Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome to SEO's Not Hard. It's me, ed Dawson, hosting, as usual, and today I've got a quite what I think quite neat competitor research tip for you.

Now, first up, this wasn't my idea. This is not my tip. I'm not taking credit for this. It was actually created. Well, I came across it by a guy called freddie chatt, um, who is um. He was the guy he created the summer of seo that keywords people use was one of the sponsors of the summer of seo, a series of e-commerce related tips, um, that were put out over this last summer. Um, and I think several thousand people went through that kind of free course. Um, and freddie's a great guy and if you're not following him, I do say go find him on twitter. Find him on linkedin. He's very he puts a lot of stuff on linkedin. So I came across this tip of his on linkedin and I thought it was so good that it was worth a share, basically, um.

So this, this is this is a tip to basically how to improve your traffic when you're doing competitor research. So it's quite normal. Most people do it. I do it as well when I'm trying to look at creating new content. I will look at this sort of the search term I'm going to target and you, you look at what um competitors are ranking there. Now most people will tend to look at the top one, two, three results, um, and see how those sites are ranking and what they've done and what content they out there that they've got, and see them as the ones to beat. Now the issue is a lot of the time, those sites that are ranking top like that, will be very high authority sites. So if you're using ahrefs domain authority as a rank, as a way of ranking sites in terms of their authority and we're talking really here about backlink authority then those sites are probably ranking because of that backlink authority. Now, if you are new or nowhere near as big as those sites you're competing against, you're not going to have that backlink authority. So what Freddie suggests is that you actually go through the top 10 results, look for the da of the domain authority of all of those sites and concentrate on looking at those with the lowest da, the ones with the lowest authority, because those sites are ranking not because of their authority but despite their lack of authority. So there's something those sites are doing content-wise that is allowing them to compete with these kind of big behemoth sort of huge authority sites. They're still getting in the mix with them despite not having that authority, which suggests there's something about their site structure or their internal linking or their content itself that is giving them a boost and getting them up amongst those big behemoths.

And you know this is similar, I mean, with broadband code. We were a great site. Yeah, okay, we weren't a minnow, but we were competing with multinational companies. Like you know, our competition were uSwitch and Money Supermarket. I mean, money Supermarket in the UK is huge. It's listed on the London Stock Exchange. It's worth about a billion pounds. It's you know it's. Its stock is huge. It employs thousands of people. They were one of our main competitors and we competed with them and other sites as big as that on a regular basis. And okay, we might not have had as much traffic as them across all the niches and all the things, and probably they even had more broadband traffic than us, I've no doubt. But we were a much smaller company, just a handful of people, and we competed against them. We were one of those minnows.

So it is possible to compete against high domain authority sites with good content, not just content. Obviously the links will be part of this as well, but you know it's not all about links. So here what freddy's is saying is look for those opportunities where sites with lower domain authority are ranking in the top 10 against those sites with big domain authority. And this can also be interesting to do, even if it's not the exact keywords you're going after. If you're just doing general research, if you're ever doing anything, and you notice a small site ranking against big sites for a term, have a look at that small site, have a look at the page, have a look at, pair their content to the bigger competitors, see why maybe they are ranking. It might give you clues as to how you can improve your own site as well. And then, as well as the content. Also, look at the backlinks especially. Look at the backlinks especially look at the backlinks to those individual pages.

So it might be that this high domain authority site although, yeah, it's, it might be ranking some of its content based on its overall domain authority. The page that is ranking might not have a lot of external links of its own, whereas the site with a lower domain authority might have just a few extra or a few good backlinks pointing that particular piece of content that's help elevating, helping it to elevate. That site with a big domain authority might have just a few extra or a few good backlinks pointing that particular piece of content that's helped elevating, helping it to elevate that site with a big domain authority. So, yeah, I just thought that was a really, really great tip that freddy's put out there. Um, do go find freddy on linkedin. He's got a whole little article about about this theory of his. And yet always, yeah, just because a search term key phrase you're going after has huge sites ranking for it, do see if there are smaller sites ranking. It shows you where the actual benchmark you've got to get to to get onto page one is. So, yeah, I hope you find that useful and I'll see you in the next episode.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywordswords People Use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywords people use, dot com slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

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