You know your competitors, and you’re not going to let some damned SEO tool tell you different!
Hey, I’ll give you the first part, but there are a lot of reasons that the results from a tool like True Competitor[1] might not match your expectations, and that could be a good thing.
I’m going to dig into five of those reasons:
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You’re living in the past
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You’ve hit a brick wall
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You can’t see the trees
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You’re stuck in one tree
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We’re just plain wrong
First, the toughest one to hear — the world is changing, and you’re not changing with it.
1. You’re living in the past
Look, I know Big Wally at Big Wally’s Widget World said your Grandma’s meatloaf was “just okay, I guess” at the church potluck in ‘87, but you need to move on. Even if you’re not quite-so-literally stuck in the past, you may be operating on an outdated sense of who your competitors are. Especially online, the competitive landscape can change quickly, and it’s worth re-evaluating from time to time.
2. You’ve hit a brick wall
Quite literally — you’ve run headlong into your own brick-and-mortar wall. As a business with physical locations, your competitors with physical locations are absolutely important, but from a search perspective, they may not represent who you’re actually competing with online.
Take, for example, McDonald’s — you might expect the competition to include Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fast food chains with physical restaurants. Meanwhile, here are the second through fourth results from True Competitor:
While DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats don’t have traditional, physical locations, these are the places where McDonald’s online customers go to order, and they represent a significant amount of organic SERP real estate. From an SEO standpoint,