What Is SEO Competitor Analysis & How It Works

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis & How It Works

When you are eager to improve your website traffic or get greater ROI, you will be optimizing your website without considering the others. As long as your strategies work, you will be ignoring what others are doing.

Unfortunately, ignoring your competitors is one of the common mistakes that businesses often make. Because, you may currently avoiding your competitors, surely they will be implementing a proven strategy to outrank you. So, it is a matter of finding your competitors and then work to defeat them.

In other words, when you talk about SEO, it is vital to stay one step ahead of your competitor by performing a competitor analysis regularly.

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?

An SEO competitor analysis is all about evaluating websites that are ranking on SERPs for search queries related to their products and services. This analysis is utilized to find:

1. Which keywords are bringing the traffic to your competitor’s sites?
2. Which strategy your competitors are performing to outrank you for those particular keywords?
3. Which backlinks they have that are earning?
4. How your rivals communicate with the audience?

Once you have identified your competitor’s strategy, you will be able to get ahead of the competition by optimizing your site in a better way.

How To Run SEO Competitor Analysis

Follow the below five steps to perform SEO analysis of competitors.

1. Select Your Competitor Analysis Tools

   Place the right tool that can optimize your competitor analysis for SEO. Some major tools are:

   1. SEMrush

      This is a competitive research tool that helps you to examine your competitor’s strategies in various categories such as advertising, content & PR, SEO and social media.

   2. Screaming Frog

      It crawls any website and offers a real-time analysis which you can export for side-by-side comparison.

   3. SpyFu

      To use this tool, you need to enter any site’s URL, and it will display where the site stands in Google along with the keywords they have bought on Google Ads and organic ranking.

   4. SimilarWeb

      Using this tool, when you analyze any site on the web, it will provide you with insights into your competitor’s customer base, channel acquisition strategy, top performing content, keywords and much more.

2. Identify Your Competitors

   Determine which website you consider your direct competitors. Remember, not every site that outranks you on search engine results pages for a relevant term is your competitor. For example, a keyword competitor may not every time your business competitor, if you are running a cybersecurity company, you will not rank for business security. People looking for the camera and locks for premises security will not be the same looking for protection against the cyber crime.

   Instead, find the companies that outrank you for localized search phrases such as cybersecurity consulting nearby you or long tail keywords such as ‘how to.’

3. Inspect Competitor Keyword Strategy

   Carefully, inspect which keywords are driving the traffic to your competitor’s sites and how they achieve ranking. Check, if your competitors:

   1. Regularly post high-quality blogs and videos following those keywords.
   2. Include those keywords multiple times.
   3. Leverage LSI by involving synonyms and terms relevant to primary keywords.
   4. Include the keywords in meta title, description and images alt-tags of pages.
   5. Or check whether they have higher Domain Authority.

4. Review Competitor’s Backlinks

   Your competitors might be earning backlinks through guest postings or by submitting their website so that it can be included in roundup lists. Once you have identified the sites that are linking to your competitors, you will be able to cover the gap by earning links from those sites too.

5. Determine Competitor’s Value Proposition

   To know the value proposition of your competitor, you need to visit their site home page. It will be displaying why people should choose their product and services and what makes them stand out in the market. Explore the keywords, benefit, features and how it is addressing the audience.

How The Analysis Turns Out To Improve Your SEO

1. The whole analysis displays you almost everything about your competitors so that you can make your strategies accordingly and stay one step ahead of them.
2. You can create your business unique value proposition by describing what you do, what makes you unique and how you are better.
3. Gain much knowledge about your customer’s interests and improve your strategies to attract them effectively.
4. Update or create your keywords list and bring them in use when creating a title, meta description, URL, subhead, body copy and hyperlink anchor text.

In a nutshell, you can do much more by reviewing your competitor’s sites. It is high time, and if you want to stay in the competition, you will have to begin applying your learnings to increase your SERP ranking, improve your site visibility and boost organic traffic.

To know more or to gain ideas to improve your SEO strategy, get the assistance of professionals at DigitalLabz. For the past many years, we have been serving startup and developing business by providing efficient SEO services in Kitchener. Feel free to call us & discuss your needs.