Competition within your niche - how to deal with it
The Internet is full of every topic imaginable, in every branch of operen you face competition on this. Whether this is on the keywords you want to appear for. The ads you want to run, or the companies or audiences you want to target.
If you still find niches or markets where this is not the case, then you are at the foot of a great opportunity, or it has been known for a long time that this niche is not profitable to invest in. For example, to start a webshop about fidget spinners now you are already a few years too late. In this blog, we share some tips on how to look and determine what your competition is, and how to capitalize on opportunities that may exist.
Who are your competitors?
Identifying your competitors is an important step for any business or website, once you know who is more in the same field then you can anticipate and take this into account. You can see what and where the other websites are doing, and look around to see how they have set things up. And from there decide, for example, what your website is going to look like roughly, what domain name you can use. Just don't register a domain name that is too close to it, this is asking for retaliation or legal action.
To do this, you can take a look in the Google search engine to see if they come up with the terms you also have in mind. Map out for yourself what these terms are as well. They are very important for more reasons if you want to advertise or appear in the organic results. To understand more about your competitors, you can also use certain online tools. Let's cover these further below.
Seeing more information about your competitors
Manually digging out every website of your competitors is often not the best way to deal with this, for this there are several tools created to make this task easier. And more streamlined. With a little effort, you can then determine which terms are feasible to bet on and whether someone will actually search for your terms. However, these numbers are always estimates, and not an exact percentage that search for these. After all, only Google has this data, and it will not be released anytime soon.
Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush and Screaming Frog can be used to see what is possible online and locally. And how your website is performing with current terms and pages. With extensive scans that you can run on both your own website hosting and that of the competition, you can gain insight into what the competition has as a basis. And how you can expand on this.
These tools are often free to use in their most basic form, but it quickly pays to invest in them to gain access to more information.
Blind copying is never a good idea
It is of course tempting to copy and rewrite all the pages and posts that your competition is scoring with. However, this is often not the best way to go about it. Instead, determine which posts, pages or products are most popular with your competition. And try to address these in a new way and from a different angle. Stay original with your content and always try to put the reader first, rather than Google's crawlers.
Don't underestimate how much effort it can be to compete
It may seem like a small task to take a competitor's spot, however, this is no longer obvious in almost all branches. Most websites in fields that have long been founded can have thousands of pages of content and links to them. The team may also be much larger, where you employ 1 writer, or even still write all the text yourself. Can your competitor pump out 10 pieces of content every day with a larger team.
To take a small example that we ourselves are known for, our knowledge base, consists of more than 500 articles that are constantly updated and expanded. However, this has been years of work to get to this level. Suppose you wanted to recreate something similar in a profitable topic, this would be a nice task to mimic and rewrite in your own style.
And with just rewriting the content you are often not there yet, content that exists for a while is linked to via external sources. Also called backlinks. These can still count heavily in 2022, although links marked as SPAM by Google can actually have a negative effect.
Focus on the foundation of your own website
So focus on the content of your website after the initial competitive analysis, and make sure that you build yourself something that matches Google's guidelines. Try not to use shortcuts that are put down as the way to rise to first place in a week. If something is too good to be true. Then it is.
Do not fall into the trap of endlessly peering at the numbers and statistics, at some point you will stop yourself from developing and building the foundation of your website. Competition exists in almost every aspect of life, don't let it stop you from starting that website of your dreams.
Want to be helped throughout this process and put some questions to our SEO experts? Then take a look at our partner MijnWebdesignPartner.nl. We are here to help you set up a strategy to get the best out of your website!
