One of the biggest challenges in SEO is trying to convince your client or boss that the competition they face online may not match their legacy competitors and personal grudges. Big Earl across the street at Big Earl’s Widgets may be irritating and, sure, maybe he does have a “stupid, smug face,” but that doesn’t change the fact that WidgetShack.com is eating your lunch (and let’s not even talk about Amazon).
To make matters worse, competitive analysis is time-consuming and tedious work, even if you do have access to the data. Today, after years of rethinking how competitive analysis should work (and, honestly, re-rethinking it on many occasions), I’m proud to announce the first step in expanding Moz’s competitive analysis toolkit — True Competitor.
Try True Competitor
What is True Competitor?
Before I dive into the details, let’s take it out for a spin. Just enter your domain or subdomain and your locale (the beta supports English-language markets in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada):
Then let the tool do its work. You’ll get back something like this:
True Competitor pulls ranking keywords (by highest-volume) for any domain in our Keyword Explorer database — even your competitors’ and prospects’ domains — and analyzes recent Google SERPs to find out who you’re truly competing against.
What are Overlap and Rivalry?
Hopefully, you’re already familiar with our proprietary Domain Authority (DA) metric, but Overlap and Rivalry are new to True Competitor. Overlap is simple — it’s the percentage of shared keywords where the target site and the competitor both ranked in the top 10 traditional organic results. This is essentially a Share of Voice (SoV) metric. It’s a good first stop, and you can sort by DA or Overlap for multiple views of the data — but what if the keywords you overlap on aren’t particularly relevant, or a competitor is just too far out of reach?
That’s where Rivalry comes in. Rivalry factors in the Click-Thru Rate (CTR) and volume of overlapping keywords, the target site’s ranking (keywords where the target ranks higher are more likely to be relevant), and the proximity of the two sites’ DA scores to help you sort which competitors are the most relevant and realistic.
What can you do with this data?
Hopefully, you can use True Competitor to validate your own assumptions, challenge bad assumptions, and learn about competitors you might not have considered. That’s not all, though — select up to two competitors for in-depth information:
