What are niche competitors?
In business, a niche competitor is a company that competes with another in a specific, limited market segment but not in all its markets. That limited part of the market is called a niche or a niche market.
Suppose Company A makes all types of cameras, including mirrorless cameras. Company B makes only mirrorless cameras. It competes directly with Company A’s mirrorless cameras in that part of the market but does not compete with Company A in other parts of the camera market. Company B is a niche competitor of Company A.
Why is important to check your business competitors?
Researching your niche competitors can give you a very good idea of the market you want to target. Also, it will show you how strong your competitors are in your selected niche.
By understanding your competitors’ positioning strategy (how they are perceived in the consumer’s eyes), it’s easier to get a handle on the demands and expectations of your target niche as a whole.
You need to check in detail why customers arae choosing them. Some ideas on things you might want to check are:
- Do they provide quality service, or are they focused on affordable solutions?
- What is their unique selling proposition, how do they differ from the rest?
- Are they on top of new niche trends?
- How often do they create new content?
- What social networks do they use to promote their goods?
It’s also a good idea to uncover the financial strength of your business competition before you jump into the same niche. The last thing you want is to discover that you’re up against big companies with a massive budget to create content and promote it, which will reduce your chances to be found against them.
Ideally, you want to focus on a niche where you can get some shares in the market and make it to the Google page one to gain exposure.
Also, by analyzing your niche competitors, you can learn what strategies they are applying. This can be a powerful method to learn what is working for them and might work for you as well.
How to identify your niche competitors.
Finding your competitors is not complicated. However, you should first differentiate between direct and indirect competitor:
- Direct competitors. Refers to companies or publishers who sell or market the same or similar products as your business. Your customers will often evaluate both you and your direct competitors before making a purchase decision or converting.
- Indirect competitors. Refers to the companies or publishers that sell a product or service in the same category as you, but it’s different enough to act as a substitute for your product or service.
In this case, we need to take a closer look at direct competitors only.
You might already know who your top competitors are. But if you don’t, the easiest way to find out your competitors is with a Google search:
Step #1. Head to Google, and type your niche, i.e. training for women.
Step #2. Browse Google search results, click on the results related to your niche, and inspect the website, not just the page result.
Step #3. Inspect the website to find out your direct competitors.
If the website has only a few topics covering this niche or just this one, this website probably focuses on another niche. It won’t be a direct niche competitor. The about section can also help you find easily what the website is about.
However, If the results you find are totally focused on this niche, and most of their content is about this niche, they are direct competitors.
Find Your Niche Competitors Top Keywords.
SEO tools can be helpful for many things, and finding your competitors top keywords is one of them.
If you don’t have an SEO tool yet, you can use SE Ranking free trial for this purpose.
Step #1. Head to SE Ranking and go to the Key Research module.
Step #2. Enter your niche idea or niche keyword and hit search.
Step #3. Scroll down to the Organic search results section and click on View detailed report.
Step #4. The detailed report will take to a massive list with all the organic results from potential competitors.
Next, click on relevant results, and SE Ranking will take you to the competitive research providing you more information about each of these competitors.
Step #5. Change from URL to domain.com in the box at the top and click on the search icon.
Step #6. Lastly, you will be able to find out if this is a direct competitor based on the organic keywords report. Moreover, you can untap hundreds of keywords, learn who your competitors direct competitors, and a lot more practical information.
To find a complete list of keywords, including the difficulty score and volume, click on view detailed report on the organic keyword section.
Step #7. Scroll down until you see the keyword list. This is a very powerful method to find out your competitor’s top organic keywords and also to “steal” some ideas and find low difficulty terms.
By clicking on a column, you can sort out the results and even run a filter with your desired values.
As you can see, even though this is a straightforward method, it can be incredibly powerful to find direct competitors and even to create a list of low, competitive keywords for your content creation strategy. A real goldmine!
Resources:
- SE Ranking Review: The all-in-one SEO tool.
- Keysearch- The most affordable SEO solution.
- AI SEO tools: Let these tools optimize your content for you.
Competitors Content Analysis.
Checkin the kind of content your competitors publish is a great method to learn how they attract their audience and also how they monetize.
Some things you want to pay attention when studying your competitors content are:
- How often they post content?
- What kind of content do they write about?
- How are they engaging with their audience?
- How do they convert their readers into subscribers?
- How long are their blog post? 500 words? 2,000 words?
- How do they monetize?
These can be some useful questions that can help you greatly. You might learn some good strategies you can apply to your website. Also, you should try to improve whatever they are doing to “borrow” some of their readers.
Content is the main aspect to analyze in your competitor’s website- Check if they focus on listicle or how-to articles if they use more videos than images and things like that. They probably have already optimized their strategy and use what works the best. So why not taking advantage of that?
My personal advice is to analyze every aspect, write them down in a list, and then create something better. Generating better content than your competitors is the best way to get rankings and an audience faster.
Moreover, you should also check their top-performing pages. This will help you understand which topic drives the traffic and how they have their top pages optimized for conversions.
Step #1. Head again to SE Ranking to the Competitive Research module. Type your competitor’s domain in the search bar and click analyze.
Step #2. Scroll down to top pages in organic search, and click view detailed report.
Step #3. Here you will find the full list with the top pages by traffic. I suggest you check topics and how the top three performing pages are optimized.
With this method, you will be able to learn lots of valuable data within a few minutes of your time can have a positive impact on your strategy.
Analyze your competitor’s traffic source.
Most of your competitors will likely be using SEO to drive most of the traffic. But that does not mean it is the only strategy.
A very easy and effective way to check how you competitor is driving traffic to his site is by using Similar Web.
All you need to do is:
Step #1. Head to Similiar web, type your competitor domain and click “Search.”
Step #2. Scroll down to traffic sources and you will find how they drive traffic to their site:
For this example, you can clearly see that most traffic is search traffic (organic.) Then it also has some direct traffic, probably coming from their email list, referrals, and social.
If you keep scrolling down, you can also find which keywords are the top 5 driving traffic, top referrals and which social networks drive the most traffic.
In this case, Facebook is what drives most of their social media traffic.
With Similar Web, there is a lot of valuable information you can learn about traffic. So you might want to analyze your top competitors and maybe try to replicate what works best for them.
Conclusion.
Checking your niche competitors is a vital part of niche research.
It can help you in many possible ways: From deciding if you want to go ahead with your niche idea to find methods and keyword ideas to monetize your niche website.
With this article, you should be able to take advantage of what your competitors are doing and apply it to your niche website.
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