How to Find Pages That Send Your Competitors Organic Search Traffic

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm gonna show you how to get more organic traffic by analyzing and replicating the pages that are sending your competitors the most traffic from Google stay tuned [Music] what's up guys samo here with 8 reps I've got a super actionable SEO tutorial for you today that approaches competitor analysis for SEO from a very important angle and that's traffic so this research method is super helpful because basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna find the exact pages that are driving the most search traffic to your competitors websites and then use that data to increase organic traffic to your own website so let me show you how it's done the tool that I'll be using is HRF site Explorer which gives you a ton of data on any website or page like backlink reports keyword metrics organic search traffic and more so first you need to enter in the domain of one of your competitors here in site explorer and by competitors I'm referring to people who are actually getting organic search traffic from Google now there are two ways that you can actually find a list of competitors and the first is pretty straightforward you just throw in some search queries related to your business into Google and then you look for the websites that are ranking for the keyword phrases that you want to rank for so for our example let's pretend that I have a golf blog since the sport is very dear to my heart I might search for something like best golf clubs or how to hit a driver with the first search query you can see that Golf Digest com owns a couple of the top rankings followed by PG calm and then you'll see something interesting you'll see Business Insider calm now Golf Digest seems like a pretty relevant competitor just by looking at their domain name in p/j calm is the official site for the Professional Golfers Association now Business Insider on the other hand is more of a general website that covers nearly every topic Under the Sun so they wouldn't be a good fit for our competitor analysis there's also another cool way to find competitors that you might not even know exist but I'll show you that in a bit since it comes later in the workflow if you want to scale this technique alright so back to site Explorer I'll enter in our competitors domain here and hit Search so one site Explorer loads you can click on the pages report in the sidebar and boom you are now looking at the pages that send your competitor the most organic search traffic okay so take a look right here you'll likely see a bunch of flags here which are actually filters by default the top pages report will choose the country that sends the most search traffic for the website that you're researching so in this case it has defaulted to the US of A now if you want to get a more accurate representation of the total SEO traffic to the pages you can switch this filter to all countries and you'll see that the numbers here get bigger with the top pages report there's a lot of cool stuff we can do here so first I'm going to break down these important metrics and then I'll show you a couple simple workflows that will actually help you put this into action since we're looking at the top pages of this domain this report will sort the table by the pages that receive the most search traffic and beside each traffic figure you can see the percentage of search traffic each page generates for a website in the selected country so in this case this story on Bill Clinton would account for around 3 percent of the total search traffic across our domain search sometimes you might find that certain pages bring your competitors over 30% of their overall search traffic 30% now when you find a site where the traffic is not diluted across all of their pages it's usually a good indication that the website you're analyzing is the perfect target to find some great topics that you can just piggyback off of next we have the value column which shows the equivalent amount it would cost to generate this many search visitors with pay-per-click advertising and this is based on clicks from all the keywords this page ranks for multiplied by the cost per click the next metric is one of my favorites and that's the keywords column which shows you how many keywords that the page is ranking for and if you click it then you can actually see all of the different search queries that page ranks for in the top 100 Google search results this goes to show that keyword research isn't just about targeting a single keyword but it's proof that a single page can actually rank for tens hundreds and even thousands of different keyword phrases we have a more detailed study on our blue where we actually analyzed three million random search queries and our data shows that the average number one ranking page will also rank for around a thousand other relevant keywords this is definitely worth a read so I'll leave a link to it in the description below alright so next we have our D which is short for referring domains so this column shows the total number of unique websites linking to the target URL and then we have the page URL which is pretty straightforward the next couple of metrics are also interesting the top keyword column shows the keyword that brings the most organic search traffic to its corresponding URL and then the column beside it is the estimated search volume for that top keyword finally is position and that's where HR F's last saw the page ranking in Google SERPs okay great now that you can see the top pages of your competitors websites what's next so the beauty of the top pages and actually almost all of HS reports is that there are some super helpful filters that you can use to narrow down the results and actually see the metrics that you care about the first thing you can do is set up some filters similar to this so first we'll set the positions to 0 to 5 which is going to show us only the pages that ranked in the top 5 results of Google then we'll set the traffic filter to have a minimum of 500 search visitors you might have to play around with a minimum search visitors number a bit depending on the site that you're analyzing so I do want to mention a quick side note here you might notice that the total reported traffic value and the keywords number they decreased and the reason why is because the keyword rankings below the top 5 were filtered out when we set this filter and the same goes for the minimum search traffic filter that we set from here you can export the list to CSV and with the CSV export you can do some pretty cool stuff in Excel to find high traffic topics without much competition here's how I've already set this up in a Google sheet since most of us should have access to this tool so first I'm gonna freeze the first row so you can see the columns as I scroll down and then we can actually sort the table by the referring domains in ascending order what this is gonna do is it's gonna reveal pages that are getting a ton of traffic without any or many backlinks now with this particular site you'll notice that there are a of top stories since a lot of the content is news based but there are also some low-hanging content ideas you can dissect from this report check this one out this page ranks in the second position for the top keyword ping Zhi irons which is a branded type of golf club in this table also shows that this page receives about 677 search visitors with zero referring domains which is pretty surprising to me now this might be a topic that you want to create content around because you know that the competition is low and that the traffic is actually at a pretty decent amount considering that they're not even ranking in the number one position one more cool thing you can do in the top pages report is to find individual pages that get a ton of traffic and basically create an entire outline for your content using the keywords that they rank for so I've cleared the filters already and the only thing you really need to do is sort the table by traffic in descending order which is already done by default so if we skip through some of the branded search queries like these ones as well as the ones that don't have much context or commercial value you'll see this cool one here you can see that the top keyword is best golf drivers in this page ranks for over 2,600 relevant search queries with over 12,000 monthly search visitors which is actually a conservative estimation not the actual traffic value now I'm sure these pages also get traffic from other sources like social referral traffic email etc in fact the actual SEO traffic will almost always be higher than what HS reports so let's say that I wanted to create my own post on the best golf drivers what I can do is click here under the keywords column to open up a pool of relevant keywords that this page is ranking for and by analyzing these I can basically create an entire outline of what I should be covering in my blog post for example it's 2018 but people are still searching for a best list from 2017 and they also want drivers that are known for distance you can click on the next 100 link here to see more of the keywords that they're ranking for then you'll probably want to talk about game improvement drivers maybe create this post in a review like style and then talk about different handicaps and to make sure to include something about mid handicap and you can see that all of these ranked in the top or near the top of Google which shows high relevance for the content to the searchers intent so rather than spending your time creating multiple pages targeting a single or just a few keyword phrases you can confidently focus on creating just one just one epic post on drivers now that you've seen the top pages report in action it doesn't mean that it's time to stop your research you can obviously search for more competitors in Google or you can go to the competing domains report inside site Explorer if you look in the sidebar you'll see the competing domains report here this page will show you a list of websites that ranked in the top ten for the same keywords as this competing website now when you're looking at this report you'll see that there are some irrelevant sites like Wikipedia and Twitter so a quick way to look for relevant competitors is to scan for lots of green in the visual bar here the blue color represents the amount of unique keywords for the website we're analyzing the green represents the number of shared common keywords and the yellow portion shows the corresponding sites unique keyword rankings in this example you can instantly see that golf comm PGA com golfchannel.com and golf week com are all highly relevant sites to this domain you can just rinse and repeat this entire process that we just went through and find an endless number of topics that you can use as inspiration and then create new content for your site I hope you enjoyed this SEO tutorial and that you'll start using the top pages report to increase organic traffic to your website now make sure to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more actionable tutorials in our marketing with HRF series I gotta get going because I have an important place to be so I'll see you soon my fellow marketing compadres [Music]