Why You Should Do an SEO Competitor Analysis On Your Site Today

In this new article, we are talking about SEO Competitor Analysis, how to find your SEO competitors, how to find the keywords they optimize for and much more.

Let’s get started!

Why You Should Do An SEO Competitor Analysis On Your Site Today

Every online business and website needs powerful SEO to not only survive but evolve in today’s competitive market.

Your online presence needs highly competitive and modern SEO practices to outshine your competitors to grow a successful business.

SEO will bring you to the top of search engine results, giving your business more exposure and maximum visibility.

However, modern SEO practitioners can take advantage of a common lack of knowledge in this area to twist and turn numbers when it comes to SEO competitor analysis.

Let’s take a microscopic look at SEO competitor analysis and find out what it really means, and why it is critically important for your business.

 

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?

Competition is an integral part of business evolution and industry.

Healthy and meaningful competition has its own perks:

• It forces organizations to offer better features and offer the ultimate customer satisfaction.
• It restricts monopoly.
• Encourages innovation and creates a path to new discoveries in each industry.
• It allows for standard and traditional practices to be replaced with new ones.

SEO Competitor analysis allows you to better understand your online adversaries and build your online presence to be ranked among the top.

If you are being outranked by your competitors, an SEO competitor analysis will equip you with the knowledge of fighting back with powerful SEO practices.

Your top SEO competitors and not necessarily your biggest competitors in the marketplace (although they may include some of these).

Rather, your SEO competitors specifically refer to those businesses and pages which are most highly ranked on Google and other search engines for searches your customers are making.

 

Why Should You Perform An SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO Competitor analysis allows you to outrank your competitors easily and lets you stay on top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Your business will be the first one to be shown when customers search for relevant keywords.

This offers maximum exposure and visibility and brings a higher profit ratio to the company.

Few customers look past the first page or even the first few results, so ranking at the top is critical.

Here are some advantages of doing an SEO competitor analysis:

• You can learn what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
• Find the weaknesses of your competitors and use those weaknesses to your advantage.
• You can discover the strengths and successes of your competitors and replicate them in your own business.
• Get an understanding of the best SEO practices and what to prioritize in terms of SEO.
• Understand the challenges and opportunities for outranking your competitors in SERPs.
• You can learn from competitors’ failures and avoid making the same mistakes.

It may be possible to outrank your competitors without performing an SEO competitor analysis, but competitor analysis will let you do this faster, cheaper and more effectively.

Strategic and systematic SEO competitor analysis can help you get a jump start on your competitors, and you can quickly rise to the top.

 

Does SEO competitor analysis really give you the boost you need to outshine your competition?

Does it really save you money while pushing you to the top? In short, Yes.

• SEO competitor analysis lets you develop a targeted strategy, which is much faster than a hit-and-miss approach
• This precise implementation of the optimal SEO techniques is cost-effective.
• Your entire focus is shifted towards the competition and focus breeds innovation.
• Your competitors have already paid for the insights that you obtain from them, such as audience sentiment, social trends, organic interests and lead gen templates.
• Since you already know what works, it will be quicker to improve your processes and implement these pre-tested strategies.
• With the analysis from your competitors, you already know what regions, keywords and demographics to target. So, all you have to do is to create and implement actionable inputs.

 

How Do You Conduct SEO Competitor Analysis?

Every process has pre-defined steps.

SEO Competitor analysis is also carefully planned out from inception to the final step.

Let’s take a look at the steps for performing a meaningful competitor analysis which yields results.

 

1. How do I find my SEO competitors?:

Before you think about starting the analysis, you need to finalize a list of your competitors.

You can start by listing them down by their popularity.

This way, you can learn from the top competitors first.

Start by searching for the organic and relevant keywords, and jotting down the websites in the search results.

Next categorize them according to the region, services offered, clientele and other features.

This categorization offers a more conclusive and segmented understanding of the competitors.

The reason for searching for your competitors is that your direct business rivals might differ from your organic search competitors.

Most businesses don’t have an idea of who their online competitors are.

The reason is that we still think of physical businesses as our true competitors.

We never assume that someone might be offering the same services as us only via the internet.

 

There are three different types of business competitors, and you need to identify all of the categories before moving forward.

• Direct competitors: The ones who compete with you for your market share.
• SEO Competitors: The ones who compete with you for your share of organic traffic.
• Local competitors: The ones who compete with you for your share of SERP real estate for local searches.

 

2. The Pivotal Role of Powerful Backlinks:

Once you the list of your top competitors, the next step is to identify the backlink placement, strategic implementation and support in bringing you to the top.

Evaluating link quality determines the potential of your business for making it to the top and outranking the competition.

According to a study conducted by a popular ranking determination website, Ahrefs, link popularity is a clear SEO “ranking factor” for over 930 million pages.

You can start by identifying less competitive long tail and LSI keywords and search terms.

These can help you maintain your position in the long run.

Since backlinks are among the top and most influential factors behind a site’s ranking in search results, it requires extensive research and analysis.

Powerful corporations and leading companies invest a lot of resources in strategic link building campaigns in order to reach potential customers. Since not everyone can afford a huge, expensive link-building campaign, SEO competitor analysis is among the best methods to understand and implement effective link building practices.

You can use tools, such as Ahrefs Domain Comparison Tool to identify the practices implemented by your competitors.

You can copy-paste your competitors’ domains into the tool, and analyze three main factors behind their success.

• Domain Rating: This is the proprietary method that Ahrefs uses to attach a numeric indicator to a domain’s SEO ‘value’ and ‘authority.’ This number is the indicator of several SEO parameters, and it tells you how powerful, authoritative and popular a domain is among users.
• Referring Domains: These are the domains that link back to the domain in question. Their authority and popularity also determine the overall rank of the competitors’ websites. If you want your website to be among the top results, your domain should have backlinks from highly authoritative websites.
• Backlinks: Think of backlinks as references to support the authority of your business. Building too many backlinks from shoddy websites is not going to get you anywhere. Without any real value from the original referral website, you cannot gain any authority of your own.

If you want to put your competitors’ backlinks under a microscope, investigate the following points:

• Analyze the authority of domain referrals for your competitors.
• Focus on the domain rating, and find out the number of backlinks from that website.
• See how many high authority websites are being used as referrals for your competitors.

You can also compare different SEO factors instead of using cumulative tools.

Take into account the domain rating, referring domains and backlinks individually and it will give you a fair idea of your place among your competitors.

It will also allow you to understand the steps need to be taken to outrank everyone else.

 

3. How do you find what keywords competitors are using?:

So far, we have finalized the power of competitors analysis in terms of links and domain authority.

It is time to move onto the next step: analysis of on-page factors.

We all know that keywords are extremely important in the evolution of your online presence, but it can be difficult to find keywords that work for your niche.

Too broad, too narrow and too many keywords can ruin your presence and ranking.

If you want to find the best keywords, here are a few points to consider:

• It should be relevant to your business.
• Must have a decent monthly search volume.
• It should be unique, and your competitors shouldn’t be focusing on it too much.

Optimal and effective keywords bring organic traffic to your website on a daily basis.

You can analyze your competitors with the help the Ahrefs tools and find out the keywords they are using, which are the most successful, and which are not.

This allows you to figure out the keywords or audience that your competitors aren’t targeting.

You can then fill in the content gap by offering services for keywords that are rarely used by your competitors.

Ahrefs offers all kinds of tools to analyze the content and keyword gaps.

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4. How do you analyze SEO competitors?:

Content can act as fuel to a company’s success.

Since everyone knows this, many organizations tend to focus more on their on-page content.

However, there is always a silver lining, and you can shine a light on that with the help of careful SEO competitor analysis.

Use Ahrefs to analyze the top pages for every domain and subdomain.

If your competitors aren’t generating enough organic audiences with the help of their content, then this can be a golden opportunity.

On the other hand, if competitors are generating a good organic audience with their content, then you can focus more on the areas and aspects left out of their content.

Once you have figured out their content assets and their pages which generate the highest organic audience numbers, we can start figuring out what they have left out. Use Ahrefs to analyze the top pages.

From there, you can move onto the “Best by Links” tab or “Best by Growth” tab.

This will allow you to understand their articles in terms of:

• Keywords and their ranking
• Generating traffic

Now, you can do two things:

• Write content for their highest ranking articles.
• Write content for the audience that is missing from their highest ranking articles.

This way, you will be able to cover all your bases with ease. When potential customers search for the keywords, they will see your articles on the top since no one else would be offering those articles.

5. Analyzing the Traffic:

By now, you have analyzed everything from off-page links to on-page content and keywords.

It is time to complete your SEO competitor analysis by analyzing the traffic.

If you are wondering how can traffic analysis help you further your competitor analysis, here are some key features of the traffic analysis:

• You can figure out their strengths and their weaknesses in terms of audiences addressed.
• This puts your competitors’ SEO strategies and content marketing campaigns in perspective. You can figure out a lot about them with simple traffic analysis.
• You can figure out the traffic channels that are hardly targeted by your competitors, and you can focus more on engaging those sectors.
• You’re also able to find the highest ranking traffic channels and engage those for maximum visibility.

Why You Should Do an SEO Competitor Analysis On Your Site Today – Takeaways

SEO Competitor analysis pays for itself in the long run.

Once you figure out every strength and weakness of your competitors, you can build your SEO strategies accordingly.

You can use online tools to analyze your competitors and apply this knowledge to your business and marketing strategies.

Ahrefs is the treasure trove of SEO analysis and helpful reports.

With the help of SEO competitor analysis, you can jump right to the top while spending comparatively little time, resources or money.

 

That’s all for now.

So do you know how to find my SEO competitors?

Have you ever done any competitor analysis for your site?

Let us know in the comments section below.

Make sure that you subscribe to the comments so that you are notified when we reply

Regards Tom

 

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