Competitor analysis is crucial for every business. As a business owner, you want to understand your competitors' strategies and determine how to improve your own strategy based on the findings. Since digital marketing is the most efficient tool today, we want to teach you how to analyze your SEO competitors effectively.
At the end of this article, you should have enough knowledge to create a sustainable strategy that will keep your business ranked number one on the search engine results page. Let us begin!
What does competitive analysis include?
In a broader term, competitive analysis includes researching competitors' products, services, marketing, and sales tactics and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. The next stage would be to analyze your own business and compare the two. That is how you can see where you stand compared to other businesses in your niche. This is a very useful strategy because it allows you to stay at the top of your game.
A competitive SEO analysis will help you to improve your SEO strategy.
When it comes to competitive SEO analysis, you want to understand what SEO strategies your competitors use. The battle for online visibility and reputation never ends, and you constantly need to keep up with the current trends to avoid losing your high search rank. With that in mind, it would be a wise choice to do a competitive SEO analysis before you even start an online business.
Create a list of your competitors
Before you can start the analysis, you need to understand who your competitors are. That is why you need to identify them first and create a list. This seems easy when we look at a business as a whole. It is clear who the niche giants are. However, that does not mean they are your biggest SEO competitors. In fact, they might not be in your niche at all!
When it comes to SEO, you are competing with companies that use similar or exact keywords like your business. Knowing that, how can you accomplish this? The answer is simple. All you need to do is search your targeted keywords and write down the list of top domains that come up. It is also worth noting what kind of content shows in the search results. For example, if you notice that top-ranking websites publish video content, you will also need to create video content.
Use helper tools to speed up your competitive SEO analysis
Once you identify your SEO competitors, it is time to analyze their SEO strategies and analysis tools and understand their strengths and weaknesses. The number one way to do this is with the help of SEO analysis software. There is a variety of great tools you can use, and you should definitely consider this as your first approach.
These tools are already built with the intent to analyze the SEO of provided domains and break it apart into small and understandable chunks. You want to be efficient and productive with the research, and the tools will help you to save time and speed up the process.
SEO analysis software will substantially reduce the time necessary to analyze competitors’ SEO strategies.
Do keyword analysis
The first step in breaking down your SEO competitor strategy is analyzing the keywords used. If you use an SEO competitor tool for keyword analysis, you will be able to analyze various factors, such as:
- domain authority, country, and age
- index rank in search engines
- any catalog listings the business uses
- backlink strategy
- the website's rank on Alexa
- the amount of organic and paid traffic
- social strategies
The idea is to use this data to understand potential weaknesses in your competitors' SEO strategy and use that to rank higher and accelerate website sales.
Build a better keyword strategy
When you research competitors' keywords, you will know exactly which ones rank high. A common mistake you could make at this point is to use the same keywords for your business. This strategy will probably fail because those keywords are not built for your business.
What you should do instead is use their keywords to get an idea of how to improve your keyword strategy. You should take what they use and make it better and more optimized for your business needs.
On-Page SEO analysis
Another benefit of analyzing competitors' SEO is to understand their On-Page SEO strategy and On-Page content. What you should get from this strategy is:
- The frequency of publishing new content
- What type of content they use
- What keywords they target with the content
- Page metadata
- Headline strategies that include the length of headlines, keywords, tags, etc.
- Internal linking strategies
This is where you have to understand what they do best and learn from their experience. Furthermore, understand what they are missing, so you can do a better job in that area.
Understanding competitors' On-Page SEO strategy will also improve user experience on your website.
Backlink strategies
Backlink strategies are probably one of the most important Off-Page SEO elements. This is where your SEO tool will really shine. You want to understand where your competitors earn their backlinks and use that information to improve your backlink strategy. It all comes down to creating new opportunities for your business.
Social media engagement
Another important Off-Page SEO strategy to analyze is social media engagement. While you can create a powerful social media marketing plan from scratch, it is a good idea to back it up with proven strategies that your competitors already use. It will save you a precious amount of time. The most important elements to understand are:
- Social media platforms your competitors use
- The kind of content they publish and how often
- Create a list of the most used tags
- How they communicate with their followers
Analyze your SEO competitors and propel your business forward!
As you can see, there are many ways to analyze your SEO competitors and use that information to improve your business. Search engine optimization is a very challenging process that constantly changes and improves. Remember that your competitors are also researching your SEO strategy. That is why you need to be aware of their strategies and constantly improve your SEO game.
