Competitor Analysis in SEO – An Ultimate Guide

SEO Competitive analysis is an essential component of any SEO strategy. However, too few conduct a thorough analysis that can be used to create a roadmap for future improvement.

You can use competitive link analysis to identify your websites and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in areas like SEO and search features. This information can help you identify the areas you’re weak in to improve them on your site. As well as to identify the areas where your competitors are weak, so you can take advantage of their weaknesses in search performance. You will get a detailed idea of how this works and how to outrank your content with the help of Professional SEO Services.

Why Competitive Research Is Important In SEO?

The competitive analysis enables you to take a step back and see the bigger picture of your business, including how well you’re doing in your market area, who are the major contenders, and what phrases are popular for searching for your product or service.

Although you may already rank on page one for your most important keywords, there are always other sites that are trying to outrank your site. 

Competitor Analysis: What You Need To Include

A business owner can build her competitor analysis or use a competitive analysis template. An accurate assessment considers as much information as possible, including information on the competitors’ features, price, customer service quality, and strengths and weaknesses. General SWOT analysis and PEST analysis help assess the potential of a business idea; however, other factors should also be considered when conducting a competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis should include the following 10 components

• Specification Matrix

Use a spreadsheet to list the features of each product or service offered by direct competitors. It can help you see how your products or services stack up against the competition.

•  Percentage of a given Market

Identifying your competitors helps you gain a clearer understanding of how your company fits into the market. Many larger organizations have much to learn from up-and-coming players as well. Practicing the 80/20 rule is also helpful in this regard: focusing 80 percent of your time on direct competitors and 20 percent of your time on top competitors is a sound approach.

• Costing

The key to analyzing competitors is determining where they fall on the quantity vs quality scale and how much they charge for their services.

• Need for Marketing

What is each competitor’s marketing strategy?  You can analyze Competitors’ advertising strategies and tactics by reviewing their websites, social media presence, and any events they sponsor. You can supplement with a review of competitors’ SEO strategies and taglines.

•  New Perspective 

What qualities and features make your competitors’ products or services outstanding, and what are they promoting?

• Key Strengths

Identify what your competitors are doing well and in which ways they’re exceeding expectations. Do reviews of their products indicate that they’re a cut above the rest? Can you find evidence of their brand awareness?

• Limitations

Identify what your competitors can do better. Are their social media strategies weak or strong? Do they have online stores or not? What is the status of their website design? Take advantage of the information to make use of it.

• Analyze

Analyze where your competitors operate and the regions in which they serve customers. Are they brick-and-mortar businesses, or do they rely more heavily on internet sales?

• Culture

Evaluate your competitors’ objectives, employee satisfaction, and company culture to see if they are likely to be strong competitors or not.

• Customers Feedback

Analyze your competitors’ customer reviews, noting both positive and negative aspects. Examining 5-star, 3-star, and 1-star reviews can help you improve your products or services and avoid the pitfalls that have led to instances of angry customers.

Include information on your market and region trends when conducting a competitive analysis. It will give you a more comprehensive view of your competition.

Threats and opportunities are common in business. Businesses should document threats and opportunities for better decision-making and act on potential opportunities that better competitors may not see.

How do you analyze SEO Competitors?

We’ll look at the basic steps of competitive analysis. Note that these are standard steps, and you can apply them right away.

• Your Biggest Competitor

One essential step in learning competitor analysis in SEO is recognizing your actual competitors.

When analyzing a website’s SEO competition, it’s essential to be thorough and accurate. Including doing SEO comparison and research on multiple keywords and taking note of the top 10 or 20 websites that appear consistently for them.

One way to find content and publishing opportunities is to use a free SEO analytics tool like Ubersuggest and type in a keyword. In the Content Ideas section, you can get a list of pages and the domains that rank for the keyword. Let’s take an example, where we used “pet grooming” as the keyword. Still, the top-ranking domains for this keyword on Google are not necessarily pet grooming sites, but other organizations are also listed.

• Successful Page Analysis

The next step in doing a competitive analysis is to examine a competing website and its top-performing pages. check out the way the keywords are used in content and also the keywords used.

Keywords that we miss out on could be opportunities for keyword gap analysis. The Ahrefs tool has a content Gap feature to identify these keywords. It is a stage where you find keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you are not.

When you find relevant keywords for your business, you should create a page about those keywords. It will make it likely that people searching for these phrases will visit your site instead of your competitor’s sites.

•  Analyze Your Competitor’s Link Profile

Another strategy to keep in mind is checking a site’s backlink statistics when doing competitor analysis. In this tactic, you should look at which sites link back to their content and how it affects their domain rank and authority. This data-driven technique can give you valuable insight. You can use it to conduct a similar link-building strategy to replicate your competitor’s results.

You can look at several different factors that influence backlinks through competitor analysis.

1. Number of backlinks
2. Domain authority of linked sites
3. Relevancy of linked content

After you know what your competitors are doing to acquire backlinks, it is easy to create a similar strategy and implement it for your site. 

Explore the best Off-Page SEO Techniques here

• Niche Keywords With High ROI

If you wish to maximize your profit, focus on ranking for keywords that bring in higher revenue. A large company may rank for dozens of top competitive keywords, in part because it has the budget to ensure this. The pet shop owner can’t rank for “best dog keychains” if he only sells them for $2 each; instead, he should aim higher up the scale.

Focus your efforts on ranking for keywords related to your high-profile product or service. Or create incredibly unique and relevant content while avoiding competing with your competitors.

A successful SEO campaign focuses on identifying gaps in the market and then filling them. The keyword you focused on can be a low-competitive keyword or a simple one, that is helpful for an article but is not highly searched for which your competition has not yet created.

•  Creating and Executing a Content Marketing Plan

After you have collected data, you can use it to create an SEO competitor analysis report. This report will help you build your content strategy. To start making your content plan, create a keyword list or a content ideas list and save it in a simple spreadsheet or use tools like Ahrefs.

The Ahrefs competitor analysis tool lets you add a list of your own chosen keywords or content ideas for export later on to create a quick SEO competitor analysis report.

•  Monitor Your Progress

Once you have published new content or re-optimized old ones, you must track their performance. It would be best to do keyword audits to monitor search engine rankings. Also to generate competitor analysis SEO reports checking whether or not your competitive analysis strategy worked.

How To Analyze Competitors’ Keywords?

Keywords are among the essential elements of any SEO strategy. They help you focus on what you create and ensure that your audience knows they’ve found the content they’re looking for. While keyword research can help you uncover the keywords your audience uses to find your business. It’s also valuable to understand how your competition uses these exact keywords.

Keywords you target with your content should be relevant and related to the content you already created. For example, if you run a blog about YouTube marketing. You wouldn’t want to write a piece about Instagram marketing as it’s not related to what you’re already doing.

Competitor keyword analysis differs from standard keyword analysis. The following section explains the steps involved in the process.

• Audience Analysis

Competitive keyword research should include understanding your audience and what they’re interested in. These will help you develop a wide range of keywords that relate to your business and additional opportunities to outrank your competitors. The better you understand your target audience, the more likely you will create well-rounded buyer personas.

For example, when running a software company, you want your site to be optimized to attract both potential customers and current customers. This stage helps you remain focused, ensuring that you aren’t just outranking competitors to outrank them. 

• Focus On Your Competitors

Once you understand your audience and know which keywords they use, identify your main competitors. Being aware of your main competition helps you create a more focused strategy. So use online tools to find and rank other websites targeting the exact keywords.

While there are probably many businesses that offer similar products and services, they may not all be viable competitors. Some may have more backlinks and a higher domain authority than others, so your business needs to identify key players.

•  Research On Keywords

Once you have identified your top competitors, examine their rankings for the keywords you also rank for. Try to understand how difficult it will be to outrank them. As mentioned above, this work is best done with the help of a reputable SEO tool. Note: Rewriting like this takes time. You will not see an immediate improvement in the traffic your website receives if you do it right. Expect to spend months on these tasks before you find success.

When choosing keywords for your content, consider the monthly search volume for a key phrase, the backlinks of your competitor’s sites, and their domain authority. If you realize that it will be difficult to outrank competitors for specific keywords, consider making content based on those keywords; that way, you provide your audience with valuable information. If you have just started keyword research, go through our keyword search intent for beginners guide(link).

How SEO Monitors The Competition Online for free?

• Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google. It helps to monitor the web and receive email alerts whenever a keyword you target is mentioned online. You can set it up to track mentions of your brand and same-industry competitors’ brands so that you can better understand where they get backlinks. It tells you where you should focus your efforts. It is excellent for SEO purposes, especially when tracking frequently-updated sources like news articles, industry blogs, and press releases. 

• Social Mention

Social Mention is a tool that monitors both social platforms and news outlets. It compiles reports on the number of times your keywords have been mentioned, and the number of users discussing your topics. It reports the sentiment behind each of these mentions (positive, negative, or neutral), and previews of what people have said about your keywords.

• Link Explorer

Link Explorer is a tool that lets you use search to examine a website’s backlinks and mentions. You can use Link Explorer to study your competition’s linking strategy and see how they are building their presence online. If one of your competitors has a high search ranking, you will be able to see exactly how they got there.

• Alexa Traffic Rank

The Alexa Traffic Rank tool measures a site’s rank in terms of the volume of traffic it receives. It offers you the ability to evaluate keyword competitiveness.

• SEMRush

SEMRush, a paid service, offers various tools to analyze keywords, traffic, rankings, and URLs. You’ll get an overview of on-page SEO standing for the links you enter, analyze a domain’s backlink profile, and track your SERP positions.

• Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO software tool that allows you to track your competitors’ search engine ranking positions and organic traffic volumes. It also tracks the number of organic keywords each competitor is ranking for. You can also use Ahrefs to identify search keywords of interest to your business. Then you can make the necessary changes to your website so that it appears on search engines’ results pages.

Conclusion

Same as Keyword research, Competitive keyword research helps you stay focused on what your audience is looking for when creating content. You will know which keywords your competition is targeting, which keywords are most successful in attracting traffic, and how hard it will be to outrank them with your content.