Section Guide: Top Organic Competitors and their Best Keywords
Sidra Condron avatar
Written by Sidra Condron
Updated over a week ago

What Do You See Here?

This snapshot stacks up your top competitors and pulls back the curtain on their search-based traffic-building techniques. Here you understand the variety of competition and just how aggressive they are.

You get these two focal points:

  1. A full measure of the threats on your horizon

  2. Identification of individual issues over shared industry occurrences

Earlier sections helped examine your competitors, but this section is different because it focuses on significant details about how those competitors try to attract attention from searchers, given as clicks.

These top competitors are both calculated competitors and emerging rivals. To name your competitors for this report, we tap the sites that share more of your organic keywords than any others, especially when the shared keywords make up a big portion of their entire keyword list. (This keeps a giant like Amazon or Ebay from being considered everyone’s competitor.)

Details

The keywords listed under the competitor domain name are a sample of keywords that you both rank on (with their rankings in parentheses). They are in order of most SEO value per keyword.

How Do You Present This?

The next statistics are built from historical data so that you can make a case for urgency.

  • Estimated SEO Clicks per month (for the competitive domain)

  • Number of Overlapping Keywords

  • Estimated Adwords Budget

Stir Up Your Support

A surge in overlapped keywords, mixed with a competitor dropping its Google Ads budget, signals a looming maneuver into your territory from a laser-focused rival. Push the urgency with your client to protect your click share with intensified concentration on this part of your SEO campaign.

And Cushion the News

Let’s say that SEO Clicks per Month go down for everyone. It might be good news for you. Carry that perspective into your client presentation so that a downturn in clicks can be tempered with stability or even an increase in share.

Or Just See How They Measure Up

How big are these competitors you are up against? Use their clicks per month to tell you how big of a threat they are, and use their overlapping keyword count to gauge how close of a threat they are. This also opens up ideas for emulating their content.

Your Best Action:

Keep tabs on these threats before they impact your share of traffic. Take a cue from the Executive Summary at the top, and review the big mover.

It could even pay to run a Recon SEO Dashboard report on these big movers, gaining a peek at their top site sections and newly ranked organic pages so you know what kind of content has been driving this boost.

An idea from a different perspective

Watch for general keyword matches for partnership opportunities or content ideas/keywords to rank on. Are they true overlapping competitors or more likely to be partners?

Jewelbasket.com seemed to let its Google Ads campaign erode away. if you’re Zales.com, this is more than protecting your castle. Review which words they were buying—could they be the same that you rank on organically? Their limited Google Ads budget just might reflect limited sales combined with dropped traffic, so count this as a sales lead for an ad buy on your page.

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