How to Find Out Why Your Competitors Rank Higher

Why do the same competitors always outrank you on Google?

The answer usually comes down to links, but figuring out where those links come from takes real digging.

Most SEO advice stops at optimizing your own site, but the bigger gap is usually how other websites link to your competitors and not you.

1. Local directories that pass along a valuable backlink
2. Free versus paid directory listings
3. Using AI to surface where a competitor is mentioned online
4. Sorting real opportunities from dead ends

Following this process gives you a short list of specific, findable places to get your own site linked and mentioned.

Timestamps
[0:00] Introduction
[0:30] Why competitor research matters
[1:04] Links versus on-site SEO
[1:39] What clients pay for
[2:14] How this connects to the mentoring program
[2:49] Links and mentions, ranked
[3:48] Finding local directories
[5:23] Deciding if a directory is worth paying for
[6:23] Using AI to find competitor mentions
[8:15] Needle in a haystack, and why that's still worth it

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Send me your AI/SEO questions!
https://www.meredithshusband.com/podcast

Transcript

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Meredith's Husband 0:33

All right, welcome to episode, I think it's number 206. And today I'm going to talk about something that I do for my consulting clients, one area where what I do is actually very valuable and how you can do something similar on your own. Okay, so first, the most important thing that I do as a consultant, and by important I mean the most valuable. The reason I can charge a healthy hourly rate is because obviously I need to bring value in a short amount of time. This is one of the things that can bring a lot of value to a big client in a short amount of time, a relatively short amount

Why Competitor Research Pays Off

Meredith's Husband 1:07

of time. And that is basically competitor research. A client hires me, and one of the first things they want to know is, you know, how do we be number one? Basically, is their objective. And in order to do that or tell them how they can do that, we need to look at the websites that are already number one and figure out how did they do it. Now, most of the time, that's going to come down to links. Okay. I've mentioned many times how important links are in Google. And they're important, especially in this aspect, because everybody can do on-site SEO. Like it's not really that difficult to have a highly optimized

Links Still Decide Who Ranks

Meredith's Husband 1:42

website in terms of what you do to your website. It's much more difficult and more competitive when you start talking about getting links from other websites and getting mentions online. Most of the time, when you look at a website that is ranked number one or really highly on Google, the reason it's there and it's not number, you know, five or 10 is going to come down to the links that it has. So the competitor research is a really important tool when I can go to my clients and say, okay, these websites that are number one, two, and three, here are the reasons they are there. This is what they are doing to achieve that. That's super valuable. From then, we go on and I help them create a strategy to do something similar. But before that begins, obviously we need to know what's working. We also do a version of this in the mentoring program. If you're part of that program, that's around weeks seven, eight, kind of right in the middle of the mentoring program. And I show students how they can use AI to help them do that. So in that situation, I obviously can't dedicate the number of hours I would dedicate to my consulting clients to help you through it, but I have developed AI skills to do that instead of me. Now, you can even do a more simplified version of that, which is what I'm going to talk about today. And again, what we're going to be looking for is links and mentions. Remember, last week I talked about uh Yelp and I talked a little bit about how important mentions are becoming, how mentioned it used to be for SEO that links were like primary importance. They were way more valuable than anything else, including mentions. That is starting to even out, especially with AI. The way AI goes about searching the internet, it can't follow links, but it does see mentions. So mentions are becoming more important. So we're looking for number one links and number two mentions. Now, the way that we do that in the mentoring program is we use SEMrush and with a company in combination with AI. But you can do it manually too. You can't do it as well. But what we're going to be looking for is directories specifically where a link would be really valuable and how to use AI to research specific competitors to see where they are mentioned. Now, this will not give you as full a picture as if you use Sumrush, but it should be helpful. So let's talk about the directories first. And with directories, specifically, we're going to be thinking more about links. But what I mean by a directory is something kind of like Yelp, like a directory of businesses, uh hopefully in your area or businesses in your industry. And usually along with those is going to be a link to your website, like on Yelp. So it depends on where you live. Like urban areas are going to have more of these, most likely, than less urban areas. But the way that you can find them is let's say I'm going to use Meredith as an example. I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to type in family

Find Directories Google Already Trusts

Meredith's Husband 4:22

photographers in Brooklyn. And I'm going to look for directories. I'm not looking for competitor websites right now. I'm looking for sites like Yelp. In our neighborhood, there's at least two or three more that are really popular that are going to show up in the first one, two, or three pages of Google. So when you're doing this, don't feel like you need to limit yourself to the first page of Google. Definitely don't do that. You want to scan, I would say, at least the top three pages, maybe the top five pages. And they're there, that might sound intimidating. It's not difficult to do that. You're going to look at each page. Each page of Google is going to have probably maybe one or two of these directories. Most of the what is you're going to find in Google is going to be competitor websites. And for this step, we can skip right over those. Okay. And so when you find these, what we want to do is we want to make sure that your website is listed in those directories. Because what do we know already? We know that Google considers those directories to be pretty authoritative, okay, because they are ranking high in Google. Okay, so a link from those websites is going to be more valuable than a link from a website that is not ranked highly in Google. So when you find directories like this, see if they're if they're free, number one, yeah, definitely, absolutely do it. If they're some sort of paid directory, then there's no exact rule of thumb here, but it might be worth some level of investment. Again, unfortunately, if you live in urban areas, it's probably going to cost more. Like there are directories that I know of that Meredith could join that are $500 a year for a linked profile. That's probably not worth it in our case. If we found something that were $10 or $20 or $50 a year, that probably would be worth it. But there is no exact number I can give you. All I can say is if it's free, definitely do it. Otherwise, you need to basically answer the question is it a is it a reputable website? If it is, and you can see that your top-ranked competitors are there and you are not, then we know that that's something that your competitors, your top-ranked competitors have done in order to get those top spots that in this case you could pay to do. Okay, so that's number one directories. The second way you can do this is, and this is where we're going to use AI a little bit to help, is pick a single competitor. And you're going to do this for probably a few different competitors, or you at least can do this for a few competitors, but pick one at a time and take that to AI, whatever model you are using. In this case, personally, I would try out Gemini because Gemini basically is Google, it has all that information. The other AI bots do not have, they can scan Google, yes, but they don't have direct access to everything. So I would try Gemini. In my experience,

Use AI To Uncover Mentions

Meredith's Husband 6:56

it's just going to come up with more information. But you want to ask about this competitor specifically and ask AI to find as many mentions online as possible. And whatever model you end up using, if there is an option to do like deep research, I would use that. You don't have to use the advanced thinking models, but you do want to let AI take as much time as it needs to go out and find these mentions. Okay, compared to you or I doing it, it's doing it like a millions and millions of times faster. So it's definitely worth a few seconds or a few minutes. And then what that will do is it was hopefully going to come back and it's going to say, this website, who is one of your competitors and is doing very well in Google, is mentioned in all these different places. I don't know, it's going to keep completely dependent on your situation and the competitor, but then go through those and start to think, well, can I get my site or can I get my brand mentioned in those places? Okay. And that's the second part. So if you can do these two parts, this is a really a very crude version of what I do for SE my SEO consulting clients at a at a pretty high level. This is what happens when a company pays $10,000 a month for SEO service. This is like the first thing is competitor research and a lot of it. And so what I just covered, a super simple, uh free way you can at least start to do some of this work yourself. The only caveat here is this might come back with a lot of information that ultimately is not helpful. This process is kind of like looking for needles and haystacks. So a lot of what you find is going to be stuff that maybe you can't do. It's not an easy link to get. For example, what I see a lot of times is wherever you live in your neighborhood, there's going to be some sort of media website. It has like the top 10 photographers for weddings in your area. Okay. An article like that, if you're not on it, you can't then add it. You can't get

Filtering Noise And Staying Realistic

Meredith's Husband 8:48

onto a list like that. You might find a lot of situations like this. Or you might not. I don't know. It totally depends. But this is what I mean by you're kind of looking for a needle in a haystack. So don't get discouraged if you find things that you can't do. And this, by the way, is a level of SEO. It's a type of SEO that most small businesses are never going to do. So if you're doing this at all strategically, I would say this is an advantage. All right. I hope that helps. Do you know what Google was called before it was called Google? I did once and now. It was called Backrub. What? Yeah, backrub. No, I don't remember that. Backrub was the name of Google before it was called Get Out. Yeah, pretty terrible, huh? Back? Like that's one of the worst. Because it was all built on backlinks. So we've talked about how important links are to SEO and to Google, and how another word for links is backlinks. The way websites link to each other is called backlinks. How'd the rub get in? I don't know. That's

Backrub Story And Final Takeaway

Meredith's Husband 9:48

just gross. That is what the two guys who founded Google called it. And it was only when they got a CEO that the CEO was like, okay, priority number one, we got to change the name. I don't think Google would be Google if it was called Bacrub. Can you imagine if they had kept that instead of saying, Oh, you can Google it? We could say, Oh, just back rub it. Oh God, no.