Who are the competitors?

When purchasing any business, it’s extremely important to look at the competitors of that business! These individuals or companies can give you invaluable information about the business venture you’re about to undertake, like whether you should actually buy the business or not! Websites are the exact same way.

The easiest way to find competitors of a website is to look at the search results for some of the keywords that the website ranks for. If you see a particular website showing up in the results for multiple keywords your target website is writing for, they’re likely a direct competitor of yours!

I always like to collect about 10 of these frequent competitors and take a bit of a deeper dive into them. This amount should give you a good idea on the website’s total scope of competition.

The first thing to look at is if the competitors are massive companies or organizations or not. If most or all of a website’s competition are big players, there’s two sides to the coin. On one hand, it means that it’s a very lucrative space with lots of money to be made and a large audience. However, on the other hand, it means that it could be very difficult to grow with such big players dominating the space.

In most cases, if more than a few of the competitors are very large publications, I would advise that you stay out of the space. Remember, we’re looking for websites with growth potential. Or, at the very least, a stable forecast. We don’t want a website that’s slowly going to be crushed by big players.

If most of the competition is made up of small, non-authoritative websites, then you’re likely in a good place!

We’ll want to use these competitors as a guide for content opportunities, monetization opportunities, and backlink opportunities. Essentially, we want to see what they’re doing well so that we can steal from them, and what they’re not doing well so that we can dominate those areas.