How And Why To Do An SEO Competitor Analysis
SEO competitive analysis involves researching the links, keywords, content, and more of your SEO competitors to reverse engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your SEO strategy.
Many businesses take competitor analysis for granted, thinking that they have done the best they can in their SEO efforts. There is always something that can be improved to get better results and stay ahead of the competition.
Read More About SEO Competition is a healthy part of the business. Monitoring and trying to better your direct competitors is what keeps firms sharp. It encourages innovation, prevents complacency, and offers inspiration to improve.
How To Performing SEO Competitor Analysis
Your niche, your target customers, and your overall business goals will all have an impact on the shape of the process.
SEO competitor analysis works as a powerful research strategy in helping you to rank higher, get more traffic, and earn more conversions. Its magic happens by uncovering SEO opportunities you may not have seen otherwise.
Competitor analysis helps successfully answer questions like:
Who are my actual SEO competitors?
What keywords should I target?
What topics should I cover?
Where can I find links?
What do I need to beat the competition?
1. Identify Your True Competitors
You need to research thoroughly and accurately in the process of discovering your SEO competition in your SEO analysis.
This involves doing SEO comparison and research on multiple keywords and taking note of the top 10 or 20 websites that appear consistently for all of them. You probably have a pretty good idea of who your direct business competitors are.
To generate target keywords, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Building a customer persona is a good way to do this. It will help you work out the topics that your customers will be interested in.
Testing out the viability of those keywords can be as simple as looking into a tool like the Google Keyword Planner.
That will give you details like the search volume for each keyword and how competitive the keyword is. From there you can decide which keywords will deliver the best ROI. They are the ones that you should look to target.
The pages and companies listed there are your main competitors for those keywords. The pages ranked most highly on that first SERP are your biggest rivals. That means the pages in the top three positions or the coveted ‘position zero’ if there is one.
There are also some competitor analysis tools that you can use to get an accurate picture of your competition. SpyFu, for example, lets you input your domain or a target keyword and then produces a list of competing sites and pages.
2. Competitor Keyword Analysis
This stage of your competitor SEO analysis is where you find keywords on a competitor’s site that they are ranking for and your site is not.
The Ahrefs competitor analysis tool has a specific feature called Content Gap to identify keywords that rank for specific domains you specify.
There are three main elements to competitor keyword analysis.
There is the analysis of the difficulty involved in challenging competitors to rank for different keywords.
Identification of keywords that your rivals rank for, but don’t. That is often known as Keyword Gap Analysis.
There is then also the process of identifying useful keywords that both your and your competitors have overlooked. These keywords will be easier to rank for but may still deliver notable results when it comes to organic traffic. That makes them very interesting from an ROI point of view.
A competitor backlink analysis involves looking at which sites are linking back to their content and how it is affecting their domain rank and authority.
You can look at these qualities from a competitor’s backlinks:
• Number of backlinks
• Domain authority of linked sites
• Relevancy of linked content
There is no way to get this information manually, so you will once again want to lean on an SEO analysis tool. In this case, your best bet may be the Link Explorer tool from Moz.
3. Content Analysis
You will also want to look at your competitors’ pages and their content to evaluate on-page factors.
Google is all about the content being genuinely useful to readers and providing them with real answers to their questions. Lengthy articles that get to grips with a subject are better than short, vague pieces of content.
You need to read your competitors’ content and make a subjective assessment. You can then compare the quality of the content with your own. That will give you an idea of if and how your content needs to be improved.
4. Social Media & Customer Interaction Analysis
Google also views user experience as an important ranking factor. They tend to rate sites that are easier to navigate higher than others.
They also like sites to be accessible to as many different users as possible. That means users on their phones, tablets, laptop, and desktop.
Good competitor analysis will identify and assess how rival sites perform in these areas. If highly ranked competitors outdo you on user experience, that’s a definite area for you to improve.
If their user experience isn’t top-notch but they still rank highly, it’s an area where you might make significant gains on them.
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