How to Use Sitemaps to Research Your Competitors
Are your competitors leaving their niches open for you to start taking over?
In today's video, I'm going to be teaching you how to check out sitemaps, to learn a little bit more about your competitors and see whether or not they are still actively updating their websites so that you can see how active and competitive your competition is.
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0:00 - Introduction to How to Use Sitemaps to Research Your Competitors
0:27 - Tactic for today: Sitemaps
The reason why is because sitemaps are the ways that sites are being able to be read by search engines like Google or Bing. They need to have sitemaps in order to make it easier for these search engines to crawl their websites and understand what these websites are all about.
So we first need to do today is find a niche in which it's interesting to us. And we want to potentially learn a little bit more about that particular niche and the people that are sites on that niche.
1:17 - Digging into a competitor's website: Ultimate Frisbee
So the first website for today is ultimatefrisbeehq.com. The last time that we looked at this website, it was just at a very high level, but essentially this is a website around information covering ultimate Frisbee.
Looking at their sitemap, their sitemap has essentially been somewhat dormant. In fact, you can see that this website was last modified in 2020. It has been several years since they've updated content on their website.
2:04 - Questions to ask yourself looking at your competitor's sitemap
The first thing that you want to do as you start to look through a sitemap is what does it look like at a high level? Are they regularly updating posts or has it been a some period of time since they last updated posts?
The reason why you want to ask this question is because if they haven't been creating a lot of new content, then it's probably something in which they let the website die.
3:39 - A few things to look for in a particular sitemap
How much content did it take for this competitor to actually rank for what they're ranking for today?
Are they actively maintaining the website? Is it really easy to overcome their already existing moat? Or is it a space in which maybe they've got thousands of pages in which they have thousands of posts already have a head start, as opposed to you?
5:40 - Digging into another competitor's website: theuap.com
So, in this case, what do we see here?
What we see when we exclude everything here is we actually have about 307 pages. So this is actually a perfect analogous example to the first case with ultimate Frisbee HQ, because this is the 10X site.
So one thing that's catching my eye is that they have a sub folder around their blog in which they cover a lot of different topics. So I'm trying to go through here. I'm trying to see if there's any ideas that potentially are inspiring to me.
8:01 - Digging into theuap.com's SEMRush profile
Here you can see that they really don't do all that well in terms of organic search traffic.
It's probably a really nice niche in which you can make a couple hundred bucks every single month from just the display ads. If I were to really take over this space that said the theuap.com has a lot going for it in which what they could do is come up with a creative way to open up more of their content.
9:41 - Key takeaways
Figure out when was the last time things were getting updated as well as how much content is actually on the website that you're visiting to assess whether or not it's worth it for you to go after them too.
✍️ COMMENT BELOW:
Did you know sitemaps are a great resource for gaining insight about competitors in your niche?
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Disclaimer: Grow with Will does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This video, and the ideas presented in it, are for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice.