keyword list
It may sound simple, but one of the best things you can do when working on your website's SEO is to spend some time analyzing your SERP competitors after finding the keywords you need to optimize your site. Take a moment to write down a list of businesses that you think are your competitors. Without resorting to Google, for now.
But let's pause on this for a moment.
Your SERP competitors aren’t necessarily your offline competitors. These could be included, but there are probably others as well. To keep it simple, you need to know who (and what) you’re competing against for the top spot so you can tailor your approach accordingly.
Let's say you want to rank for "lawyers in Barcelona". If we look at the SERPs (search engine results pages) for this term, we can see:
That’s probably what you expected, right? We assume you were hoping to see a list of lawyers. Gone are the days when Google only ranked businesses. After all, they hope to provide the best results for users and it doesn’t always mean ten links to different businesses.
Here, you can see a mix of:
Directories of lawyers
Generic directories
Legal Practices (Business)
And there is a map with a list of the main organic results.
Understanding who you're competing against can help you figure out where to put your efforts. It's important to analyze the SERP results for your target keywords to understand what's ranking and how you need to structure your website and its pages.
When you run your own searches, you'll want to establish whether a firm's homepage or its internal pages are ranking. The search results we've just seen are mostly homepages of attorney websites. There are also a couple of top results that rank their internal pages.
attorney homepages
You should also spend some time browsing the pages that rank for businesses like yours and start to build up a picture of the content they cover. If you want help finding keywords that your competitors are ranking for in search results, check out our Organic Research tool . You'll be able to see where your competitors are ranking for keywords and how you can strategize to start earning top rankings.