Looking for businesses that bid on industry keywords can be a little more reliable than looking at organic traffic overlap. That’s because it tends to surface direct competitors rather than blogs or other sites with different business models.
For example, look at the ads for “email marketing software.”
3 email makreting software ads
Both of these advertisers are direct competitors to ConvertKit or MailChimp because they sell email marketing software.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
If you want to scale up this approach, use the Ads History report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to see historical search ads data for relevant keywords. For example, we see that 307 domains have historically paid for ads on keywords like “email marketing app” and “email marketing software.”
4 ads history
c) Look at category listings
Whatever you sell or do, you can bet there’s a website that curates companies that do the same.
Got a software product? Check companies listed in categories on G2 or alternatives.
Own a local business? Check Yelp and its alternatives.
Selling ketchup? There’s a listing for that as well.
This method is fast and straightforward. However, companies listed in a relevant category won’t always be your competitors. You never know how the companies got listed.