DIY SEO #8:Determining the Competitiveness of Your Local Competition

As a local organization, determining the competitiveness of your competition can be tricky.  You need to search both regular keywords (no local modifiers) and local keywords.  You will most likely find both other local organizations and national organizations in the results.  If that isn’t enough, you also aren’t playing on a level playing field.

You’re Special
As a local organization competing for local visitors, you have an advantage.  When the search engines determine that location in important in relation to what a person is looking for the search engines will serve up local organizations in the search results, even if they aren’t as well optimized or have as many links as the national competitors.

So, the good news is that you get a leg up.  The bad news is you don’t really know how much of a leg up you get and it may be different for each keyword.  So, we have to slightly change our strategy for checking your competition.

Your Local Competition
Start by checking out your competition that is local.  So, look up keywords with local terms in them and find other organizations that are local to your area.  Then do the competition research as shown in the main article.

Note: You might think that because you are dealing with local competition that you should change what you consider a competitive site in terns of inbound links, but remember that you can get links from anywhere and you can employ link building strategies that can attract lots of links that aren’t just limited to your local area.  So, you may find that some of your competition has millions of links.  If not (heh, heh), you can

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Non-Local Competition
Next, search for the non-local keywords.  As you go through the results, look for local organizations.  To be clear, we aren’t looking for local search results (i.e. Google Places listings or Bing Business Portal listings), we are looking for regular search results that happen to be for organizations local to your area.  If you don’t see any local organizations in the results, then do the competition research just as described in the main article.  If you do see local organizations in the results, then this can give you an idea of the boost you are getting for being local.

Make sure you do the competition research on those local sites.  That’s about the level of competition you are really going up against.  Keep in mind, however, where they are in the results.  if they are ranked in the top 3, then that really is what your competition is.  If they are ranked #10, then you’re going to have to do better than they are in order to get into the top 3 results.

Photo by shaggy359

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DIY SEO #7: Keyword Competition Research <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #9: Determining Local Competition