How to Spy on Your Competitors' SEO & Steal Their Traffic Through Competitor Analysis

- You shouldn't start any SEO campaign until you do this. Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm gonna share with you how to spy on your competition. (upbeat electronic music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel that way when we release more tips, you'll get notified. Question for you. Do you know how much search traffic your competition's getting? If you do, leave a comment below with yes. If you don't, leave a comment below with no. Now I'm gonna share with you how you can get all of this information and best of all, for free. So step one, go to a tool called Ubersuggest. You can Google it. You can go to neilpatel.com/ubersuggest or ubersuggest.com. Pick whatever way you had there. I now want you to type in a URL of your competitors. It could be any of them. Step two, you're gonna see a report that just loaded up. This is gonna give you their overall traffic per region. You'll notice that Ubersuggest breaks it down per region and this is important. You'll find that your sales will mainly come from a few different regions. Even if you're a global business, you'll be stronger in certain regions over others. For example, Salesforce does really well in the United States. Their number two market is Japan. You may think oh, it could be United Kingdom or Germany, but it really ranges for each and every single business. This is why Ubersuggest, it's broken down per region. Now I want you to scroll down and look at top pages. Click through that. Step three, now that you're on top pages, I want you to dive really deep into what's driving your competitors their traffic. See this top pages report breaks down the most popular piece of content on your competitor's website. How many social shares these pages are getting from sites like Facebook. How many back links each of these pages are getting. Who's linking to each and every single one of these videos.

How many keywords each of these pages are ranked for and what are those keywords. What is the cost per click for those keywords. You just click that view all button and you can see all of that. And by seeing that you can figure out oh, here are the keywords that are driving traffic, here are the ones that aren't. Here are the ones that are high cost per click, here's the ones that are low cost per click. Step four, now that you clicked view all in the keyword category for any of your top competitor's pages, I want you to dive into all those keywords. Keep going next, next, next, and you can see a laundry list of all the keywords that are driving traffic. The reason this is important is you'll be able to spot the keywords that are driving the majority of the traffic, that have a high cost per click, and a low search difficulty score. A low search difficulty or SEO difficulty SDERF, search difference easy to rank for. If that keyword is easy to rank for, has a high cost per click, and does a lot of traffic, what does that tell you? That keyword if you rank organically, will get you traffic. Now the next thing I want you to do is go to the top keywords page. This report shows you all the keywords in general that your competition's getting traffic from. And you can keep going next, next, next. The same thing you want to look for is the keywords that have a high cost per click, high amounts of traffic, and have a low search difficulty. If they have a low search difficulty, that means you can rank for these terms faster. Now the next thing you need to do after you type in a handful of your competitors is type in some of these keywords that you're thinking about going after. The reason you want to do this is if you type in these keywords into Ubersuggest, it'll give you more feedback on that keyword, the overall cost per click, overall trends when it comes to traffic over each and every single month 'cause some keywords have seasonality, you'll also notice all the variations of that keyword. When you go into the keyword's ideas report, which is what I want you to do next,

and you'll see a laundry list of other suggestions. Both runs that come from Google Suggest and others that come from Google Ad Words if you click on the related keywords. And the beautiful part about this report is it will show you on the right hand side everyone who ranks for this term, how many social shares do they have, how many visitors are they getting, how competitive that term is. Now you have a understanding of what everyone in your space is doing. You take all that data, you even take the social shares people are getting. It will even give you ideas on what kind of content you should create, what keywords you should be going after, and what keywords are gonna be driving your sales. Because if you see a lot of your competitors going after the same keywords creating content on similar subjects, that means they're making money from it and you should consider doing the same. Now you don't want to just do the same as your competition and create the same kind of content. It could be on the same subject, but you need to go above and beyond. Brian Dean has this article called the Skyscraper Technique. Follow it, read it. It talks about building content that's 10 times better. You know those crazy building in Dubai and they're just like oh, we're not gonna build a building that's one or two stories taller, we're gonna build a building that's double the height. We're gonna build a building that's a seven star hotel, not a five star hotel. We're gonna one up everyone. They just go so above and beyond and that's a concept of the Skyscraper Technique. So when you see what your competition's doing, you don't wanna just do what they're doing, you wanna go above and beyond and beat them so much that they would not even dare to copy you. If you follow that, you'll now know what your competition's doing and what you need to do to beat them. Now if you need help growing your search traffic, check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital. And if you enjoyed watching this video, like it, share it, subscribe to it. And if you have a question, leave a comment below and I'll make sure I answer it. Thank you for watching.