergrnd
    0
  • IcarusSEO


    We have GA set up on our site for a while now. However, we do not look at the data. We did today and it's quite overwhelming. Is there anything in specific we should start with? A top 3 items we should start to monitor each week and try to improve? Bonus Question: Is there a way to use analytics to find out who are competitors are?

    | IcarusSEO
    0
  • amu123


    Hi All, Just I need few sites who have implemented J-son schema on there blog. Looking for ecommerce blog. Hope you guys share with me good site. Thanks in advance.

    | amu123
    2
  • enableholidays


    Hi, Apologies if these are very simple queries, but I cannot seem to find the answers anywhere. I understand meta keywords are pretty much pointless nowadays, however when I run a report on another 'keyword website' - my website only ranks for around 2k keywords where my competitors rank for much more (around 20k). I was just wondering where these keywords are found, as I can only assume that these are meta keywords? The company that I'm working on the SEO for is a holiday agency that specialises in holidays abroad for disabled people, so that means that we have a niche product/service and whilst we rank fairly high for some keywords, we would like to rank higher. How is it possible to work towards ranking higher for particular keywords? When doing keyword research 'disabled holidays' has a lot more search traffic than 'accessible holidays'. We are called Enable Holidays and our main competitors have the words 'disabled' and 'accessible' in their domain's, so I would imagine that it's going to be hard to potentially rank higher than our competitors for these keywords? Could someone put me in the right direction of how you improve rankings in the SERP for certain keyword searches? For example, do we have to write more content on a certain page about a keyword? Do we have to include more long-tail keywords in the content? Any help is appreciated. Thanks

    | enableholidays
    0
  • jamiemonteathaegon


    Whilst doing a SERP analysis for a particular phrase, i noticed that the same page is ranking twice in the top 10. I've known of the same domain ranking twice with different pages which makes sense but to see the exact same URL ranking twice is a new one for me. Has anyone seen this before too and know of reasons why this would happen?

    | jamiemonteathaegon
    0
  • iwantclarity


    While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk.  But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on?  Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.

    | iwantclarity
    0
  • robandsarahgillespie


    On our campaign, I have three local competitors which I like to keep an eye on.  Two have been around for years but the other is pretty new.  According to Moz, he has a Domain Authority of 1, has no backlinks and ranks lower on every keyword I keep track of. How then is he getting ahead of us for certain search terms?  Can Moz not give any more information?

    | robandsarahgillespie
    0
  • helenlorettahasan


    I thought I might be able to use Ahref's Batch Analysis for this, but that just gives stats on backlinks. I have a several lists of thousands of pages scraped for particular sets of keywords, but what I need is some way to automate fetching the biggest keyword that each page ranks for - biggest being the keyword that is estimated to drive the most organic traffic. Is there a tool out there that does something like this?

    | helenlorettahasan
    0
  • mwaters1979


    I'm doing work for https://www.charlestonblackcabcompany.com While I know whey we are only at #2 for Charleston Party Bus as Google treats it as a branded keyword search and I don't know of any ways around that there are other competitors that don't make sense to me. These guys are #1 for Charleston Limo Service and we are further down the list despite having much better numbers across the board for months now with out seeing much gain. https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.charlestonlimo360.com%2F&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=1&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site= I'm talking over 6 months and still these guys and some others whose competitive analysis shows us beating them across the board still has us further down the rankings for over 6 months.  It seems like the competitive analysis doesn't matter at all.

    | mwaters1979
    0
  • ahmetkul


    Hi guys, I am wondering how we can tell that the certain company doing SEO or not?

    | ahmetkul
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hello Mozzers - I am researching the most popular sites within a category - are there any services that identify the most popular sites within a category - I noticed Alexa do offer a service but I have no idea who else offers such a service (Majestic, perhaps?). Thanks in advance, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0
  • foreseegame


    My website Alexa rank has dramatically dropped in the past 3 months: Website: www.sastasundar.com End of July, 2012: 5217 Global, 265 Local(India) But Now: ** 29260** Global, 2274 Local(India) Definitely something big has affected my global ranking and I'm not able to figure it out. Please help.

    | foreseegame
    0
  • Bartbijen


    Hi, I notice today strange update on the DA of our website and competitors website as well. caminhoslanguages.com (our website) : drop from 26 to 19 bridgebrazil.com : drop from 29 to 26 rioandlearn.com : drop from 19 to 14 carioca-languages.com : drop from 22 to 15 DA drop affect all website, but bridgebrazil.com less than the other. bridgebrazil is close now. the website is rank first, but it is a business that no longer exist. thay rank first, only because it belong to an international company that have other languages schools in different countries, providing them a huge based of links high DA. Sorry to tell you, with this new update you totally miss the point. In which sense does the DA represent the quality of the websites ?? Is it not fair for small school, trying hard to get excelent website to get penalized like this, because it is really hard for them to get link from very high PA pages you know ? Could somebody give explication? If you would like to improve your algorithms, I would suggest to reduce the values of the links from companies internal linking. Because it provide unfair advantage for small business.

    | Bartbijen
    0
  • iQuanti


    I'm doing SEO for a medium sized client whose area of business is targeting a very niche audience, in an almost monopolistic market. We're currently in top 3 ranks in our head terms. However, market research has indicated the threat from an upcoming competitor. The competitor is relatively larger and is well established in other countries. Is there something I could do from my end to defend/maintain our current position?

    | iQuanti
    0
  • wdsguy


    Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau

    | wdsguy
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.