Audit Your Competitors For Fast Results

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Another week, another episode of the SEO show. I'm your host, Michael, and I'm joined by Arthur. How are you going, Arthur?

ARTHUR: I'm doing really well. I'm doing really well. Looking forward to this episode.

MICHAEL: Yeah. More than the last one. The last one was pretty fun.

ARTHUR: Yeah. No, this one's a good topic. Very useful for, I guess, people starting out in SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah. This is real world actionable SEO advice we're going to talk about today because we're on the topic of auditing your competitors for fast results.

ARTHUR: So, you've got your two cliches that you want to bust out?

MICHAEL: I do. Ready for these? Now, you say they're cliches, but I think they're extremely apt and relevant for this topic. So, I'm going to say them, see what you think. With SEO, success leaves clues. That's the first one? That's the first one. And the second one is, with SEO, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Both very true. Yeah, very true. You listeners at home, you can decide whether they're too cliched or not, but in this case, they're very true, right? You can look at other websites in your industry, in your space, and take inspiration from them, from what they're up to, and apply them on your own site. We do a lot of it, don't we, in our own day-to-day SEO efforts?

ARTHUR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's part of SEO, you know, checking up on the competition, making sure that you're up to scratch, you know, you don't want to fall behind.

MICHAEL: And coming back to success leaves clues, what do I mean by that? Well, Google have this thing called the search engine results page. When you type something in Google, it's what shows. You might have heard of it. You might have. You might have used it once or twice. And all that stuff that shows on the first page or the websites, they're the clues. They're the successful sites. What are they up to? You know, what are they doing that you're not? Where are the gaps in your site? If you can figure that stuff out and apply it to your own site, then chances are you're going to see good results. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Now, a big caveat that I want to say at the start is do not get too obsessed with copying your competition. You know, you might be in a small market where there's only a few players and they might not even be doing SEO and you're obsessing over what they're up to. So, who's to say that what they're doing is the best way, you know, first. And second, even worse, they could be using dodgy tactics, you know, really dodgy link building or sort of suspect on-site optimization tactics. So, don't copy word for word or strategy or tactic for tactic. Instead, just look for inspiration for obviously good ideas, right?

ARTHUR: Definitely. Yeah. And it's also worthwhile looking overseas as well, because like you said, we, our country is quite small. So looking at countries like the US and the UK, where there might be one or two steps ahead to get inspiration, definitely makes sense. I do that all the time, you know, because it's just a great way to find new ideas that aren't being done in our market.

MICHAEL: Yeah, big players, much more sophisticated. Even like if you're a Sydney based business, there might be a really gun operator in Perth, for example. So don't just look in your own backyard. So, all right, let's start from the start. We always like to start from the start. Good place to start. It is a good place to start. And we like to start with figuring out who your competitors are. You know, who are you going to look at to figure out these SEO tactics that you should be using on your own site?

ARTHUR: Exactly. And you know, there are two types of competitors. So, your perceived competitors. So, they're the competitors that you think or you might be competing with. offline. So bricks and mortar stores, you know, the perceived competitors that you've been, you've known for a while, but there's also the competitors that rank on Google. So your online or keyword competitors. So a lot of the time when we talk to clients, they might not have come across a lot of the sites that outrank them. So it's very important to kind of look at those competitors when you're trying to, I guess, gain advantage online.

MICHAEL: Yeah, 100%. We'll have an onboarding, like an intake form when a client starts and we ask them, who are your competitors? And a lot of the time, the ones they say don't correspond with who are the actual competitors in Google, in a Google sense. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, the way you do that, like from an SEO point of view, we only care about the keyword competitors, as we call them. Exactly. So, how do you figure them out?

ARTHUR: Well, simply searching for them really.

MICHAEL: Funny, funny that.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Coming back to that search, the search page.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're all over there, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. So basically trying to figure out what keywords people would be searching for to get to your website. So a lot of the time it's common sense. You might have to do some preliminary keyword research, but yeah, nine out of 10 times you already know what people will be searching for. So it's just as simple as searching for that keyword and seeing which competitors rank. Hmm.

MICHAEL: How many do you like to sort of go with when you do that? Are you going as deep as page two? Shock horror? Page two or page three?

ARTHUR: I think, you know, top three is a good start. You can look at page one. It depends on where you're at, really. But top three is always a good start. And there's, you know, you can also use Ahrefs. Ahrefs has the competing domains section built into it, where you plug in your domain. And what it does is it shows you all the websites that rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as you, just to give you an idea. And that will spit out a list of 50 domains. which is a lot. Obviously you don't want to be looking at all of those or maybe you do, but I think, you know, a good starting point is top three, at least, you know, top five.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Coming back to the topic of Ahrefs as well, like you can plug that stuff into Ahrefs in their dashboard, but the Ahrefs browser extension for Chrome, if you install that and log in. Yeah. And then it will put an overlay on the search results. So when you're looking at all the top rank sites, you can very quickly see, you know, what is their domain rating, the strength of the domain and how much traffic are they getting all that sort of stuff. So that can be a really quick way of filtering as well.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely. I like, I use that on a day to day.

MICHAEL: Yeah. A hundred percent. And as we said, it's not just your local market competitors. You know, if you want to get super tricky, you could go overseas, you could use a VPN, make yourself look like you're in another country, you know, LA, London, something like that, and have a look at what those top ranked sites are up to. But maybe to start with, just focus on your own backyard.

ARTHUR: I do that for fun sometimes just to see what stuff ranks in like Finland or random countries. I don't know if that's a bit weird, but it's just interesting to see what sort of search results they have and I guess the stuff that ranks over there.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it is. No, I find that fun too. I think we are probably a pair of weirdos in that we're hosting an SEO podcast, so we really enjoy that stuff. For most business owners, they're not going to enjoy researching Finnish ranking websites on a Friday evening as they have a whiskey. But look, if you get one or two hints from doing that stuff and it makes a difference in your business, then it's well worth doing. We joke, but in time, you probably need to expand to other markets just to get more ideas. But anyway, that's the starting point. You have a look, you figure out the top-ranked sites for the keywords that matter to you in your market and similar markets. Record all of that and then we need to start digging into what those sites are up to, right?

ARTHUR: So I guess the first starting point would be looking at the content of the pages. So look, I like to start simple. It depends, I guess it depends very much on your website and your niche, but it could be as simple as just looking at the homepages and the category pages of the site and then just doing like a, I guess a manual kind of spot to see where you're at to see, I guess if you're hitting the right amounts, I guess it needs to be a bit more in depth than that. But just to see, you know, does this page have content if it doesn't, I'm just, I'm blabbering here.

MICHAEL: No, no, no, no. You're not like a visual, a visual analysis of it.

ARTHUR: That's yeah. For lack of better words. That's what I was trying to get at.

MICHAEL: A visual analysis. What can we call it? A quick look under the hood.

ARTHUR: Basically. Yeah. Having, having your side open against your competitors side by side and just having a visual analysis to see, you know, what, what they're doing and what you're, what you're not doing.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so you might go on their page and see that they have a whole bunch of FAQs and you don't have that stuff. Exactly, yeah. Or they even have like all this written copy on the page and you don't. That's it, yeah. That's a very obvious thing that probably needs to be done with your site right away. Yeah. The other thing I would say, you know, you can look at things like word count, like there's plugins for Chrome. I think it's just called word count plugin or word counter. I think it's yeah, word count. Yeah, you can go on the page and like highlight copy and see what the word count on a page is and you might see that, you know, your page has 750 words and the top-ranked sites have 5,000 or something like that. That's a very obvious clue, very quick. you need to add more copy to your page. So that's where you start. Yeah. The visual. Got there in the end. Yeah, we did. We did. So the other thing, I guess, you know, that's one way of doing it. It's a very manual way, I guess, you know, clicking copy on a page and counting the words with a plugin is a manual way. You can use tools like our trusty old favorite Ahrefs to speed up this process a bit. So, we've got a couple of things we like to do in Ahrefs. The first one would be, you know, you just plug in one of these competing sites that you found, you plug the domain into the site explorer in Ahrefs, then you can go to the top pages report and make sure that that's sorted by traffic. And that's going to list all of the pages on your competitor's site. And, you know, the referring domains that those pages have, how much traffic it can expect to have, how many keywords it ranks for. So it's a really quick way to see what pages are driving traffic from Google to those competitors sites. So then it's a matter of saying, well, look, they have all of these service pages, all of these suburb pages, and we don't have them on our site. So we need to go out and create them. We also like to use Content Explorer in Ahrefs. Now this is a pretty cool little technique for finding keywords, or not even keywords, pages on other websites that rank well, that get traffic, and the page, it might not necessarily be that competitive from an SEO point of view. So I'll explain how it works first, and then why we like it. So basically Content Explorer, it's one of the features within Ahrefs. If you go into that section, you can type in a keyword. So generally like to go pretty broad with the keyword. We might put in marketing or digital marketing, something like that as a keyword. And then generate all the results and you can then apply filters to those results. So I always like to put the filters are that the site is a WordPress site. So that stops other things like forums and, you know, question and answer type sites being found just WordPress sites. Then I like to set the page traffic to be 250 to 500. So that's how many visits that the page is getting a month. Then I'll put the DR, the domain rating, between zero to 30, because that's saying that the site's not that strong from an SEO point of view, from a link point of view. So what we're seeing here is these pages are getting between 250 to 500 visitors a month, pretty weak domain, and they're on WordPress. So it's going to be very similar to what most business websites are. That's going to spit out a whole bunch of results of pages around the world that are related to that keyword you typed in. So marketing or digital marketing. So then you can just look through those results and try and find ones that ideally are in Australia and you can then go and create essentially exactly the same content for your site. And you have a chance to get similar levels of traffic if your domain is, you know, anywhere near as strong as that, which it should be because it's not that strong, you know, zero to 30. Yeah. So it's a really cool way of generating new content ideas for a site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It sounds similar to the skyscraper technique a little bit, basically replicating or finding content and just making it better and improving on it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So, well, I guess the skyscraper you're using it to try and acquire links in this case, it's just trying to require traffic. So look, you probably could take this content out and try and get links to it. But from, um, from the perspective I'm coming at, it's more about, um, you know, forget links. It's more about getting content on the site that is already ranking in Google relatively easily on other sites that aren't that strong.

ARTHUR: So it's like a bizarro, bizarro skyscraper technique then.

MICHAEL: Yeah, well, it's just, I guess, yeah, you probably don't, like with the skyscraper technique, you, you are going all in on that content and making it amazing and so good that it like blows the competition away and you can get links to it. This one, you're just looking at what ranks and, you know, doing something similar and, you know, make it, make it a bit better. But, uh, the fact that these pages rank already, and get traffic and they're not that strong, it suggests that you don't need to put as much effort into it as you might with skyscraper technique. But yeah, that's a little hack there on the content, I guess, competitive analysis side of things. With that one as well, you're not It doesn't matter who you think your competition are. You're just putting a keyword in and Ahrefs is finding that all out. That research you did at the start doesn't play a part in this little technique.

ARTHUR: That's a really cool technique. Look, I can't say that I personally use it, but it sounds really handy.

MICHAEL: Give it a go this week, have a bit of fun. You can go look at what client you're working on at the moment, but do it for some 3D printing. I will, for sure.

ARTHUR: It's hard to find topics in 3D print. Actually, no, it's not. It's hard to find relevant topic for our client for 3D printing.

MICHAEL: That's the thing and like a lot of people, you know, this sort of deals with things where clients might say, you know, I want to rank for some extremely broad keyword where it's super competitive and it's not going to drive traffic, but they also want traffic. You can sort of run this technique and find quick wins, you know, doing this sort of stuff is going to get traffic to your site quicker. Like, is it going to be the best traffic? It depends on the theme of the article and whether it's got a commercial intent or it's just informational and there's all sort of strategic stuff you got to think about. it can lead to quick results. So, that's my humdinger. Do you have any humdingers you want to add on the content side of things?

ARTHUR: Humdinger? I haven't heard that before.

MICHAEL: You never heard humdinger? No, never. Not even like Abe Simpson on The Simpsons, the old guy. I'm living like a 1930s old man.

ARTHUR: I have, yeah, one thing I kind of wanted to touch on was a tool that I like to use or we like to use called Page Optimizer Pro. Now Page Optimizer Pro or POP is a, it's a really good tool which helps you identify the top competitors for any given search term. So basically in a nutshell, what you do is you get, you get the tool, and you plug in a keyword that you want to rank for and the page you want to rank for that keyword. Now, what this tool does is it'll have a look at which pages are ranking for that keyword. So in your, in your local market and basically audit your page and all the pages that rank for that keyword and spit out recommendations on how you can improve the content on your page. So it's more in line with the competitors, which are ranking for that keyword. So I guess the theory behind this is like you mentioned before, these pages already rank well on Google. So there's a reason for it. Google obviously likes the content among other things about those pages. So in theory, that's it. Yeah. So in theory, if you replicate, You don't have to copy it exactly, but replicate the structure of the page. So I guess going back to Page Optimizer Pro, it will tell you which keywords the pages are using. So whether it's an exact match keyword, whether it's an LSI or variation keyword, it tells you the frequency, it tells you where to insert the keywords. So whether or not the keyword needs to be added into the URL or the heading tag, so the H1 or all the way down to H5. whether the keyword needs to be added to the paragraph, or you might find that your page is over-optimized for a keyword. So you might have to de-optimize that page. So basically what it does is it gives you a roadmap.

MICHAEL: No, yeah, it does. And we use this a lot and the results, the results can be amazing or they can be nothing. So it's not to say that what this tool is saying is a hundred percent right all the time because it's not, but. It is just a, it's a good way of speeding the process up. And particularly if you've done nothing with your site, you know, you, you, you run it through a tool like this and most of the time it's going to improve things.

ARTHUR: Absolutely. Look, it's a really good starting point as well. If you're looking to, you know, brief in a copywriter, you can give them, you know, instructions on how to write the content. So make sure you include this keyword this many times. We'll make sure that these headings include this keyword. So it's like instructions, like Lego, basically Lego for content.

MICHAEL: But yeah, better. It's not like those IKEA instructions with that little blob, that blob man, like putting stuff together.

ARTHUR: Depends on how good your brief is.

MICHAEL: Content is this. If you use this, the brief is a level above the IKEA blob man. Yeah.

ARTHUR: I remember you used to always say the content you get is always as good as the brief you give them, so.

MICHAEL: Very true. Very true. So what else on the content side of things? I guess we're a little bit of an opportunity to plug Natch here. Yeah, for sure. I'll let you go with the Natch plugin.

ARTHUR: So Natch is a tool that we created, which basically utilizes Google's natural language API. And what it does is it basically, you run the content through this API and it gives us a window or insight as to how Google interprets the content. And I guess how it reads the content on the page. So what it'll do is it'll pick up specific entities. So it will look through the content and find specific keywords and entities, and then assign a score, a sentiment and magnitude score. And by doing that, you can, I guess, at a glance, see how it reads and interprets the content on the page and how it values specific keywords and sentences. And I guess the idea is I guess simplified, the idea is just to push up the entities or keywords that you want to rank for by tweaking the copy. And I guess that's a very simplified way of explaining it. It's a lot more complex than that. But basically what we can see is how Google interprets the content, how it sees the keywords on a page, and it allows us to make hundreds and hundreds of tweaks. to push those keywords up, improve the sentiment and magnitude scores. And in theory, we found that by doing that, we see those keywords start to rank better.

MICHAEL: So, yeah. So again, it's similar to like, uh, page optimizer, not similar, but you run your site through it. You should also be running the top sites in your space through it. Um, just to see what Google thinks they're relevant for, let's say relevant. And then what, what your site's relevant for and try and get them in the same ballpark really.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And if you find content that has, has the entities that you want to rank for quite high, you can kind of replicate what they've done in the way they've structured the sentences because it works. It works a lot on, It's weird, you know, it works in natural language. So little, little, I guess, minute changes like punctuation and, you know, um, we've even found adding commas before and after keywords makes a big difference in how Google interprets that keyword. So picking up crazy, isn't it? Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. Like I will. Yeah. Before this, you would never have thought that adding a dash or adding a comma somewhere in the copy will have that sort of like impact. Hmm.

MICHAEL: But it's a very manual process, isn't it though? That's the thing. Like we will make changes, run it through the tool and make another change, run it through the tool. So it requires a lot of time. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Well, we've got a tool, you know, imagine if we didn't have match, it was even more tedious, basically having to rerun everything over and over again. So we have the luxury of having our own tool, which makes it easier for us to, you know, test and test and test.

MICHAEL: Yep. So I guess that one, when it comes to content in order of priority, that's probably going to be the most advanced thing. Like most business owners, obviously they don't have the tool, they're not going to be using that to get this done. But things like POP, things like looking at your competitors and running things through Ahrefs, all stuff you can do and see pretty quick results from if you spend the time. Look, the content pillar, that was the first one there. We're going to focus on three pillars, content, backlinks or offsite and technical. So let's move on to the next one, which is backlinks. You know, the big daddy of SEO or big daddy aspect of SEO. You know, you speak to any SEO people, they're obsessed with backlinks. Where'd you get those links from? Who's got a good source of links? What's a good backlink building technique? You know, every article to do with links is the most popular ones. You know, SEO people are obsessed with links. So it stands to reason if you're auditing your competitors and trying to figure out what they're up to for, you know, fast results for your site, you'd spend a fair bit of time looking at links. So how do we go about that? Well, what do we use? We use Ahrefs. We like Ahrefs. We love Ahrefs. Not just for content, but it's also for links. So what's, you know, if you tomorrow had to audit a top competitor of a client, and figure out what they're up to link building wise, what would be your go-to move?

ARTHUR: You say if I had to, I will be doing it. It's my job. In this wild hypothetical, what would you do? So basically what I would do is I would use Ahrefs or Majestic, two very similar tools. They allow us to see what backlinks are pointing to any specific domain. So we'd plug in the competitor's domain to both of those tools and look at the referring domains to see which sites are linking back. And what I'd like to do is I'd probably create a Excel spreadsheet or just any spreadsheet, export all those domains and just start going through them one by one to see which ones I think would be beneficial to us. And then I guess make a short list of sites that I'd want to reach out to, to get a link back from.

MICHAEL: And so when we're saying beneficial, you can put filters in your spreadsheet and look at things like the domain name itself. Let's say we're in Australia, .com.au is going to be good, but .ru, Russian websites, you probably want to get rid of them. Things like DR. Links from a DR30 plus site is going to be better than links from a 0 to 10, so you might get rid of them. You can look at things like anchor text potentially and see if there's really spammy ones, get rid of them. Other sites, directory, scraper type sites, probably get rid of them and really start to clean up that list.

ARTHUR: Yeah, you could, I guess a good starting point would be to build some web 2.0 profiles, social profiles. Uh, you mentioned scrapping directories, but they could be, you know, a quick, quick way to get links. If you don't have any links already, if you're starting from scratch, um, they don't cost anything except your time. It can be a bit tedious, but you know, if you have some, you know, spare time on a Saturday afternoon, grab a beer and start building some well-known directory links. Um, Obviously I can't imagine a better way to spend the weekend, but, um, they do, you know, they do serve a purpose. And if you don't have any, if you don't have any domain history, if you don't have any links, you need to build those profiles out. So as tedious as it is, um, they, they play a part in SEO.

MICHAEL: Um, the other thing with Airtress is the link intersect tool. So Alta, I know it's your favorite, one of your favorites. Why is that a good tool to use? How do you know it's one of my favorites? Because I've seen it on your screen. You have three screens in the office and you have the Link Intersect tool up pretty much. It's my home page. Yeah. Pretty much 24-7.

ARTHUR: Look, the Link Intersect tool is simple. Basically what you do is you can pick up to five different domains, you plug them in, And Ahrefs will do the hard work for you. It will find all the common websites which are pointing to those domains. So I guess in this scenario, you could find, or you'd pick three competitors, insert them to the link intersect tool, and it will tell you which links are common to all those three sites. And that way you'll know that these links are really strong. These types of sites are linking back to my competitors. There's a higher chance of them linking back to me. So it's just a good way.

MICHAEL: Sorry to interrupt it also it shows you like one is that link to them, but don't link to you. So that's right. Yeah I tell you what else I like to do with that dress I like to just jump straight into the new, so you run the competitor's domain through the site explorer. On the left-hand side, you can jump into referring domains new, and then you can sort them by, I think it's like the last 7 days, 30 days, 60 days. If you have a competitor that is actively engaging in SEO, like you might know for a fact they are. You can jump in here and if you just set it to 60 days, it's going to show you every link they've picked up over the last 60 days. And you might see that there's some really juicy ones in there that you can immediately go and reach out to and try and get those links yourself. Definitely. That's pretty, you know, that's just good practice. Even, you know, if you have an SEO agency working on it, they should be doing that every month anyway, looking at other sites in your space to inform their link building. But if you don't have an SEO agency, then that's just something you can do as a business owner to try and keep on top of, you know, what your competitors are up to and make sure that you're, you know, keeping up with them or closing the gap.

ARTHUR: Yeah, for sure. And I guess on the flip side, you can also look at lost domains and see which domains they've lost over the last 60 days and reach out to the sites that have dropped the link and see if they'll link back to you.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that's double, that is a double win right there. You get a link they've lost on. Yeah. Beautiful. That's pretty, you know, like, although link building and backlinks are a huge aspect of SEO, really everything we've covered there is just good competitor analysis practice. And that's where the bulk of your results are going to come from in terms of, you know, monitoring the competition and using it to improve your own SEO. We won't dwell on links, we'll move into the exciting world of technical SEO and what you can do there to improve your site with a bit of competitive research. So, what do you like to do? Again, in this hypothetical scenario, let's say tomorrow, you had to go suss out a competitor of one of our clients and figure out technically what they're up to and little ideas we could glean from what they're up to, what would you do?

ARTHUR: Where's your starting point? That's a good question. So I would do some what I like to call preliminary research. So first thing I like to do is have a look at what CMS they're using. So there's a few ways you can go about it. I guess the more difficult way is going through the source code and trying to find hints to see whether they're using WordPress or Shopify or whatever. But I like to use a tool called BuiltWith. So BuiltWith is a handy site. I'm pretty sure they're actually Australian based. And it's just a little tool that you can use to basically plug in a domain and it scans the code on the page and it lets you know what sort of technology and tools they're using on their website. So it looks at things like analytics, tracking, hosting, the CMS. So it's a good way to see what tech they're using and comparing it to what you're using. So you might find that majority of your competition are using WordPress, but you're using Wix. So that could be, you know, something you can look at and say, all right, maybe I need to upgrade to something a bit more comprehensive than Wix. You can see where often you can see where the site's hosted, what sort of hosting they're using, whether they're using cloudways or Google cloud. If you're using, if you're using cheap shared hosting, then you might say, you might say, all right, well I need to up my hosting game. So getting, getting hints like that basically.

MICHAEL: On the topic of hosting as well, if you're looking for another way to suss out where a competitor hosts their site, one I like to use is called MX Toolbox. They have a feature on there, maybe DNS lookup or super lookup, something like that, where you plug in the domain of your competitor and then it will tell you the IP address and where it's hosted so you can quickly suss out, you know, where they're hosting their site. And then there's also another one hostingchecker.com where you can just plug in the domain and it will attempt to tell you where their site's hosted. So looking at that sort of stuff's pretty cool because you'll probably find the top sites are using a nice fast host. We bang on a lot about fast hosting and it's because we do stuff like this and we see that fast sites are preferred most of the time. What else do we like to do? Another one is, let's say you identify that they are on WordPress. You can use tools like scanwp.net or if you just Google WordPress plugin checker or what plugin is a website using. There's all different websites where you can just go and plug in a site and this crawler will look through the site and try and figure out what plugins they're using. then that can give you little ideas around things that you can use to extend the functionality on your site. So they might have a cool opt-in form or a pop-up or some sort of conversion element on their site that's being run through a plugin. Using these types of tools will very quickly help you figure that out. So that's just something to help you improve maybe the UX of your site. It's not even necessarily always a technical thing.

ARTHUR: You could find out what's like a site speed plugin they're using, if they're using nitro pack or something different.

MICHAEL: Yep. You can look at that. You can use a site speed plug, not plugin, but tool like GT metrics tool. Yeah, for sure. Yep. Um, what else?

ARTHUR: Core web vitals. Yeah, super important. So there's a plugin or a Chrome extension you can use. Yeah, there is a Chrome extension where it overlays similar to Ahrefs. You can see all the Core Web Vital metrics and see where your site compares to the competition. Yeah, that's really handy. I use that every day, basically.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And Google's, well, they've been headed that way for a long time and they're definitely down that path now. So you want that to be as strong as possible. And you'll probably find the top ranked sites are doing better than sites that aren't ranked as well.

ARTHUR: Except Google sites, which often score poorly on the call with vitals.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I know it is weird. The other thing I like to do in technical is use a tool like Screaming Frog. which is a web crawler. You basically can plug in a website into it and the tool will go and crawl their website and pull out all of the pages, all sorts of information on the pages. So with that, you know, you could put in a competitor's site and it will Pull out every page. So sometimes with sites, right, you might see in the main menu all the links to main categories and the like, but really that site has an SEO tactic at play where they have all sorts of other pages, but they're linked to via internal links and copy that you might miss. You might not see it when you're looking at the site. If you use Screaming Frog, it's going to pull all that stuff out and you might very quickly see that, wow, they have tons of service pages or they have location pages or they have all sorts of different things going on that you can't necessarily see when you look at the site. So then that can feed your research. You might go and use Ahrefs to look at what traffic those types of pages are getting or do a visual analysis yourself and say, yep, this is stuff we need to create for our site. So that's a little hack to get the true picture of what's going on with some of these competitors' sites. So look, I think that's a pretty, you know, there's all sorts of stuff that you could be doing, but like everything we like to talk about, we try to focus on the juicy stuff that's going to get you results quickest and with the biggest impact, right? 80-20 SEO, as we like to call it.

ARTHUR: And look, we hit all three pillars and this is what we do in a day to day. So yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a good way to boost your SEO. And like you like to say, what's that cliche? Success leaves clues. Yeah.

MICHAEL: No need to reinvent the wheel.

ARTHUR: That's it. It's true. And it makes sense. And you know, if you replicate your competitors, which are doing well in theory, you should do well as well.

MICHAEL: Out of interest. If you were to reinvent a wheel, what would you do?

ARTHUR: Reinvent a wheel.

MICHAEL: Yeah, like there's just no way to reinvent it, is there? It's just perfect the way it is.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess it has evolved over time. Like the wheel would have been just a big stone wheel, right? So now we have, you know, we've got tires, we've got amazing, like we have nice wheels in our cars. You wouldn't put a wagon wheel on a Formula One car. Absolutely not.

MICHAEL: I don't know why I threw that in there at the end. I was just, uh, just seeing, just seeing what you'd come up with.

ARTHUR: Never, never thought about it. I like, it has, it has been reinvented over time.

MICHAEL: It's being iterated on and improved. It's a fault. Yeah. You know, I think the whole point of that saying is that it's already perfect to begin with, so you can't reinvent it. You shouldn't reinvent it. Don't make things hard for yourself. You don't want to have a square wheel and be bouncing all over the place.

ARTHUR: No.

MICHAEL: Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about. That's a very weak ending to the episode, but we'll do better next week. So, as always, thanks for listening. If you did like that, we'll chat aside. We'd love it if you leave us a review or some sort of feedback or do something on your end to show us a bit of love. Ask us a question. We'll do more SEO questions and answers in the future. Otherwise, in the meantime, happy SEOing. We'll see you next time. Bye. See ya. Bye.

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