This series picks back up on how to start and compete in a competitive market. Here is part 1 which our main point was to Know who your competition is. We are building on that idea. Now that we know which companies are competing in this space we need to know more about each one. Based on the last post you should have made a list of some competitors. My list ended up being about 20 people since this is pretty competitive. I also started to notice patterns for each site, more on that later.

Research the details of your competition.

I used a free site analyzer tool called Ubersuggest to research a few pieces of competitors' sites. Sticking to your list, add in these items to each site. How many pages does each site have? -- Not that you need to start with a 3,000 page website but look for the patterns. In my case, the sites I saw were very small but the content on those pages was way beyond anything I think people would read. What keywords do they rank for? -- Right keywords are paramount. By reviewing this it can help you know which keywords to start targeting and it may even give you ideas you had not thought of. In my case I saw that the pages on the sites were built for people who might be interested in selling their homes but the articles on the site were all geared to other investors. This lack of continuity gave me some ideas on how to write articles. Number of backlinks -- The more a site has the higher it ranks. A backlink is a digital way of saying, “this link is important and has valid information you should read.” You will want to get as many as you can but this is built over time. In my case most sites had a ton of backlinks but the backlinks were from very low ranking sites. 50 backlinks from bad, spammy, websites are not nearly as valid as 1 backlink from a great website. But how are sites graded? Read the next item... What is the site’s Domain Authority (DA) score? -- This score is out of a possible 100. The sites that have a 100 are sites like Google, Microsoft, etc… so you will probably start competing with the single digit sites and then work up form there. Using Ubersuggest you can see the DA for any site. I looked for patterns and noticed that most DA scores on page 1 were in the 50s, page 2 were in the teens, and page 3 results were in the low single digits. Just hold on to all that info since the goal was to see patterns and plan the attack. We will pickup on this series in the next post.