Optimizing your website is vital for your business. When you do this, you are making sure that your website appears higher on Google searches.
If you want your website to appear on the first page of Google, you need to make sure that you have the right keywords on your site. If your website doesn’t have the right keywords, it is likely to appear lower than your competitors.
It is important to know your competitors’ ranking tricks. You will be able to see how to do SEO competitor analysis and how they are doing, what was their strategy, and what is the structure of their website. That is why SEO competitor analysis is very necessary.
What is Competitor Analysis?
It’s no secret that organic search results are more likely to be clicked on if they’re one of the first five options that appear on Google.
Nevertheless, even if you create a strong SEO strategy, write great content, and perform regular technical SEO audits, there’s no guarantee that your content will get the attention it deserves.
In fact, studies show that ninety percent of web pages don’t get any search traffic from Google at all! So if you’re not getting traffic from Google, where is it coming from? More often than not, it’s coming from your SEO competitors.
The bottom line is this: if your competitors are doing all of these things better than you are, you’re going to have a hard time gaining visibility in the search results.
No doubt your competitors can be fantastic sources of information if you know how to look at them correctly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) competitor analysis is a great way to tap into this hidden treasure and use it to your advantage.
When done right, SEO competitor analysis will help you create more targeted and relevant content, improve your search engine ranking, and draw more traffic to your website.
Google Analytics and SEMrush are two popular tools that you can use to help you in this process. If you are a startup, you need to hire an SEO specialist.
These people will help you analyze your competitors and create a plan to beat them. When you are hiring someone for this task, make sure that he or she is very knowledgeable about the field.
Competitor analysis SEO can include:
- Learn what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
- Find competitors’ weaknesses, and capitalize on them.
- Find competitors’ strengths, and replicate them.
- Understand how difficult outperforming competitors in the SERPs is likely to be.
- SEO keyword competition analysis
- Competitor backlink analysis
- Keyword gap analysis
- Top content analysis
Content is King
Many marketing companies are trying to rank better in search results. The best way to get more traffic is to improve your website’s content. However, it is not easy to produce high-quality content.
You need to invest a lot of time and effort to create it. If you are not interested in writing the content yourself, you can hire writers.
With the help of an SEO competitor analysis tool, you can analyze the competitor and find out what they are doing right and wrong. You can also compare your competitor’s content with your own site to identify your weaknesses and strengths.
You can get an overview of what your competitors are doing and why they are doing it. This will help you to analyze why they are getting top rankings and how you can increase your ranking.
Steps on How to Perform a Competitor Analysis?
SEO competitor analysis can be completed with two tools: Ahref and a Google Sheets template. Be sure to make a copy of the template before getting started.
It may also be helpful to have a copy of the completed sheet on hand for clarification if any instructions feel unclear. You can do that here.
Through Competitor analysis, we will understand how you can beat our competitors and dominate your competition.
Identify Your SEO Competitors
The first step in a competitor analysis is to define your competitors. A lot of people are intimidated by competitor analysis. This is because it involves going through a list of competitors and seeing how they operate. However, you can easily do this.
You might already be aware of whom the industry giants are in your field, but do you know your main SEO competitors by name? They might not be the same.
In fact, you could have multiple SEO competitors who exist outside of your niche that you need to try to outrank in SERPs.For example, a bakery in Dubai trying to rank for keywords like “best bread in Dubai” would be competing with other bakeries for first-page results.
But if that bakery was also trying to rank a helpful how-to blog, they became fail because as we know competing against big companies can seem daunting, but remember that they are also trying to rank for keywords that are relevant to their business.
By understanding your main SEO rivals, you can develop a better content strategy and improve your chances of ranking on the first page of SERPs.
Evaluate Keyword
It’s always a good idea to assess the strength of your SEO competitors before you start analyzing specific link-building strategies or on-page SEO.
Although you can beat out any competitor in any niche and for any keyword, in theory, it would take a lot of resources to do so for some keywords, making them unfeasible.
Use your competitor analysis tool to look at your competitors’ total domain strength and then analyze specific factors, such as you will need to use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner.
It can help you to discover keywords that your competitors are ranking for and keywords that they aren’t ranking for.
These are keywords that you can bid on to try and get on the first page of search results. If you do this, you can start to improve your organic search rankings. It will also help you to know what your competitors are doing and what their plans are.
Link Building
To make sure that you are ranking highly for the keywords you are targeting, it is important to have lots of quality backlinks. A lot of companies look for links and pay money for them.
This is not the best way to get links. Instead, you should focus on getting links organically. The best way to do this is to have a quality link profile. The backlinks you get will help you to get more visitors and leads.
They will also help to boost your search engine ranking. If you are worried about how you will be able to build links, you can use the tips below to get links that will help your rankings.
- Domain authority.
- Domain country and age.
- Indexing search engines.
- Catalog listings.
- Backlink
- Alexa rank.
- Traffic
- Social signals
Analyze On-Page Optimization
Your competitive analysis tool is the perfect way to get an in-depth look into your competitor’s on-site SEO practices. You’ll be able to see how often they publish new content, what kinds of content they produce, and which keywords they’re targeting.
This information is invaluable as you work to improve your own site’s SEO. To improve your on-site SEO, figure out the internal linking strategies of your competitors.
This will give you a benchmark to follow and help you improve upon what they’re already doing well. Additionally, take note of what they’re missing so you can fill in the gaps and provide a better user experience overall like
- Topical relevance.
- What types of content or media they’re creating?
- Video length or word count.
- The depth of detail covered.
Examine the Site Structure of your Competitor
Competitor analysis is a key part of any SEO strategy, and it’s especially important when trying to overtake competitors in the SERP rankings.
If you can identify opportunities where your competitors are ranking well despite having an outdated website or poor mobile optimization, you can take advantage of those opportunities to improve your own rankings.
Google has been putting a lot of emphasis on user experience recently. If you haven’t noticed, most of the major changes to the algorithm in the past few years have been related to UX – making mobile experiences better, pages loading faster, and search results more relevant.
If your website is slower than your competitors, difficult to use on mobile, or generally just difficult to navigate, then you need to fix that.
Use Google Ads Campaigns
If you’re struggling to compete with other websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s possible that your competitors are using paid traffic campaigns to generate conversions and sales.
I don’t recommend trying to match their spending dollar for dollar, but it can be helpful to monitor their Google Ads campaigns, promoted content, banner ads, paid posts, and more.
This way, you can at least get an idea of what other people in your niche are spending on advertising.
Apply the Social Media Strategy of your Competitor
If you want to increase website traffic, you need to track when your brand is mentioned online, even if there are no links back to your website. Use a social listening tool to track brand mentions on social media.
It’s important to track linkless mentions of your brand on social media so you can engage with your audience. This is especially true when people are specifically using or looking for your product.
You can also track brand mentions on news sites, blogs, forums, and other platforms to get a sense of how people are feeling about your brand.
Technical SEO Competitor Analysis
It’s time to turn your attention to technical SEO auditing if you want to improve your website’s ranking. This process involves reviewing the technical aspects of your site and comparing it to your competition.
You need to identify any technical SEO gaps that could be harming your ranking and take steps to fix them.
Internal Linking
Internal links are like the roads or pathways between the different pages on your website. They help search engines index your site so it shows up in relevant searches, and they help users navigate your site more easily.
Google recommends using descriptive anchor text for internal links, which means the words you use to link should give users an idea of where they’ll end up if they click on that link.
Creating a robust internal linking structure helps both users and search engines find their way around your site more easily, and it also helps boost the ranking of important pages on your site by giving them additional link authority.
Page Speed
The Google Page Experience update means that site speed will become an even more important ranking factor.
Your pages should take no longer than three seconds to load and 52% of visitors expect them to load within two seconds.
Mobile-Friendly
If you want your business to be successful online, you need to make sure your pages are mobile-friendly.
With more than half of all Google searches now conducted using a mobile device; Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly pages in its search results.
So if you want your business to be visible in search, you need to make sure your pages are optimized for mobile.
SSL Certifications
Google rankings will improve for websites that have strong HTTPS encryption because it provides a safe browsing experience for users.
In fact, if a website doesn’t have HTTPS encryption, a ‘Not Secure’ label will be displayed next to the website’s name in the search results.
In short, How to do SEO Competitor Analysis
- Reveal unknown search competitors with the Discover Competitors feature.
- Monitor your competitors’ keyword rankings.
- Discover new keywords with the Keywords Suggestions feature.
- Find keywords that you are already ranking for in the Keyword Discovery feature.
- Join your Google Search Console tool to get a broader understanding of which keywords are driving your traffic to your website over time.
- Identify your top rankings keyword and the top keywords per domain.
- Stay on top of your backlinks profile and identify link-building opportunities with the Backlinks feature.
- Create customizable Activity Plans that are unique to your website’s search needs. You can even incorporate competitor SEO analysis into your progress tracking and KPIs.
FAQs Related How to do SEO Competitor Analysis?
What is the best SEO tool for competitor site analysis?
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Page Optimizer Pro
How do I find my competitor’s SEO keywords?
- WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool
- BuzzSumo
- Semrush
- Spyfu
- Ahrefs
- Google Auction Insights
- Seed Keywords
- Tag Clouds
How do I check my competitor traffic?
One of the most important things you can do is monitor your competitors’ websites. You can do this by using a service like Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service that lets you analyze your website’s traffic.
It is a great tool for helping you learn about your customers and how they behave. You can use this information to increase your sales. When you analyze your competitors, you will be able to find out what they are doing.
This will help you to understand why they are successful. You can also use this knowledge to improve your own business.
What questions should I ask in a competitor analysis?
- Who are your competitors?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the opportunities and threats within a given market or industry?
- What are the characteristics of your ideal customers and your competitors’ ideal customers?
Conclusion
Most of us know Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as one of the leading internet marketing strategies for businesses. If you want to reach your target audience, you should optimize your website.
This means that you have to work on getting the most traffic possible to your website. You must know how to do SEO competitor analysis and how to optimize your website for search engines like Google.
It is a process that can be easy if you follow the right procedures. There are many factors that you should consider while you are optimizing your website.
These include the design of your website, your domain name, and your keywords and SEO competitor analysis are the main key features of your success.
