How to analyze the competition for a website

Key Takeaways

on the first episode of business taco a question from Mike Hillman would you consider growing or marketing small business niches Etica as a category that is too saturated to go after well Mike will answer that question in this episode welcome to business taco the only show with tips you can learn in the time it takes to eat a taco or perhaps a po Rico here's how the game works we have to answer the question in the time it takes this random person who's not that random it's my wife to eat a taco so Ricky how do we find out if a niche is too saturated because this is something that everyone has to decide when you create a new website you have to decide one is there enough traffic and then two is it so competitive that I can't get a piece of it right and I think one of the the big things that we've discovered over time is that chances are you're going to overestimate your competition it's going to look like there's more competition than there really is so as we start start thinking about if a niche is a little bit too saturated to go after we start doing some competitive analysis and it's actually really pretty basic um we're gonna go to Google and we're gonna start looking stuff up now if I just go to Google and I type in growing a small business yeah I'm gonna get a lot of search results from some really top websites but if we start searching maybe some more specific terms specific search for agent phrases about growing a small business then we can start to get a feel for where there might be some openings yeah and this is completely different the way that we do this analysis is completely different than a way that most people do most people when you're trying to find out how competitive a keyword is you're gonna go to a tool you're going to go to a keyword tool and it will give you a number it's this you know however competitive the reason that we don't use those it's just because as we have compared those over years and thousands of articles that we've that we've written we compare reality to how well how hard it was to rank to the tools and like most of the time there's hardly a correlation between these two and so I feel like the tools leads you to make incorrect decisions which we've talked about in previous videos and that's why we kind of take a very down-to-earth practical approach to doing a competitive analysis because we found this to just work better for us so what happens if I type in how to grow a small business so this is what I told you not to do right because this is at the top level I'm going to see all of the biggest competition okay and you know I've got 27 low-cost ways to grow your small business five ways small business owners can grow in 2017 from Forbes okay fast company five essential principles for growing your small business these may not be fantastic articles but even if I ran a really good one I'm probably not going to outrank Fast Company in Forbes on a brand new website but that doesn't mean that it's overly competitive that what that means is I need to dig in a little bit deeper so what's something we could search related to growing or marketing a small business small business bookkeeping tips we're just trying to think of a keyword that's something in the small business space and now we're looking at these articles and we're really just asked asking ourself one question are these results so good that I don't think I could create a more helpful resource than this right so the first article is from entrepreneur com has a pretty authoritative site but it's from 2011 that's pretty old so that has an opening the next one is cabbage calm I have no idea what that is but it looks like they may be selling us some things you have software so that's a good sign we may be able to rank for this the next is the balance calm 5 bookkeeping tips for small business owners ok so that's right on point top 25 bookkeeping tips from the pros so what we're seeing here is there are kind of a mix of authoritative sites and knots or Thorat ativ sites well all of the articles are exactly on point they're exactly bookkeeping tips what gets us more excited is when it has like one article about bookkeeping tips for small business and then the other one is like accounting information or something things that are tangentially related that Google's tossing in there because it can't find a better result that's exactly right so I would say this is pretty competitive it is fairly competitive and because of that you know does that mean that it's so competitive that you can't carve out a niche you you probably can you just need to continue down this path okay so try three or four more different search phrases maybe more than that think about if you know if growing a small business is sort of your thing right and you're like well if I don't do that I don't really have a topic then okay what is your thing within growing a small business what what do you know about what would you write about and go do some searches around there and based on those topics you're gonna get an idea of what the competition really looks like yeah before I commit to making a niche site we gotta hershey's before I commit to making an entire niche site that's a months-long project I'm gonna want to do this a lot I'm gonna want to make sure that I can find 15 20 30 different keywords that the competition looks low now a couple other signals to look for since these were competitive other signals to look for that say this isn't so competitive is oh she's got almost the whole thing in her mouth no other signals are like if you see forum results yeah forum results are the lowest form of quality online and you know or if a result is really low from a website you've never heard of things like that will tell you that okay I can easily beat this but it's okay to see other articles written on the same topic but you just need to ask can I make a more helpful resource than that person if you can then it's a keyword you should write about dip as part of this business taco segment we want to invite you to participate in the business taco segment if you would like to be our next participant on business taco go ahead and go to what are we setup income scum school comm slash taco that's right and you just selfie mode record yourself eating a taco or perhaps a burrito yeah and just give us the email or give us the link to your video or you can send it through that form and then we'll show you and we'll give you a shout-out to your website if you have a URL for a website you work yeah and now for a dramatic reading of one of your YouTube comments which I found hilarious PDR zone says okay you say put a photo on your website or blog over 30 times how was never covered listen to this just put an article on your website how so with the photo on the blog page on the blogger on what part the front page the top the bottom common common jaimini asks how evergreen is niche citing going to be for the long term love seeing that as a verb by the way what if Google does something in the near or far future to change the game alright well let's get a taco going what do you think I mean are you afraid of just niche sites as a general business model becoming ineffective I'm not for multiple reasons one I don't like to live my life in fear of what might happen until I actually start to see indicators of a shift I'm not gonna make a big change for example I'm not gonna pull all my money out of the stock market because it might collapse one day okay and when I look at the internet there are some little shifts happening right people when they have a simple one-off question they'll just ask Google or Siri or Alexa an article called how many calories are in an orange is not a viable art all today because Google will just say 60 calories right you don't need to read an article about that it just gave you the answer so that cuts out you know one very specific type of post but I'm a machine Google as an algorithm is never gonna be able to write something like you know three mistakes I made in my business this year it can't do that it's not a human being it's not having human experiences and so while algorithms are going to be to change and continue to improve I think sure it still can't it's still not going to become human and so I'm not worried about that what I do consider a lot more is what about a format change what if people are reading more blog posts now and then they start transitioning to youtube instead of going to websites right and that is definitely a concern but you know what what we like to do is just keep our eyes out you know if we have websites and we start to see the traffic shifting away from our web sites and more toward YouTube then we're going to shift with it we also like to try to diversify where our traffic comes from so we don't do yeah we don't do we don't do all of our marketing just through YouTube to get people to our website you know you try to build up an email list or SEO articles to your website solutely exactly exactly why you will not be seeing in combe school creating a Facebook page because Facebook is just not sending that traffic and so we're not gonna play their way there we're gonna do something different and it's really just a matter of watching what's happening in the industry and then being nimble enough to move as those shifts happen over the last eight years of running websites I've seen some shifts and some of them were really scary when I had a following of 600,000 followers on Facebook and Facebook started to not really letting people see that my links to go to the website and stuff oh that hurt and that was really scary for a while and but you quickly learned to shift you say okay I've gotta get this audience and I've got to move them onto you know going to my website just typing it in every day to see new articles so maybe I'm going to start writing news or you know you say let's get them subscribed to the email list or whatever it is you can you can shift and adapt as long as you just have your eyes open and see what's coming down the pike in the industry right exactly and and again I just I hate the idea of living in fear of what might happen we can say yeah sure either Google might change something or the internet just may change the way people interact with it may change and it will but it's not going to be a night today tomorrow it's different in niche sites around Sallee right we're gonna have time to to make adjustments and that's what we're here for we're gonna be testing the waters all the time and as we do we'll make you guys aware of what we find and what's working today yeah for example YouTube I think isn't it is one of those changes it used to be that I didn't do any YouTube anything like that with the niche websites that I create and now I think for most niches YouTube is really helpful to get your niche going because it's just another source of people that can be coming because some things you know how to fix a leaky faucet something like that I'm gonna go directly to YouTube for that but that doesn't mean it stolen the traffic from a niche website because now I give the answer how to fix the leaky faucet and I say you know you really need these three things that will help you all fix all your home plumbing needs so this doesn't happen again go to my article for it and she's the Angie's done alright so one other thing that we want to remind you guys of don't forget to comment on our YouTube videos this year we have a contest going on and just comment on our YouTube videos between now and the end of the year to win a couple of days with us coming to you to work with you on your websites also we have income school.com slash course that's where we show you step by step by step the 60 actions we take to create a profitable niche website get traffic to it and earn money it's worked for us over and over again and we hope you'll check it out income school comm slash course thanks everybody