I think it's still competition because other sites take away potential traffic from your site. That's just the nature of how search engines work, but search eng

I think it's still competition because other sites take away potential traffic from your site. That's just the nature of how search engines work, but search engines also favor big sites with many pages and tons of quality back links. I'm not saying sites like digitalocean or stackoverflow are bad, but from an SEO perspective it's not going to be easy to out rank them in most topics where you're writing about the same or similar things -- especially not in the case of digitalocean because they are selling something, and they have a ton of $ to promote their site everywhere.