If you want to climb up the SERPs, it becomes essential to do an SEO competitor analysis to know where other contenders rank. Competitor research means you check out the competition on the online market in your niche. By assessing your competitors and examining their strategy, you can gain insights to boost your site’s online visibility and climb up in the web rankings. Many professional digital agencies perform competitor analysis in order to gain insight for SEO or conversion rate optimization or to increase lead generation, etc.
If you want to learn more about what a digital agency can do for you in this regard click here.
When you know what your competitors are doing right and what opportunities they are taking advantage of, you can utilize those insights to optimize your own site.
We´ll share some tips on performing SEO competitor analysis the right way in this article.
Table of Contents
Identify Target Keywords
To begin your SEO competitor analysis, first, you will need some keywords on which you will base the research on. You might be in the same niche and you might sell the same products as many other companies, but it is the keywords that you are competing on in the search engine results pages.
When you start conducting an SEO competitor analysis, you will discover more keywords and key phrases to include in your list as you go. However, try to focus on doing your SEO competitor analysis on the primary keywords of just a coupe of your service or product pages.
If you use lots of keywords and key phrases, believe me, you will be ended up with a long list of competitors that will take a long time to get through. So, identifying your core target keywords is crucial here. Once you have identified the target keywords, stick with them and start conducting analysis.
Identify Competitors
As you may already know, you will have to eventually compete with other websites over the same content or keywords. If your site is already live, you certainly know at least a few competitors competing with your website or company. However, if you are new to the market, start compiling a list of all the possible contenders you can think of. This way, you will have a reliable start for your competitor analysis.
Besides this, you can also take advantage of major search engines such as Google to find your online rivals. Just type your focus keywords and see who shows up on those results. Search engines have all the details you require to identify your competition further. Pay extra attention to top rankers because they are your tough foes in terms of organic traffic and pay per clicks.
Analyse Competitor Keyword and Content Strategy
No doubt, keyword research is a crucial factor in SEO. That is why learning how to do keyword research is a must. There are 2 primary approaches to keyword research – manual and automated. The first method of conducting research can be time-consuming if you have lots of keywords to analyse, but it can be worthwhile if you have only 1-2 long-tail keywords. You can also use automated programs like SEMrush. These tools give you all the info about the keywords to target, their volume, trend, SEO difficulty, and CPC.
Along with keyword research, you can also perform content research side by side with your competitors. Automated tools can easily give details like which pages are ranking for each keyword, which has the highest backlinks, etc. All of these details can be useful if you want to learn what type of content is allowing them to rank up. This content will impact your content marketing strategy. So, analysing their content and content strategy can be a plus point.
Learn Social Media Leveraging and Ad campaigns Techniques
Learning about your prospect’s social media and ad campaign strategies can be a game-changing move for you. For instance, social listening tools allow you to boost site traffic by tracking the engagement of your audience, primarily when visitors are especially using or looking for your product. You may even want to track competitor linkless mentions on social media channels, customer reviews, and PR on their profile to find out what their visitors love about their product so you can offer better service. You can also track brand mentions on social media networks as well as monitor their sites, blogs, forums, etc.
On the other hand, if you are still outperformed in the SERPs by your competitors, even though, you have done all the possible optimization to your site. Then, there is a chance your competitors may be using paid traffic campaigns to generate leads, conversions, and sales. I do not advise you to match each competitor’s spending. However, it will still be valuable to learn about their Ads campaigns, promoted and paid posts, etc., so that you can at least have an idea of how much your other competitors are paying on advertising.
Analyse Backlinks
This is one of the key factors that truly completes your SEO analysis of your adversaries. As you know, backlinks are the most crucial factor when it comes to determining a site’s Google ranking. Generally, the more quality links you have, the more promising your SEO will be from other websites. So, it is necessary to analyse the backlinks profile of your competitors.
Besides, finding out where your competitors are acquiring their backlinks and using that info to make a high-quality linking profile for your site can be a very useful strategy. Because if your backlink profile is feeble and your competitors’ profile strong, then they surely rank higher than you on Google.
Scrutinizing your competitors’ backlink profiles is an excellent way to discover new link opportunities. However, you will require a powerful SEO tool to ease up your work. Also, it is nearly impossible to pull off all by yourself. So, if you ever find out that competitor sites have quality links that you miss, then it is time to start making those backlinks!
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