In order to succeed at dominating among one or more targeted audiences, you need multiple strategies for reaching them. Through social media, email, search engines and other avenues, brands can slowly build massive followings that result in consistent exposure, sales and other forms of engagement.

Search engines remain one of the biggest platforms for brand competition, with virtually everybody using search engines multiple times per day to find what they need. If you want to dominate in targeted search results effectively, however, then you need to know who is competing for the same attention. Below, we’ll talk about how you can quickly determine who all is competing for your audience – and you may even discover some competitors you didn’t know existed!

Search for “Related”

Using Google to determine who else is competing with you on Google seems like the first step in figuring out the competition. With the operator term “related:yourdomain”, you can uncover who else Google views as being relevant to your brand.

This also often can be a great way to figure out how Google sees your brand, as it will show you which entities are associated with your brand in one or more ways. This method of determining fellow competitors works best when pinging to Google related queries for larger and more established domains, but can be used in any situation to get an idea of what the broader competition looks like in any situation.

Probe Your Keywords

Another simple set of Google searches can further provide insight into the competition. By simply executing queries for your targeted keywords, you’ll be able to see which websites and brands are ranking best for the niches you’re targeting. When performing this search, be sure to disable any personalizations that would naturally skew the results to mirror your personal search preferences.

At the same time, you can also perform Google searches for your own brand. You may discover that some of your competitors are targeting your own brand as one of their keywords in an attempt to rank more highly among your more loyal audiences.

Purchase Competitor Analysis

If you’d rather enlist the services of a professional solution to find out who all is competing against you, then you have a variety of options to consider. Services such as Searchmetrics and SEMRush offer not only an overview of your competitors, but a summary of your online reach and marketing efforts. This information – for both you and your competitors – can be useful in determining where best to spend your time, and where your competitors may be lagging.

Through these tools, you’ll also be able to identify which specific keywords and phrases your competitors are pinging to Google, Bing and other search engines. This approach is certainly more streamlined and can help you gather more comprehensive data about your competition.

Uncovering who exactly is competing against your brand is a matter of survival. By figuring out who’s targeting which specific keywords and how they’re performing, your brand can be better positioned to outperform their efforts. With this information, you’ll be ready to tackle any new challenges from competitors in the future and expand your reach beyond its present levels.