Checking the competitiveness of the competition

gelsi

gelsi

Joined
Feb 26, 2018
Messages
30
Likes
5
Degree
0
If you were entering a new market for the first time what checks would you do on the competition to check competitiveness?
Normally you might use a keyword analysis tool but that wont work because I'm in the Philippines and there's a shortage of data.
I intend to 'google' common search terms then list those sites on a spreadsheet then check their competitiveness.
One metric I can use is 'age' by going to whois and checking 'creation date' but I'm wondering what else I can do.
Thanks in advance for your help :smile:
 
Not sure if it's ok to toot my own horn, but I have a work around for your problem....serpwoo.com

Oddly enough, I just did a video on my spin for finding out if a niche ( and competitors ) are too hard or not.

 
If you're dealing with traditional marketing, all of the typical SEO metrics aren't going to matter as much as looking at what they're spending on PPC advertising and stuff like that. But it sounds like, based on what you said in the OP, that you are talking about SEO and organic rankings.

At this point in time I'd say that there are two factors that are most important beyond any other, followed up by a third that is still leagues beyond other attempts to detect competitiveness. These are:
  1. Domain Age (Uninterrupted & indexed with content on it)
  2. Domain Authority (Links & social shares to all pages on the site)
  3. On-Page SEO of page
The Page Authority can matter but you can get spanked by a brand new page on a site with more age and domain authority. You can also get spanked by a page on a lesser domain with much better on-page optimization.

So the question becomes how you get all of this data quickly for a lot of search terms. I agree that SERPWoo above covers most of it, but they currently don't give you a quick snapshot of on-page SEO (and actually that's a pretty complicated thing. The best you can get is whether or not they covered the basics of putting the keywords in the right places). For that I like a certain module in Market Samurai software.

BUT! At this point I think you can safely assume for any term with reasonable competition, the pages are going to be optimized. You don't often find un-optimized content any more, unless you're digging in the 100 volume range.
 
Thank you Eliquid and Ryuzaki for your replies. I watched the video and found your commentary particularly interesting as you shared your experiences.
The market I'm in is tourism, and I am going to set up as an affiliate with trip advisor and amazon. I then plan to start writing blogs on resorts, picking the resorts based on the competitiveness of the SERP, hopefully some of the smaller resorts wont be too competitive.
My website according to whois is 14 years old, not sure if it's been continually indexed or not. I use the Moz tool bar and according to that the domain authority is not registering, so likely zero.
How can I tell if the site has been continually indexed?
 
gelsi said:
How can I tell if the site has been continually indexed?
Click to expand...
I'm not sure how, but I've seen some people act as if they can tell. Your best bet would be to dig through the Wayback Machine archives and see what was on it going back through it's history.
 
Wayback isnt too helpful; shows screenshots for 2004 and has corresponding pages. Then no screenshots 'til 2014. 2014 to 2018 a few claims to have screenshots but when clicked on says 'nothing available'. I've seen this often with other sites I've searched.
Last Nov I bought 5 sites via domain hunter gatherer , all had history on wayback going back to the time DHG had said they were created. But after registering them the date on WHOIS was when I resurrected them (Nov 2017).
I bought 2 on godaddy auctions and they had the original creation dates (2004 +2005) on the WHOIS directory.
So maybe the WHOIS creation date is an indicator of if they are continuous indexed or not, but I doubt it.
 
A domain can be consistently owned for 15 years without dropping that ownership, yet have periods of time where there's no website on the domain. So the WhoIs definitely isn't a foolproof method of checking indexation.

But the reason the ones on GoDaddy auctions and other registrar auctions is that they "catch the drops" before they drop and go back to the general public as a fresh new resale. That's how the WhoIs creation date stays intact. It doesn't indicate constant indexation but it does mean, a majority of the time, that the link juice can be resurrected if done carefully. This is how most PBN's are built.
 
gelsi said:
How can I discover the link juice?
Click to expand...
You need something like Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz, etc. to see how many current live links still exist pointing into the domain. Not just the homepage but internal pages too (which you want to recreate or 301 to a very closely related post so Google doesn't reset it).
 
HARD WAY
1. Sign up to Google AdWords Keyword Idea Generator and find a commercial keyword with the highest volume.
2. Plug that keyword into Google and review results
3. If top 8 is dominated by EDU or GOV, give up... move on.
4. If top 8 is dominated by large well-funded sites, give up... move on.
5. If it isnt, then visit the top 4... review if the keyword is in the H1 or other typical On Page areas, if it isnt... might be good.
6. Decide if you can beat the top 4 in regards to content quality and user experience. If you can, this might be it. If not... give up... move on.

EASY WAY
Plug in the market into SEM RUSH. There are heaps of free 30-day trials out there. This will give you an idea.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back