Working out who we’re really up against in the search engines is hard at the best of times. Our biggest competitors may well not be who we think they are. However, we’ve been getting a lot of great information out of the new True Competitor Tool in the Moz Pro suite of (paid-for) tools.
True Competitor pulls the ranking keywords (by volume) for domains in the Moz Keyword Explorer database and analyses recent Google results to find out who we’re truly competing against, across the board.
The tool combines the existing ‘Domain Authority’ (DA) metric with ‘Overlap’ and ‘Rivalry’ measurements. These look at the percentage of shared keywords where our site and the competitor both rank in the top 10 results; and for the overlapping keywords, our site’s ranking and the proximity of the two sites’ DA scores.
Then we can create a table comparing our site’s ranking with any two selected competitors for the top ten most relevant keywords. Warning: for most of us, it probably won’t be what we expect!
We’ll probably give this a go for a few clients over the next few weeks, but if you’re a client and would like to be pushed to the top of the list, let us know. Other readers may like to try it out themselves: they usually have a free trial on.