Hello again. In the last lesson, we learned how to identify our competitors. But just knowing who they are is not enough if we are going to reach our business goals. In this lesson, we'll learn how to analyze and even rank our competition using keyword analysis, so we have a good idea of who we can beat and who we can't. We'll also delve into how to set reasonable expectations and develop a plan for placing ourselves in the best possible competitive position. Now that we've identified our competitors, our next step is to evaluate our competition. This will help us determine which competitors should be the easiest to beat, which ones we should be the most concerned with, and what we can do to compete well in search. In the last lesson, I showed you how to obtain data regarding your top competitors. This is an example of what the spreadsheet and data looks like once I repeated this process for each of the key words I am researching. Let's take a moment to analyze these results. We can see Google's semantic algorithm at work here. For example, you can see that the first keyword group for e-textbook rental, and the second group for electronic textbook rental are almost the same. When you pay closer attention, you will see that none of the title tags for the sites under electronic textbook rental actually use the word electronic. So we can see that there is a very strong relationship between E and electronic that Google is recognizing in this case. This is important to keep in mind when deciding final keywords to target as it may be unnecessary to target both in some cases. In the case of the third result, only two of the results contain the keyword digital in the title tag. The other keywords all target online as their keyword. So like above, this is a combination of semantic relevance and other SEO factors that indicate digital textbooks is relevant to the site. However, note that the third result for digital textbook rental isn't even a site devoted to textbooks. This is a site for random news stories that just happen to publish one about textbook rental. And the site has the lowest page authority and linking domains. However, digital textbooks is placed first in the title tag, and it is also part of the URL. The content on the page also utilizes the term. This can give you an idea of an important of proper keyword selection and usage. Keep in mind that because the site is not dedicated to text book rentals, they aren't what many clients would consider a direct competitor. However, the site is an organic competitor, and it's important to outrank this page because the page contains a list of places to rent text books. And this may drive the audience to your competition. Companies you work with will often tell you who their competition is, but they often do not take organic competition like this into account. So its important to be aware of the results, and not discount them just because it wasn't named by your client or considered direct competition. Next, I like to highlight sites that appear for all of these terms. For example, Amazon tends to rank in the first three results for all of my keywords. Highlighting competitors like this allows me to see which keywords have the lowest competition, as well as get a good idea of my competition across the board. Since a site should focus on multiple keywords, it's a good idea to perform an in-depth competitive analysis of a variety of keywords. This helps us see how hard it is to compete overall. In this case, my biggest competitors are Amazon, which I highlighted dark red because it appears in the first position multiple times. This means it is the most difficult of the sites to compete with. The next is Chegg, which appears in the second or third result most frequently. So it is the next level competitor I need to watch out for. I chose a shade down from the dark red. CourseSmart is the third competitor which appears in the third or fourth result most frequently, and is the next main competitor to look out for. Barnes & Noble as well as the Digital Reader site take up the top five 50% of the time. So while those will be important to get to at some point, my main focus right now is on the three I selected. Amazon is going to be hard to beat. They have a very strong brand, authoritative domain, and two pages dedicated to textbook rentals that both rank well. That doesn't mean you won't beat them. It just means that getting your relevance and trust high enough to overcome the domain authority of a giant like Amazon will take some time and effort. It looks like CourseSmart, when we look at the URLs in our ranking, is their homepage which contains very little content. So they are ranking mainly on brand and site authority for that term. Chegg has built a page dedicated to e-textbooks, which while less authority, has some good content that's helping them rank. You'll notice that Chegg also has less authority than Barnes and Noble which ranks under Chegg in the top result. But the page that is ranking for Barnes and Noble, has very little content. This is because Barnes and Noble has a lot of authority, but is not entirely devoted to textbooks like Chegg is. So Barnes and Noble has a more difficult time getting a better ranking. Based on this analysis, ranking on the first page looks doable. These top five are somewhat promising, but the top three are the hardest to beat. And there is no guarantees that we can outrank those sites, at least not until we have built up good authority and history. Ranking here won't be easy, as this is highly competitive. But if you or your client have a decent marketing budget to write good content, and perform outreach for good links, you stand a decent chance of ranking on here over time. It's important to set proper expectations. Even getting on the first page will require a lot of effort, but it is possible. Now the next thing I like to do is repeat this process for other sets of keywords that I find to be high value. In this case, I also liked online textbook rental related keywords, so I'll go do those next. This is the example I did for the term online textbook rental. When I compare these results, I can see that there are a lot more sites which are consistently appearing in the top 5 results. We can see some familiar results here compared to the last batch we looked at. We can tell that Chegg and CourseSmart are really strong in this space and they're getting top rankings for a variety of targeted words in both of the categories I looked at. Amazon doesn't rank as well with this query as they did with the last, but they are still a top contender. With this analysis, we can see that there are some sites that appear here who did not appear in the sites we looked at under electronic related keywords. Next, we want to compare all of these keywords to get a really good idea of who our biggest competitors are across the board. I repeated my analysis of competitors for general textbook related keywords and for keywords related to long tail queries and questions. I then went through each sheet I created and placed each competitor in a new column under their respective keyword category. Barnes and Noble wasn't very high on the competitiveness scale, but they have brand recognition. So I included them at the bottom of the two keyword lists that they showed up most frequently on. The next step is to organize this a little better. So I color coded this to see competitors from strongest to weakest. The dark green is Chegg who is the most competitive, while each code down in level of competitiveness from there. I chose the space on where the site showed up most frequently, and the number of keywords the site appear on. For example, Chegg usually showed in the top five results, for every keyword I selected. Amazon showed as frequently as BookRenter, but ranked more highly, when it did show up. After this, I found my top competition in order of the most to least competitive is Chegg, Amazon, Bookrenter, Valore, Textbook Rentals, Coursesmart, Barnes and Noble, and Bigwords. You should now have a good understanding of how to determine who your main competitors are for a variety of top keywords. You should now know how to analyze that information to determine who your top competition is overall. Next, we will analyze our top competitors so we can see what they are doing well SEO-wise, areas they are falling down on, and how to turn this into an opportunity for our site to rank well.
