If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get a head start on your competition, just make them do your homework. That’s right, when you reverse engineer your competitors, you build on their successes and avoid their mistakes. Here’s how you do it.
Be clear about your niche
Your first step is to be absolutely clear about your niche. You need to figure out the following:
- Who’s your target audience?
- Where do they hang out?
- What products are you selling?
- And are your ideal audience members currently buying products or services similar to yours?
If you’re unclear about the answers you’re getting to the questions above you need to make adjustments in how you identify and define your niche. It may turn out that your ideal market is a subniche of a much larger market. Whatever the case may be, be clear about your niche.
Find your competitors
Now that you have a laser focus on the sub-niche you’re targeting, the next step is to go to Google Keyword Planner tool. Open a Google ads account and you should get access to this tool. Enter broad keywords that you think are related to your niche. Set up the keyword planner tool to give you ideas regarding more targeted keywords.
You should be able to get more filtered or a better targeted list of keywords. Your next step is to enter these into Google. Study the results closely. Now that you have a good idea of the sub-niche you’re targeting and your ideal audience. Now is the time to be honest. Are these really my competitors? Are they selling to the people I’m trying to reach?
This is no time for wishful thinking. If you’re not sure if a website you pulled up using your target keywords is really your competitor, don’t put it on your list. Only list down websites that you are sure are targeting the same people you want to market to.
Enter your competitors’ domains into paid SEO tools
There’re lots of paid SEO tools available on the market. The most powerful ones are Ahrefs.com and SEMrush.com. Take your pick. There are cheaper options out there but they may not be as accurate or as comprehensive as the two tools I named above.
Regardless, enter your competitor list into your paid SEO tool of choice. Click on organic keywords. You should see a list of keywords that your competitor’s websites triggers. Collect all these and put them into an Excel spreadsheet.
Filter your competitor keywords by ranking difficulty
Now that you have dumped all your competitor’s keywords into a master spreadsheet it’s time to filter. The first thing that you’re going to do is to set the keyword difficulty threshold for your filter. I usually set mine to 14%.
At that level you should be able to easily rank for your target keywords, if you create halfway decent content based on these keywords. Of course, the lower the keyword difficulty the better.
Filter your competitor keywords by monthly search volume
You cannot afford to skip this step. You do not want to find yourself in the sad situation where you rank all your target keywords but get very little traffic.
This happens when you focus solely on keyword difficulty and ignore search volume. You’re filtering for keywords that are easy to rank, but also pull in a decent amount of traffic.
Now here’s the tricky part: finding a minimum search volume threshold depends on your niche. Some niches get very little traffic. There aren’t too many users for those niches. Now if you’re able to convert a small fragment of that search volume you stand to make a lot of money. These are niches like Gold IRA or other specialized finance niches.
Don’t obsess about numbers, but focus on the average volume of your sub-niche. Still, you have to pick niches that get a decent amount of monthly searches. Adjust this up or down based on your niches overall traffic volume.
Hand filter your keywords by entering them into Google
Now here comes the sensitive part: you cannot be lazy about this step. You have to do this by hand. You also have to invest the right amount of time and focus to do it right.
Enter one or two words into Google and be completely honest with yourself regarding the results. Are they related to your niche? If so, do they relate to your audience? By asking these questions you should have a good understanding of whether the keywords that you’re targeting pull up content that clearly addresses the intent behind those keywords.
This is crucial because the keywords that you are researching have an intent behind them. Do you understand it? Would you be able to produce content that delivers on that intent? If the answer is “No,” you’re just wasting your time. You might be creating content that people using these keywords are not interested in.
There has to be a one-to-one correlation behind the intent behind those keywords and the content that you create targeting those keywords.
Use Surfer SEO to contextualize your target keywords
Your next step is to take your remaining keywords after you’ve filtered them using the steps above and enter them one by one into Surfer SEO. You don’t necessarily have to use Surfer SEO, it does have many competitors like Frase or Postpace, but you need to use a content optimization tool.
These tools pull up contextual keywords that are related to your main target keyword. These are called latent semantic indexing keywords or LSI. LSI is just a fancy term for “companion keywords” that set up the proper context for your target keyword.
Put simply, Google is more likely to rank your site higher than your competitors because you’re showing your target keywords with other keywords that normally show up with it at higher ranked content.
Using Surfer SEO also helps you get a good idea about the proper word count of your articles. A lot of online publishers waste a lot of time and money publishing content that is either too short or too long.
Surfer SEO will tell you what the ideal length of your content should be so you can rank higher. It will also let you know how many pictures and headings you should put in your content so you can beat your competition.
Do this before writing your content
I know at this point you’re excited about reverse engineering your competitor’s content. After all, you have all the information you need to possibly outrank your existing competitors.
But I need you to slow down, because you need to be clear about the quality of the content that you are going to produce. It’s not enough to know the technical element that will go into an article or a blog post that will rank higher.
At this stage you have to focus on your quality guidelines. This is how you do it. First, pull up the top ten results for each of your target keywords. Ask yourself, given what I’m seeing, will my content be superior to these results?
By this point you should get information from the top ten results. You should also pick up clues on how they structured their content.
After you read enough of the results, a certain pattern emerges. You will see that the content flows a certain way and they’re organized a certain way. You will also get a sense of how these articles and blog posts position your target keyword.
You have to ask yourself, given all this information that I’ve taken from these pages, how do I make my content superior?
Here’s a quick checklist
- Your content must contain more comprehensive information
- Your content must contain clustered questions
- Will your content be snippet ready?
- Is your content easier to read?
- Is it easy to scan?
- Does your content have better flow?
- Is your content more engaging?
- Did you bother to get custom diagrams or unique pictures that are specific to your topic?
- Did you bother to embed relevant videos from YouTube on your page?
This means that none of those ten results will have the exact same information your page will have.
People think in terms of questions. That’s how they organize the information they find on the internet. Organize your content accordingly. Feed the information to your viewer using targeted questions.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you enter a question into Google your results will take the form of snippets. Google will show the exact answer to your question if it can find it. Make sure you set up your content the same way.
If somebody asks a question in one of your headings, the following section should be compact and bite sized enough to deliver the answer to the question clearly without losing any details. If you get enough of these snippets to Google your site’s overall rankings will go up. Write your content to be snippet ready.
Now that you’ve read the top ten results of your target keyword you should already have a good idea of their overall quality.
Do you write for people with a college degree? If so then your content might be more complicated that it needs to be. Tone down your word choice. Set it up so people who only have a Sixth-grade education can easily understand and follow your content.
A lot of online publishers screw this up. They write their content in large paragraphs and they use either too many subheadings or too little. Whatever the case may be, their content is hard to scan.
One look at your page and people get the sense that you have to sit down and plough through your content to make sense of it. The moment they get that impression – they leave.
Make sure your content is easy on the eyes and it’s not intimidating at all. There have to be enough subheadings and the paragraphs and sentences have to be short.
Did you line up the different sub questions that your article or blog post answers in a logical way? Does one section build on and add value to the section of content before it? This is how you know your content has superior flow.
The rule of thumb for using multimedia materials is simple: they must add value to your text.
Tidy up your text
At this point you’ve finished writing your second draft or even third draft of your post. You’re probably ready to call it a day. Don’t call it quits yet. You have to enter your text into Grammarly or any other online grammar checker. Make sure your quality score on Grammarly is at least 96 and there have to be zero grammar errors.
If you’re using Surfer SEO to optimize your content make sure that your SEO score is 90 or higher.
I know that this is kind of a hard balancing act between getting the grammar right and making sure you mention enough contextual keywords from Surfer SEO, but you have to walk that tightrope.
This is worth the hassle and the extra focus because chances are your competitors aren’t going through this. If you go through this extra step, you increase your chances of dominating them in the search results.
The final word on reverse engineering your competitors
Using the steps above you can quickly leapfrog your competitors. If you don’t use the process that I’ve described it can take you months, if not more than a year to get out of the Google sandbox if you have a brand-new site.
But even if your site is already ranking and is quite established, following the steps above enable you to quickly reverse engineer your competitors easier to rank pages.
Once enough of your pages rank on Google you can then shoot for more competitive or difficult keyword targets.
Need a professional to reverse engineer your competition for you? Contact Gene Eugenio for expert reverse SEO help