Wix SEO | Competitive Analysis for SEO

Welcome to Competitive Analysis for SEO is brought to you by WIX in collaboration with Semrush. My name is Morty Oberstein. I'll be your host today or tonight, depending on your time zone. Aside from being your host, I'm also the official SEO liaison here at wix. Joining me or joining us today is not only a dear friend of mine, she is the founder of LP Marketing, Inc. She is the former director of SEO at Outbrain. She is an industry speaker. She speaks at all the SEO conferences from SMS to Brighton SEO. She's a international SEO and content consultant. She is, as she is here, a representative of Semrush in many, many, many webinars. And she is considered an organic competition analysis expert, which makes a great deal of sense as to why she's here today. She is the Roz Postdan. Hi, Thereaz.

Wow, what an intro. I'm impressed. I didn't know everything about myself.

I practice all night. Oh, I forgot. She has 13 years of experience in the SEO industry. Now I got it all.

Oh, thank you. I thought I missed something.

Sorry.

Really honored to be here. So I really, I really hope that everyone will understand everything that we're going to talk about and after this conversation, they will know how to do competitive analysis for their website. So I'm really, really honored to lecture everything that all my knowledge away.

Amazing. So before we, before I hand the reins over to the RAZ and before I go through some of the procedures for this evening or this afternoon or this morning, whatever time zone you're in, I don't even know anymore. I want to talk about very quickly the importance of doing organic competitive analysis or competitive analysis for SEO. So obviously it's really important to know who your competitors are on the Google results page or. Or an SEO lingo, we call it the serp, which stands for search Engine results page. Because you need to know who your competitors are, because Google's really important. However, to me personally, I find that competitive analysis, aside from being the starting point from doing really strong SEO, is also the starting point to offering up your brand identity, your brand presence on the results page. What do I mean by that? When you look and see what the sites that Google is showing on the results page for the audience, for the users that you want to visit your site. When you see what content Google is putting in front of the very target audience that you want to come to your site, it gives you an idea of what's out there and where you might fit into this conversation. Let's call it where do you fit in? Where is it possible for you to add added value, real added value, unique value to your target audience? So yes, while understanding your competitors on Google is really good for, you know, beating your competitors, we all want to beat our competitors. We get that. And finding new opportunities, it's also a really good place for you to start. And as ironic as it may sound to start thinking about differentiating yourself from your competitors, where can I be better than my competitors? Where can I offer the user my target audience, something really unique and that's really great for your audience, for your potential consumers. And it's also that having that unique identity and the unique added value is also really great for search engines. But that's a very different conversation for a different time, hopefully. Okay, with that I will now hand it over to my dear friend, Diraz. Hey, floor is yours.

Yes. Okay, cool. So I'm really honored to be here and I want to get started with the competitor analysis. I personally have to say that I will not try to sell Semrush. Basically I will do everything in my best just to share my knowledge of how I'm using Semrush just with just let's say one hour of work instead of doing just manual work. That can take me days and even weeks to do competitive analysis. So for me it's my go tool basically every single day, even a couple times a day. This is my, I'm just doing everything on Semrush from rankings to competitive analysis to site audits. It's my go to tool. So let's get started. I want to understand, I want to explain what is competitor analysis and why basically we need it first. Hello, this is me, Neeraz Pastan, 13 years of SEO in the industry. I'm delighted to share my knowledge here today. I think it's a call for everyone that's basically working with Wix websites and I know how tremendously you need this knowledge in your toolkit, let's say, and I want to talk about it. What is the competitive analysis and why you basically need it and how to get started. We're going to talk about each of each steps here in the presentation and let's go and understand. Well, competitive analysis means that you need to study your direct competitor competitors to see what's working for them and how you can leverage it for your own strategy. Meaning first I just need to understand who my competitors are and then I can just make a good assumptions and how can I adjust my own strategy. Maybe I'm missing out on things and maybe I can be inspired of things that they're doing because sometimes it can be like overwhelming. I have competitors, they're like huge brands. I don't know how to tackle it. But you can if you're a small organization and you have, you know, you don't need all this bureaucracy in the background, you can just launch things very fast. And so don't be afraid to just act. And so in couple of the slides I will show you how to act and how to create a proper strategy and how to minimize your gap with your competitors. So why we need it? First we need to identify market trends and patterns. If all my competitors are doing something and I'm not, well, it's a pattern. They're doing something and I'm missing out. I'm out. I need to understand what am I missing out. And first of all I need to understand if they have recognized a trend or maybe they're inventing a trend. I would want to see what they are doing. We want to optimize our strategy. Basically we need to optimize our strategy all the time. We have everything new here in the digital marketing, everything is new. Covid time is not the same as one year ago. It's not really the same and it's not going to be the same one year later and it's going to not going to be the same in two months from now. So we always need to adopt our strategy over and over again. Or you need to close the opportunity gap between me and my competitors all the time. We need to understand how we can close our gaps and be, let's say, one step above them about whether they're doing so. Let's first understand who are my competitors. We have, let's say we're surrounded by competitors, right? We have lots of competitors, but let's try and tackle two of the types of the competitors. We have direct competitions which are basically people that are selling a website that are selling the same product as mine. Pretty similar product. You can argue about the quality, you can argue who's doing it better or which brand is better, but basically it's the same product and indirect competition. Basically it's a similar product than me. For me, similar product than me or basically they're serving in the different country. Let's say I have a bracelets that are just for UK market, like really on the bracelet you have like a curve UK map. But we have the same for Canadian bracelets. So these are the same product but serving a different country. So basically we're not competing with each other. It's not a direct threat, but I still need to take a look at what they're doing. Let's take an example. Nike, we have a direct competition with Adidas, right? They're both serving the same product. Of course we can argue who is better, which has the best shoe, the best running shoe. But in the end of the world, this is what they're doing. Like they are creating running shoes for athletes, for sports, for people that want fashion. These are the same thing and they're basically, basically serving the same countries as well. But if we look on the other side, we have bloggers, affiliates, we have different kinds of people or websites that basically selling running shoes, but they're not making them. But they still are my competitors on search results. So this is what I want to tackle. For example, if I'm going to look at this search results page, I'm going to look, I'm going to have brands, I'm going to have bloggers, I'm going to have affiliate website, I'm going to have Quora website questions. I'm going to have people also ask. If you see this picture by Google, it's basically showing me what user are asking about running shoes. I just chopped in, typed in running shoes as a query here. And this is what I came out like with the US search results. And I also have Wikipedia and Wikipedia is also my competitor because sometimes Wikipedia is ranking first on my search, let's say leading search term. And it's not, you know, people are saying, oh man, how can I beat Wikipedia? You can, you can. This is a matter of put your strategy in front and just do whatever you can and just beat the competition. So we have lots of different competitions. Also this images, Google Images. Like let's say for an E commerce website, if I type in running shoes and I go for Google Images, this is basically the user journey, right? They want to see first what is the running shoe that they're going to buy. And they want to get some inspiration if they're not really focusing on a specific brand. So, so they have all the options here. It's like a catalog. So if my competitors are basically doing here like a really good work with their SEO images strategy, that's it. Like I can rule this, I can rule this world. So we also need to understand how to tackle this strategy. And there are a lot of things that we can do in order to beat the competition. You can see here we have Runner's World, which is a Reebok, we have Nike, we have Under Armour, we have lots of brands that we didn't see even and in the search results for the same query. So take a look at everything that you need to take in terms of bidding, the competition for your competitors. I think let's get to work. Let's see how it's done. Right, cool. So I took Wix site, really cool website by the way. Coal and Canary, which are basically serving. They're creating luxury candles, really cool candles, great smells, great scents and they're basically located in Canada and this is the main market for them. So my research is going to be focusing on Canada, but not only. Okay, so basically this is what I did. I typed in on Google CA luxury candles. And in the end I found this. Top three competitors, the White company, Candelarium and Harvey Nicholl's. Well, if you look closely, some of them are not really my competitors as the White company is also selling bath products and also things like that. And Harvey Nichols also sells bags and fashion. So they're not really my core competitors. So basically I took Semrush. If you want, we can go over to Semrush and just see. But I just take a snapshot because I want to explain everything. So I took the Candelarium, which is pretty much the same product as a colon canary, and basically I took. Here, I just typed in. This is all you need to do. Just type in the domain name and that's it. Go to domain review. This is what you get. You get tons of data and then you're going to ask me, oh my God, what is that? Yeah, exactly. This is the first time when you're going to do it and then it's going to be like super easy. Just going to type in the URL and you go into domain overview and you see so many things interesting. You see that the organic traffic Candelarium is getting. You see that the countries that they are serving. You see the Canada share is not really big. US is the main market. You're going to see the organic traffic that they're getting and the trend. You can see that. I don't know, from February they have a little bit of decline. February 2020, they have a little bit of decline with their traffic. And you see they're putting some efforts with paid traffic, meaning Google Ads. So they're putting some. Not much, but they're doing some Google Ads. Also the amount of backlinks. We're going to talk about backlinks in the presentation. Backlinks means how many sites are linking to my site. Google sees backlinks as a Referrals as a credits as a credit someone gives me to my site. So we want more of these as more that we have backlinks means the more websites are linking to me, the more websites are recommending me. So we want more of these sites. We also see that they're doing display advertising. So for me, not only Google search ads, they're doing Google display ads. Nice. So maybe if I'm not doing it, maybe I will consider doing most of these things. And I also can see what are the top keywords that they are ranking for in Google. So if you take a look, we have here the, I don't know, Cactus flowers, Jonathan Adler. Supposed to be like a partnership or supposed to be like a specific category for candles. They may have done with them. Coola voicemails, Nest fragrances, everything that can be really nice. They're ranking pretty nice. And here you can see the search volume meaning how many people are searching for this specific query averagely a month for Canada. Okay. Specifically so this is pretty nice. Here you can see the landing pages, meaning the pages, the content that is ranking for these keywords. And I can take a look at this and. And I don't know what to look at. I'm really not sure. So I'm looking at paid traffic. Are they running paid ads? What offer they want to promote? What is the text? What is the copy that they have on their ads? What is the images that they are displaying on their display media? Also we want to check out the keywords that we just saw. What are the top keywords that are ranking? What is generating the most traffic for them? Because basically the traffic may can assume us to get more conversions at the end. Maybe if I'm not doing that, maybe I'm missing out money. What is the average position that they have if they're not really ranking but they have tons of keywords that they rank but they're not really ranking on first positions. So maybe they're not really generating this amount of SEO traffic, Google traffic. But maybe they're doing something different than others. We saw this partnership with Jonathan. Maybe it's something that I can do more. Maybe it's something that I can think of a way to get influencers into my, I don't know Candles. I don't know, I don't know. Backlinks. How is their backlinks profile meaning is there unusual links there? Is there something spammy there? If there's like a huge pr we need to understand and dig into their backlinks to better understand we're going to do all of this together. Yeah.

Hey Lee Raz, can I ask you a quick question? So can I do this masking rhetorically, but can I do this on my own website, plug in my own websites and see exactly what's going on here as well?

Basically the domain overview, it's just like you can type in any domain in the world.

So if I want to see where I was ranking or my organic traffic. Exactly. And when it comes to backlinks, I just want to point out everybody, you know, not all backlinks are equal. If you have a, and you mentioned this, you have a backlink from a site that's maybe a spammy site. That's not the best thing. You want to have backlinks from sites that are really high authoritative sites, really reputable sites and also really relevant to what you do.

Exactly, exactly. We're going to see it together like what backlinks that they have and we're going to recognize it. This is what I meant with backlink profile. Basically we need to understand what is the structure of it. And, and we need to understand what is the best content. We saw the landing pages that are ranking before, what is the best content? Is it blog pages, is it category pages, is it product pages? What are the main traffic that they're generating? If you're generating from blogs article and they have tons of traffic and I don't even have a blog. So maybe it's time for me to start and write content or hire someone for me to write this content for me and create a content strategy. And of course also what kinds of blogs and products, what kinds of products are they trying to sell and what is their unique selling point for them? We saw it's luxury candles. How are they different from my other competitors or than me? And finally we're going to talk about gaps, the keyword gap and the backlink gaps. And we're going to try and minimize the gap and see what are the opportunities for me to get. And this all can be done with just five clicks, which is amazing. Okay, so here we have, we're going to minimize the zoom video. Okay, here we have the traffic analytics for Candelarium again. So I took up, basically took a local competitor which is Natura Soy. I went ahead and saw that Coal and Canary are soy blend candles. So I thought maybe that can be a really good competitor for them. Also based in Canada. So, so Natura Soy you can see totally. You can see the traffic share between them. You see the Candelarium is slightly, a little Bit bigger than naturasoi. You can see also they have like the graph here, how it shows like in terms of the trends of their traffic. You see that most of them. You see like Candelarium is a little bit in decline. And you see that Natura Soy has a little bit a takeoff in January. And you see overall they have a little bit of a positive trend with their traffic. And you can see like let's say like a snapshot from analytics there. Like here it's like a divisive duration. Here you see like they have really long duration visits and bounce rate is really good for those two websites. And also we can take a look at the sources here we can take a look on Candelarium traffic. We can see you have both of them have similar direct traffic. Mean people are looking for their brand name which is really good. You see they both don't have any referral traffic which is interesting for me. They have good search meaning SEO traffic meaning organic Google search traffic. You see here only Natura Soy has some social traffic which is interesting for me because Candelarium probably isn't doing much on social and paid traffic. Only Candelarium is doing. So this is something that interesting for me to understand. Each of these competitors are doing something different in their strategy. And for me this is a little bit interesting. Here I put the traffic journey for Candelarium and a tour soy. In a bit I will add in for this puzzle my own site called Canarium. So basically here you can see Candelarium all the sources. They have google calm, google.com which is SEO content, SEO traffic, sorry, direct traffic. And the direct traffic for Natura Soy. You can also see Google page only from Candelarium. They're using Google Calm and DuckDuckDo which is a second search engine and they also doing Amazon. But here with naturasoy I have less traffic sources. I have this website which is probably something that sells like probably an affiliate website for them. Or we have like Google SEO and we have direct traffic. So this is pretty interesting. I will put in Coltonary and let's see the whole picture. So basically Colin Canary is doing only SEO traffic and the Colon Canary wholesale website which basically I think they might be missing out on things. They might be missing out Google paid. They might be missing out a referral website from affiliate website. They might missing out Amazon. So here you can take a look of many things that you can basically adjust. And now we can create the gap analysis with just a click. Okay, so we go into the Semrush Dashboard. And we go into the keyword gap, which is here. Before we were here. We're just going into the keyword gap, inserting what we want in the domain name. This is me. This is the root domain for CAD delirium. This is naturasoy. And here we can just see how they overlap. Meaning they have some lap. You have some shared keywords between them. We have some shared keyword that all of them are ranking together. But you can see the tremendous opportunity they might have with just share with just missing keywords. So here basically Semrush is just telling you this is top of an opportunity for Colin Canary. Amazing opportunity. Yes.

What do you mean by missing keywords?

This is like this. So basically all my competitors are ranking for my keyword for these specific terms and I don't rank for them. So that could be an opportunity for me. See here Candle store near me, they're all ranking for this man. Candles. Luxury candles Candle shop. Luxury candle supplies, Canada. This is amazing. This is money. Money on the floor, guys.

So these are keywords that you could be ranking for yourself should you target them in theory?

Exactly. Exactly. Let's say we have like, we have 23 missing keywords. We have. See that? This is amazing table for me. I'm always using it. So they all rank you for something. You can see their positioning here on Google. You can see that candle Killerium is luxury candles is position six. And the tour so is not really there yet. But you can see the natural soy is ranking number first on wood candle, for example. And I'm not ranking on any of them. Sorry. Just take a little bit of drinking.

So while you're drinking, that doesn't mean that this website isn't ranking at all. Just means for these. These are the keywords. I got you covered. These are the keywords that you have an opportunity should you decide to start targeting them. It doesn't mean that you. You're doing anything wrong. It just means that this might be a good place to focus next. I won't.

Yeah, exactly. This is an opportunity for me. I can write content for this. I can maybe open new categories. I can do a lot more of this. Basically my competitors, my direct competition is basically ranking on these search terms. But I don't. And this is something that can help me adjust my strategy and build more content. Got it. Okay. Okay. So what do I do with this data? Right. What do I do with it? Okay. Action items create content first. We can create blog posts. If I see something that is relevant to write a Blog post about for sure. Go ahead. Maybe you should open a blog that's like a whole new deal, but maybe I can write a new post about something specific. Maybe I can create new category pages, new category for products. Maybe I can create new products, even new partnerships. Use something. I can get influencers to partner with me and create content marketing strategy around it. And the second thing is just to optimize everything. We need to add more competitors to follow because we saw we have so many more competitors. That can be just one or two things that I want to check. We can create a keyword, research and tracking and reporting all the time. We need to track and see if my actions were okay and if I got in and just keep optimizing and report about it.

This, by the way, because I saw somebody ask in the Q and A. This is a great way to build links, right? By building content. Building really good content that people really enjoy that's really valuable is a great way to get links. If people will want to link to you. Imagine you did a study or you have a really nice guide to something. Well, if somebody's talking about that in their blog post or on their website, they'll link to your guide or link to your study or whatever content you create. And here's Blue Roz on backlinks.

Sorry. Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to add in. That's really great because if you have like a partnership, let's say that's a new way for you to get an influencer, let's say, with you and just to partner with you for a new line of products or something like that. That's a new way to get it viral, to get the word out there. Or if you write a good blog post, that gets really good backlinks. That's amazing for you.

Yeah, look, even a category page, we'll call it a collection page, where you have a lot of your products. And if you have a really nice list of products, imagine you have the best list of jeans in the whole world. So when someone was running a blog post about where to find the best jeans, they might link to your collection page.

Exactly, exactly. And also you can see they have like a search term for man candles, stuff like that. That's a whole new category page or collection page. That. That is the.

It's new for me, certainly.

Okay, so let's talk about the gap, the backlinks. Let's first understand what is a backlink because we talked about it beautifully. Okay, so we have like a. Let's say a strong website. Let's say an authoritative website, let's say New York Times. Okay. And I'm doing a pr and for me the PR is really great and it's not really linking back to me, just talks about me. So I would love, when I'm creating a pr, I would just would want New York Times to link back to my sites. Basically when I'm getting another website to link to my website, this is called a good backlink. Like, but not all backlinks are equal. When again those authoritative sites that can really link for me that they really have a connection to my niche or either a PR or like a brand, something that I want to put my brand out there. So we want to get those more of a backlinks to my sites. So basically what I've done, I took all the competitors that I created and basically compared them to Cole and Canary and saw what are the best backlinks that they have that they're not linking to me. So you can totally see that what is very, let's say shouting here that they have coupon sites that linking to them. A lot of your coupon sites, it's like here you can totally see it. So I can totally assume that my competitors are doing tremendous work with coupon sites that are really, sometimes they're really, really good and sometimes they have like authority around them. And I ask you a question. Yeah, sure.

How do you determine that authority? How do you know? What do you do to determine whether or not this is a great link or this is maybe a link I should disavow somehow?

So first here you can see the authority score as mean authority score. Also SMS has these bubbles that can also explain to you everything. But here you can have the authority score and I just like filtered it from the highest to the down to the most low authority score. Here you can see of course bing.com of course they have like a huge authority website. It's from 100, let's say. So this grade shows me what is a good website. And also you can take a look at the website itself. If the website itself, let's say for those coupon pages, if those websites you see that they're not really generating any content for them, it's like clean website doesn't really look good. The mobile is like not really responsive. You see like all these pop ups coming in and destroying your experience. Okay, so you're going to understand yourself. It's a spam website and we want to disavow or remove them. If we can just contact the website owner and say, hey, can you not like me but be nice? Okay, what do I do with this data? I have all these backlinks. What do I do with that act? I want to earn backlinks. I want to earn partnerships. Partnerships can bring me lots of natural backlinks. I don't need even to do a lot of efforts and just getting them coupon sites, which is. Which are very good coupon sites. Not the examples of. Maybe you can see in the other slide that they're not really as authoritative affiliates. Partnership. There are really good affiliate websites and publishers that can basically publish and promote your candles. Anything that you're doing. Sorry. And work on your brand name. Also do pr. Put your brand out there. So this way, when you're doing a PR work, this basically can give you some more authority of the website that can link back to your website. So what should I do? Spy. I'm so sorry. But you can spy on your competitors. You can put. You can create a site audit campaign on Semrush. Just create site audit. I will just show you in a bit how it looks like. Just crawl your competitors. You can take a look on what are they missing out? They probably have bad broken links. They have content that they're not taking care of, content that is not generating any traffic for them. And this is how it looks like on Semrush. Basically, I put down just a screenshot of how site audit may look. And it can give you all the grades that you need. Basically slow pages, four or four pages, like error pages that they're not doing right, if they're doing okay with their crawlability, site performance, internal linking, all of that can give you, you know, if their site. If the site pages of your competitor is important for them, so they might take care of them. But if something that is not really performing well for them, it's not the niche that they need to take a look so you can see what they're not focusing on. So if something broken and they don't really care about, so it's something that you can take in and take advantage. Just like, oh, I can take gold of it. Let's say if I have a backlink for them that is broken, I recognize a link. Someone is linking to their website and it's broken, you can totally contact the other website and say, hey, I saw this link is broken. You're serving bad experience. Why not linking to me? I serve the same product and my link is not broken. So this is something that you can totally do as a strategy.

Also really good as you can see, when you do a crawl, you can do a crawl on your own site and do this in reverse. But if you crawl and you see, hey, you know this, this site is ranking for this keyword and the crawl comes back saying that that page is thin, meaning there's not a lot of content there, that's a really good opportunity to say, you know what, I bet you if I create a much better, higher quality page, I bet you I could rank for that page. Because this page is ranking and it's thin. So all these are different ways you can find opportunity. And also find, if you do it in reverse, look for problems on your site. That might be why you're not ranking. If the other site has really prolific content, your content's a little bit thin, so it might be worthwhile to, you know, spruce up that page a little bit.

Exactly, exactly. Basically, Site Audit is amazing tool, gives you everything that you need to know all the problems and all the good things that be happening on your website. So it's something that I just set up like a daily crawl and that's it. Like I get in my mail, like alerts, hey, this page is broken. Oh, okay, I'm going to fix it. So just be alert of everything that's happening on your website and others. So we want to minimize the gap, right? Want to create the content on the keywords. You find the keyword gap and we want to create better content than them. We don't want to copy their content, for God's sake. We don't want to make content that is thin content as they are doing. No, we want to do it better than them. We want to be more sophisticated and we want to be able to serve like better experience even. I can design a better landing page. I can design, I don't know. This is why I use wix, right? Like I want to design like my best website and I can do it like that. I don't need the other developer to just design and everything for me, I can do it like that. And this is the main experience that we want to choose. Also, if your website is doing very slow, so make sure you're serving the fastest landing pages. And also we want to tackle the broken backlinks. So we talked about it. If we see a broken something that is broken on the backlink that is linking to my competitors, I'm going to reach out and ask for them to link to me. We serve the same product. I'm not, I don't have any broken page, just link to me. I Give you the best experience. So yeah, basically all this manual work can take you weeks, right? So all this competitive analysis, it can tell you, I don't know, like 30 minutes. So when you're doing everything and you're busy with your own business and you're doing other business strategy, you know, you don't want to waste your time. This is how I use Semrush every day for site audit, for competitive analysis. Just like five clicks, I swear to God. Okay, so this is just for summary, this tracking my competitors over time for staying ahead. Right. Final words, analyze competitors, look for ideas, trends and more. Close the gap. We need to make use of every opportunity we see. And you know, Semrush is just marking you, highlighting you for top opportunities for you. So it should be very easy for you to identify it. And we need to create 10 times value content for outranking to outrank my competitors. So just think of it as something that always need to be on the back of your mind. Do competitive analysis once a month and you're done. That's great for you. And that's it. If you have any questions, DM me on Twitter, I'm there. I'll be happy to answer anything that you have in mind.

The raz that was absolutely amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Loving the great questions in the Q and A and in the chat. One question I wanted to ask you about. Semrush is a wonderful tool. I personally use it all the time. There are other tools and then, you know, not every tool is for everybody. So definitely take that into account and make sure you find the tools right for you. But also one of the things that I do and I use Semrush to use a bunch of tools is I always end up going to the SERP itself and looking what's there with my own eyes.

This is how I started my slides for sure.

So it's important I think to remember that while you do want to, if you want to do things at scale and you want to do things with ease. So you're going to need a tool to do that. But even if you are doing that, it's always really important I think to go and take a look at what's actually what the page, what the results page actually looks like, what other features are there, what other ads, local packs, direct answers, what kind, what does this get a feel for what's there? Take a look at it, Take a look at the competitor sites themselves. Always take a look at the competitors site, what's their user experience like how does their page look? How does it feel? How are they structuring their content? All of these things are very holistic, but they're really important. And no matter what you do, the best practice is always, yes, use a tool and always check things out at the same time on your own so you can get a real qualitative understanding of what's actually out there. So I know there's a bunch of questions about, do I have to use Semrush to do this? No, no. You certainly can go and see who your competitors are. And even if you do use Semrush, that I highly recommend, or another tool, it's very important to check that out on your own and see what it actually looks like. Anyway, every SEO will tell you this. I myself, when I look at my competitors or when I want to see how Google's changing, I always take a look at the actual page itself.

I think the best tool is your eyes. The best tool, like, really, you can identify everything that a bot can. You know, just something that you need to keep in your back of your mind. But it just simplified my work, and I work with other tools as well, but it just simplifies my work.

So I wanted to ask you, when you see a site, because you mentioned before that they're doing paid advertising, whether it be display advertising or whether it be the actual advertisements on the Google results page itself, does that mean that you should do that necessarily? Does that mean, forget my organic content, there's ads there? How do you go about that? Let's say I don't want to spend on ads.

If you don't want to spend on ads, that's perfectly fine. We're just going to see if my competitors are doing investing more payments.