SEO competitor analysis assesses your competitors’ Search Engine Optimisation strengths and shortcomings. It is handy because it will allow you to use what you discover to improve your SEO. Since you will be performing a competitive analysis, your goal should be to find gaps between you and your competitor. However, rather than concentrating on a marketing plan, you will focus on SEO strategy.
This analysis will help you examine your general market, your rivals, and how the current search landscape works for critical keywords. Even if you’re currently at the top of the search results for your most essential keywords, you’ll need to keep an eye on your SEO performance to ensure you don’t lose your position to a rival. That is why we’re here to offer you six tips for conducting an SEO competitor analysis.
1. Determine Your True Competitors
Before you even begin to develop an SEO strategy, you need to know who your competition is. However, while it may appear simple, identifying your actual competition may be more complicated than you think. It may not always be obvious who your primary competitor is.
Even if two websites are in the same niche, they will not attract the same audience. To conduct an accurate competitor analysis, you must first identify which of your competitors has the most similar audience to yours. However, to do so, you must first understand how to locate them.
To begin with, you should find out who is not your competition. Some websites may rank for keywords relevant to you, but this dons not mean that they are a direct competitor. You may find that some bloggers in your niche use just as many keywords as you, yet they don’t have the same audience as you.
After you have eliminated non-competitive websites, you need to differentiate between significant rivals and secondary ones. Major competitors provide the same goods and services as you and target the same audience. Secondary rivals do the same keyword research and want to rank for the exact keywords as you but do not provide the same goods or services.
2. Begin With Keyword Research
Keywords are the backbone of SEO. They don’t account for much on their own, but without them, any SEO effort will be futile. That is why it is critical to get your keywords correct. Therefore, before you begin any analysis, you must first identify the most important keywords for your company.
If you own a moving company, for example, your keywords should be related to moving, packing, real estate, and transportation. Hiring an SEO expert is also an option if you are having difficulty figuring out your keywords.
They will not only help you with keyword research, but they will also help you reach your goals easily. However, if you want to do it alone, you must know that the terms you wish to target must be motivated by informative, commercial, or transactional purposes.
After you’ve created a list of keywords, the next step is to see if and how your competitors are using them. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two tools that will be extremely useful at this stage.
They will assist you in determining what your competitor is doing and how they rank in comparison to you. If you are ranked lower than your competitor, try to study how they use their keywords and incorporate them into your posts. If you see no progress over time, you should investigate other aspects of their website.
3. Look at the Structure of Their Website
Search engines favor websites that are simple to crawl. And one of the major factors influencing how simple this process is is website design. Furthermore, well-designed websites naturally have better, more intuitive user interfaces.
This is another factor that contributes to a high ranking. As a result, if your competition is ranked higher than you, look at their website. Compare the two websites and see where you can improve.
4. Look at the Length of Your Competitor’s Content
Average content length is a significant factor of SEO. Search engines seek to provide consumers with the most detailed material available. Take notice of the average length while assessing your rivals’ top-performing content.
However, you also need to look at the quality of the text in general. Our advice would be to create content that covers topics in-depth. That being said, you should also create content that naturally attracts links. If your competitor has a lot of backlinks, look at how they format their texts and what topics they usually cover.
5. Look at Internal Links When Conducting SEO Competitor Analysis
Internal links lead your visitors from one piece of content to the next. It is essential because it increases the number of clicks your website gets and brings traffic to different pages on your site. However, good internal linking also:
- Allows your users to navigate your website more naturally
- Creates a network of interconnected content
- Increases the authority value of your content
- Spreads around traffic throughout your website
You should examine your rivals’ websites to discover how they develop internal links.
6. Examine Your Competitor’s Backlinks
And the last of the six tips for conducting an SEO competitor analysis is looking at your competitor’s backlinks. Aside from keywords, external links are one of the most critical aspects of your website in terms of SEO.
Backlinks are what will set your website apart from the crowd. When you link to authoritative pages, your site becomes more trustworthy. Not only that, but it will also boost your website’s ranking. However, you cannot simply link to any website you want.
You must include links to websites that are related to your product or service in some way. If you’re unsure which websites these are, look at your competitors. Examine where they get their links and how they incorporate them into their content.-
