To tap into digital marketing’s lucrative potential, you need to examine your SEO competition. Performing a detailed SEO competitor analysis can help you to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and you can develop a rigorous plan, giving you a competitive edge while mastering the digital landscape. In this detailed guide, you will learn how to do an in-depth SEO competitor analysis by covering the basic steps along with the tools needed to get real-time accurate results.
Identifying Your Competitors
Who are your real competitors in terms of SEO? The first thing you need to do is to identify both your direct and your indirect competitors. Your direct competitors respond to the same audience requests and offer the same products or services like yours. Indirect competitors are very different from you, but they might compete with you for the same target market. Start with search engines. Find who’s ranking for your primary keywords. This gives you an initial list of competitors that succeed in your market space.
Further, you can use tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs or SEMrush to find competitor websites that you might not have noted before. These tools will provide you with a long list, based on keyword overlap and market share. It is important to identify the right competitor set, as this will help focus your analysis. Knowing who your competitors are will help you draw meaningful conclusions about market dynamics and reasonable benchmarks against which to measure your own SEO efforts.
Analyzing Competitors’ Keywords
Armed with a list of competitors, the next step is to do some intellectual spywork. Use one of the software tools, such as Ahrefs, SEM Rush or Moz, to see which keywords your competitors are ranking on. Pay close attention to keywords with high search volumes, but not only those. Some hours or days of investigation will reveal some long-tail keywords, i.e. those with lower search volumes, but that still drive some traffic to their sites.
Furthermore, you should also pay close attention to your competitor’s keywords that are driving the most traffic from search engines. You should understand which keywords are most valuable to them as these might give you clues to their overall SEO strategy as well as their audience intent. Add to that the keywords involved and their search volume — which could estimate the competitiveness of ranking for these terms. By learning from your competitor’s keywords, you’ll be able to optimise your own SEO strategy and increase your presence in search engine results.
Evaluating Backlink Profiles
While the importance of backlinks to the technical aspects of SEO can never be understated – they’re still one of the most important aspects of SEO, and one of the things that most search engines analytics cites as helping them determine just how authoritative a website is on a particular topic – understanding your competitors’ backlink profiles will help you glean information about the link-building approaches your competitors might be using to build their personal search engine real-estate. Takeaways From The Process: Use a tool such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Majestic to analyse the quantity and quality of backlinks competed by your competitor. Take the time to check out the domains from which these backlinks are coming.
Aim to identify relevant terms in both the anchor text and quoted body text of backlinks, as these can give you great insights into the kind of keywords your rivals are targeting. Discovering high-authority sites linking to competing content is a promising way to pick up your own backlink opportunities. Make sure to pay special attention to the distribution of competitor link sources. A healthy backlink profile will typically cover a wide range, hinting at a well-rounded strategy by competitors. Compiling this data can help you design a robust backlink strategy to elevate the authority of your own site.
Assessing On-Page SEO Elements
On-Page SEO, if well sorted, improves the awareness that users and search engines have of your site’s content. Hence, if your main competitors rank higher than you, a straightforward start is to analyse their on-page SEO components. If you do so, you are able to understand which best practices are followed by them and which aspects of your own content SEO need to be improved upon. Things to look at include meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, URL parameters. For the analysis, you can rely on Screaming Frog and Yoast SEO plugin.
Spy on your competitors to see the keywords they’re including in their content and metadata. Observe the length of their content content, the keywords density, multimedia such as images and videos, and experience, including speed of your site on different devices, ease of use, and navigation. Knowing how your competition optimises for all these will help you perfect your own on-page SEO, so that your site is great for both search engines and users.
Examining Content Strategies
Content is at the heart of any successful SEO strategy. Analyzing your competitors’ content strategies can provide valuable insights into what resonates with your target audience. Start by evaluating the types of content they produce, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or case studies. Look at their content frequency and the platforms they use for distribution.
Identify the most popular pieces of content based on social shares, engagement metrics, and backlinks. This can help you understand which topics and formats are most effective in your niche. Additionally, consider the tone, style, and depth of their content. Are they providing comprehensive guides, or are they focusing on shorter, more frequent posts? By examining these aspects, you can refine your own content strategy to better meet the needs of your audience and improve your SEO performance.
Using Website Traffic Checker Tools
Seeing the traffic picture gives you a better idea of how effective a competitor’s SEO is The robust traffic checker tools out there, including SimilarWeb, Alexa and Google Analytics, can help you understand the origins of your competitors’ website traffic, their visitors’ demographics, key engagement metrics and more. They will show you trends in where your competitors’ traffic is coming from.
Check the percentage of organic traffic compared to paid traffic. If the percentage of organic traffic is high, it points to strong SEO. If the percentage of paid traffic is high, some area of advertising might give a competitive edge. The average time spent on a site, bounce rates or pages per session are critical in understanding the quality of traffic. Using the above-mentioned cheap website traffic checker online free tools, you can get the idea which tactics do your competitors use to monetize your traffic, and which tactics they rely on. It will give additional ideas to improve your website.
Conclusion
An SEO competitor analysis is an important SEO tactic that sets the direction of your own SEO activities. Once you identify your competitors and find out what keywords they rank best for, what backlinks they possess from SEO authority sites, other on-page SEO and content-related strategies they deploy, and their site traffic, you will be in a position to understand what works for your industry and refine your own SEO efforts.
This data will give you better chances of boosting your rankings and consistently increasing traffic to your website. To gain a competitive edge in the digital world, keep your SEO competitor analysis current and up-to-date.