Let’s talk about what is competitor research and why it should be an important part of your digital marketing strategy. A great way to deep dive into your competitors and how they are generating their own traffic. Do they do anything different to capture more traffic and sales?

Does your competitor rank for keywords that you don’t, but you could? It’s all about taking your time and doing a thorough analysis of your competitor’s and their search terms. This can be a time-consuming task, but the result can be so beneficial towards your business and its growth trajectory.

Why is competitor research important?

Some Companies may not care about what their competitors are doing and how they are ranking. Personally, I think this is a huge mistake, as knowing the moves they are making will help you plan and execute an SEO strategy. To combat any ranking changes that could affect your very own positions, losing you traffic and sales.

The changes might be small but could have an enormous impact on your overall revenue. In 2020 Ignite Visibility conducted research about the percentage of CTR for each of the positions on page 1 of Google. here are the results.

• Google Position 1: Click through rate of 43.32%
• Google Position 2: Click through rate of 37.36%
• Google Position 3: Click through rate of 29.90%
• Google Position 4: Click through rate of 19.38%
• Google Position 5: Click through rate of 10.95%
• Google Position 6: Click through rate of 10%
• Google Position 7: Click through rate of 5.28%
• Google Position 8: Click through rate of 4.13%
• Google Position 9: Click through rate of 4.13%
• Google Position 10: Click through rate of 3.11%

Average Google Click Through Rate by Position Bar Graph

As you can see, if you were to drop from Pos.3 to Pos.5 that would give you 20% less in click throughs to your website. Of course, the other way you are gaining 20% extra. Competitor research is really important, to take advantage of the gaps and the ability to snag higher google rankings. You can see how important being in the top 3 really is and should be the goal for any search term.

How do you research your competitors?

Here at Vision’s design we use Semrush and all the tools it has to help our clients create an SEO strategy plan to rank above their competition. Finding keyword gaps and link building, giving the website or blog posts and pages higher authority.

Below I’m going to lay out a minor example from 2 websites that sell the same products to the same consumer. The marketing plan is pretty different for both websites one is very large website and the other has 2 smaller sites under the JD umbrella, but they sell the same items. Capturing rankings twice for the same products over could be giving them a higher CRT than just with the one website.

How to research competitors websites

Let’s look at 3 websites that sell the same products and how small google ranking jumps against your competitors can make a big difference.

So we have

Gooutdoors.com V Blacks.com and Millets.com who are both under the same umbrella brand of JD.

Gooutdoors have Organic Traffic 2,832,726/month with 58k keywords in the top 10

Blacks have Organic Traffic 613,775/Month with 24k keywords in the top 10

Millets have Organic traffic 490,241/ Month with19k keywords in the top 10

When I use Semrush, I can look at the position changes and the impact it has regarding traffic to the website.

As you can see, Blacks have managed to snag a couple more top positions moving up from #3 to being ranked #1. lets now check the traffic and who else is on the search rank for down jacket men’s.

They rank for the search term also for positions 3# giving the combined traffic of 10.7k. If we use the CTR chart from above, that means roughly that Millets and Blacks generated 73.22 of combined CRT compared to 37.36 CRT for Gooutdoors because as consumers we never just click one link and that’s our search done, we compare prices and see if any of the products on that page are to our liking.

All 3 websites have a huge amount of product listings and Gooutdoors is the bigger brand with 900k search for their brand alone., But as we can see, with some clever position ranking from Blacks and Millets, they can generate some fantastic CTR being in top 3 positions.

How to find keyword gaps

The keyword gap tool is just amazing and let me show you why. I added Myself and blacks and compared their website to others, as you can see on the image below. Gooutdoors is the clear winning ranking for more keywords.

All 5 websites share 14.2k keywords together but Blacks has 196.3k of untapped keywords compared to its competitors. This could be done to what products they list compared to the other websites. Also, this is the perfect chance to check out your own listings and see who ranks for what compared to you.

So let’s break down what blacks could do to increase traffic and if they have big traffic keyword gaps, they could go after.

So Millets stock Crocs but Blacks don’t, so they are missing out, Blacks could also be going after that product listings on google. Here is the most interesting thing that Blacks and millets don’t rank for batteries, but both sell them and its seem to be an untapped keyword for them. Blacks and Millets also both stock Bucket hats but don’t rank for the keyword.

This entire process can be very time-consuming, but if you put the time in finding these keywords can be so worth your while.

Conclusion

Knowing what is competitor research is and why it’s important can be so beneficial to the growth of your website. Semrush is a fantastic tool we use daily to help our clients grown with sear