There’re two primary ways of developing your business:
One is to figure out a business type that might blow away all the competitors and get you rich ASAP.
Being creative and innovative is a sure way to reach success (unless your name is Nicola Tesla). Look at Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk. Those are the people who came up with great ideas, put plans into motion, and managed to reach greatness. The best thing about the inventors is that no matter what others do, they will always be: “Like…”
Another way is to find someone who already did what you’re about to do and mimic it.
SERP, WHAT?
Ranking in Google is a very peculiar process, a vicious cycle of sorts.
Google inspects the top positions in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and says to itself (figuratively!): “Wow! If it’s that high, it must be what women (people/Robotic Overlords from Mars) want.” Then, it centers its parameters for the top websites ranking for a particular category or keyword. Most often than not, when you have quality content but it’s not at the top of the SERP, you would have a hard time ranking high. To reach the top, you must look the part.
“I don’t need any competition analysis. My product is unmatched!” Well, that might be. After all, whatever you are selling, should be as good as it can be, whether it’s video games, cars, insurance, electronics, or fishing rods. In the modern era, quality is the essence of most businesses. But that alone doesn’t equal the Top Positions in Google. Say, how would anyone find your product if they have to dig deep inside of Google? Before they see your offer on the third page of SERP, they will have 30 other companies offering similar products that you’re trying to sell. So why should they come to you?
Competition is all about competing: if you refuse to do it, you’re out of it. And not in the good sense.
COMPETITION, WHO?
Considering you’re in the business for some time now, you’re well aware of your most significant competitors. Let’s say you run a game development company. We assume you know every other company like yours. No matter if you’re selling your games to aggregators, online, or both – some are your direct competition.
On the other hand, say you’re a startup, the best way will be to type the keywords you’re interested in into the browser and look around. Let’s type, say, “casual games [your country]” and see what pops in the top. You can try and do it with more specific keywords regarding your business. There will be repeatable websites that have dominated the niche over the past couple of years.
What’s more, some SEO tools will show you domains and websites ranking high for specific keywords - your competition, in other words.
If you are not in the Top 10 for the desired phrase, it means you have work to do!
WHAT IS COMPETITION ANALYSIS IN SEO?
Remember that game company from across the globe stealing away your potential customers (e.g., profit)? Do you know why? Why do people choose that game over yours? Is it cheaper, of better quality, more recommendations? Or maybe it’s the customer’s service? Asking these questions and looking for answers is Competition Analysis.
In SEO, we focus on websites. There can be countless reasons for a domain to rank high in Google. The domains age and history, the quality of content, the keyword density, the number of backlinks - the list goes on. Identifying these factors and reconstructing them for your website might increase your ratings considerably.
Yet, even doing everything correctly does not guarantee to overtake the competition. If they are actively working on SEO, we need to do even more work to "get ahead of them."
The truth is, you will not rank high in Google without said competition. Times, when there was no competition, are long gone. To get a High Rank in Google, you have to Match your competitors or be Better than them. There is no way around it!
