How To Do An SEO Competitor Analysis

Search Engine Optimisation is constantly changing, so it’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve by doing regular SEO audits. Part of this process is analyzing your competitors to see what strategies they’re using that work for them. By doing an SEO competitive analysis, you’ll see what strategies work for your competitors and adapt them to your SEO campaign. This will help you stay ahead of the competition and keep your website ranking high in the search engines.

To do an SEO competitive analysis, you’ll need to gather information about their website and how they’re performing in the search engines. This includes looking at their SEO ranking, backlinks, and on-page SEO. Once you have this information, you can start to formulate a competitive analysis strategy to beat your competitors. This may include improving your SEO ranking, increasing your backlinks, and optimizing your on-page SEO.

This blog will highlight some of the recommended steps you should perform if you want to stay up to date with your own competing pages. This is a great way to get ideas for your SEO campaign and see what strategies work for your competitors!

SEO Competitor Analysis – Search For Information

The first step in creating a competitor SEO analysis is to gather information about their website. This includes looking at their SEO ranking, link building efforts, and on-page SEO. Using various SEO tools and resources, you can find this information, such as SEOmoz’s SEO Toolbar, Alexa, and Ahrefs. Once you have this information, you can start to formulate a strategy for how to rank better than your competitor’s site.

Don’t just look at the rankings and backlink profile, the nature of their business or services are something that you should consider as well. Competitor analysis is not just about copying what they are doing but seeing what you can potentially do better by looking at their weaknesses.

Apart from the digital marketing perspective, some marketing core principles such as positioning the competitor’s product in the market can also give you valuable insights. This would help you understand what your potential customer might be thinking when looking for a product or service that you are offering, or their search intent. This strategy will allow you to analyse your own business’s nature and consider which market segment you should target. As well as, an estimation of the market share that you would achieve from this strategic planning.

Competitor’s On-page Analysis

An SEO analysis looks at what your competitor is doing on their website to rank high in the search engine results. This includes looking at their meta titles, tags, descriptions, header tags, and keyword density. You can use various tools, such as SEO Quake and Screaming Frog.

Once you have this information, you can start to formulate a strategy for your own niche keywords. This may include improving your own on-page SEO, adding a particular keyword to your title tags and meta descriptions, and increasing your header tag size. This will help you improve your page ranking and eventually lead to more business via organic search results.

Another important ranking factor is to do keyword research on your competitors’ content to get a lot of key ideas such as low competition keywords, paid keywords, high search volume, top keywords, branded keywords, specific keywords, organic keywords and competitive keywords, plus the competitors’ PPC keywords. This might sound like a lot of work but your SEO efforts will definitely be worth it with a keyword competitor analysis as in-depth as this.

Competitor’s Off-page Analysis

The off-page SEO of your competitor is just as important as their on-page SEO. This includes looking at their link profile, social media activity, and brand mentions. You can use various tools to do this, such as Majestic SEO, Moz’s Open Site Explorer, and Google Alerts. Once you have this information, you can start to formulate a strategy your own backlinks strategy. This may include building more links to your website, creating a relevant blog post, increasing your social media activity, and monitoring your brand mentions. By doing a competitor analysis, you can see what off-page strategies work for your competitors and adapt them to your own website to up your SEO performance.

Formulate An SEO Strategy

Once you have gathered information about your competitor’s website, it’s time to start formulating a strategy. This includes improving your SEO ranking, increasing your backlinks, and optimizing your on-page SEO. You can find out how to do this by reading various SEO blog posts and articles. You can also hire an SEO consultant to help you with this. Once you have a strategy in place, you can start to implement it and see results in your search rankings.

We recommend you formulate a strategy systematically, starting from what will be the first thing you would do? What would you consider next if the implementation was working? Or if it’s not working, what else we could do to achieve a result?

Some basic strategy that we recommend you try to adapt to your website is gathering all the data and finding a common point and different points between your website and your competitor’s website. After that, start planning on SEO strategy by working on technical checks to see if your website is operating functionally. If not, then it is time to optimise and ensure that no technical SEO gaps are preventing you from getting better domain authority or a better ranking on google search results.

Then moving to on-page optimisation, observe how your competitor implements content style, page title, headers, site structure, meta description or even your competitors featured snippets. If you are not optimised well, it can be vital and critical to your chance of getting an increase in organic traffic. As they say, content is always king, no matter what. SEO content strategy is something you shouldn’t miss from the strategy planning.

Lastly, don’t forget off-page optimisation. Starting from comparing a backlink profile, start checking how many backlinks you have compared to competitors, and how many referring domains you got mentioned compared to your competitors. Even though the number of backlinks and referring domain may not be the main factor in getting a better ranking position, it is still a good indicator to estimate your position and where else you can improve to beat multiple competitors on the search web pages.

Conclusion

Creating a competitor analysis is an important part of SEO. By doing this, you can see what SEO strategies work for your competitors and adapt them to your website. This will help you improve your SEO ranking and stay ahead of the competition.

Finally, put together a report of your findings and present it to your client or director. This report should include the SEO tactics your competitors are using, how well they’re performing, and what you can do to improve your rankings and organic traffic to your website.

Contact us today for a free consultation! Our SEO experts will analyse your landing pages and find competitors to help you formulate a fool-proof plan to direct organic search traffic to your site!