Every company strives to be the best in the market, and to achieve this you have to outperform your competitors. By incorporating the competitive analysis to your SEO strategy, you can identify your ranking in the market then make changes to your weak spots. It would be in your best interest if you studied your competitors and understand their marketing strategies.
SEO competitor analysis will enlighten you on platforms that they use to attract customers. You will get valuable information about their site structure, the content that they post to their audience, and you get to study their links.
Let’s look at how to identify your competitors, factors that make them outrank you, and take steps to improve your current ranking.
⦁ Identify Your Competitors
Before you begin the SEO competitive analysis, it would be best to identify your real competitors. Your competitors include websites that compete against you or companies that provide similar products or services. To start, identify keywords that competitors would use to attract customers, then identify the sites that rank highly for all the keywords.
For better accuracy, record the results of the domains that frequently appear for each search. To simplify the work, you can try an SEO competitor analysis tool that prepares a competitor lock report. The report compares your backlinks to each #1 ranked page, and it shows you what the gauges look like for each of the top ten results. Once you have identified your primary competitors, you can use it to conduct an SEO competitive analysis.
⦁ Analyze their Websites
You will need to understand how competitors build their backlinks. It would be best to analyze the anchor texts that they use, the websites with lots of links, and the number of links that each competitor has. By performing a backlink check on your competitors, you can understand their profile and why they rank that way. You will also appreciate the strategies that they use to get links; hence, you can create a list of links that you believe will attract potential clients. You will have to identify the total number of links linked to the website, the total external links, and the linking root domains.
⦁ Analyze Keyword Difficulty
It would be wise to analyze the strengths of your SEO competitors. Find a suitable analysis tool then analyze their domain strength, Alexa rank, Backlink data, Catalog listings, their indexing, domain age and country, social signals, and traffic volumes.
Take note of the date and identify weaknesses that you can use to your advantage. If your competitor has a more reliable SEO, then it means that it would be difficult to outrank them. In this step, it would be best to focus on competitors who have a lower score.
Once you have analyzed keyword difficulty, it would be best to identify new keyword opportunities. You should consider performing a TF-IDF analysis that will help you improve your current content, and you will identify the right keywords; thus, you will optimize your website pages for search engines.
⦁ Analyze Competitors Backlink Growth
It would be in your best interest to analyze your competitor’s link building strategies. Start by inspecting the rate at which they get linking sites since it will give you a target when you begin building your link. For every domain, pick some domain referrals then subtract from the number of links that they had a year ago.
Besides, you will also need to analyze the growth trend for leading competitors. Analyze whether their profiles show consistent or inconsistent growth. You might identify websites that will provide your site with a better backlink in the process.
It would be best to monitor the dofollow links since they will positively affect your ranking. The dofollow links are the high priority linking domains that all your competitors share.
⦁ Compare your Content and SEO Ranking with That of Competitors
Take your time and study your competitors. You might identify some unknown competitors who are struggling to scale the SERPs for keywords. By analyzing their content, you will identify bloggers, publishers, and all the brands that you compete against.
Also, there are some link metrics that you will have to compare depending on the type of tool you prefer using. Some of the parameters to look into include Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Ahrefs, Domain Rating, and Domain Authority.
Besides, you can compare page speeds and inspect whether your speed is slower than that of competitors. Depending on the depth of your SEO analysis, you can also compare product pages, category pages, and homepages.
⦁ Perform the Keyword Gap Analysis
The gap analysis helps identify keywords that drive traffic to your competitors and not to your website. The review will help reveal loopholes in your strategy that you are currently not using.
Besides, you will identify product lines that you can create with your team, come up with new content to post, and identify opportunities to implement in-service pages. You can use a comparison website to filter different keywords and apply filters when performing the gap analysis.
It’s also important to analyze the short and long-tail keywords which your local competitors use to attract customers, and implement them to increase the traffic to your website.
⦁ Do a SERP Analysis
It’s difficult to understand the appropriate keywords that will target customers; therefore, it would be necessary to understand your customer’s intentions when searching the keywords. You will have to understand your customer’s mindset, and you can achieve this through the SERP analysis. Other than determining customers buying intentions, it would be best to look into the SERP metrics such as keyword difficulty, link metrics of all competitor pages, and SERP features such as snippets.
A more in-depth SEO competitor analysis will give you a competitive advantage over your competitors. In the process, you will gain insight into fundamental steps to take when running your company. You can use several tools in performing the analysis, but as a business owner, it would be appropriate to understand the levers that drive the SEO strategy. Most importantly, competitive analysis is an integral part of your marketing success; therefore, you should invest your resources in performing it.
