a single source, nothing corroborates it

Search an index made only of your competitors

Load the sites you consider your competition into a Google Custom Search Engine and run operators against that set instead of the open web. Queries that would return noise everywhere become useful when the index is just the people you are chasing, and custom sorting lets you rank their pages by review count or modification date. It surfaces repeatable content slots such as terms rewritten every month.

The method

1. 01

   Build a Google Custom Search Engine containing only the sites you consider your competition, then run search operators against that set instead of the whole web.

2. 02

   Search your competitor index for titles containing month names, because the terms that get rewritten every month are a repeatable content slot, and check who is already targeting next year.

3. 03

   Turn on custom sorting in your Custom Search Engine and rank competitor pages by a structured data field such as review count, so you can see which products or pages to build out first.

What it returned

• Glen Allsopp loaded the top design blogs from his own rankings pages into one. He notes operators that would return noise across the open web become valuable when the index is just your competitors.

• An intitle: search across design blogs showed both design trends and wallpapers being targeted with month-specific queries. Glen Allsopp says a surprising number of sites are already chasing terms dated in the future.

• The setting sits under Search Features then Advanced, and sorts on keys from PageMaps, rich snippet markup or meta tags. Keys Glen Allsopp got working include review-RatingCount, metatags-DateModified and itemprop-DateModified.

Sources

• Advanced Keyword Research: Four Tactics You're (Probably) Not Using - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Strategy #2: The Google Custom Search Engine Method · 2018-09-06