Competitor Analysis: 5 Steps help you analyze and beat your competitor
An SEO competitive analysis is a useful process for understanding your competitors’ online presence. When you know what they’re doing and how successful it’s been, you can tailor your own strategy accordingly. In this guide, we explain why Competitive Analysis is essential to any SEO campaign and the 5 steps you need to take to complete an effective and thorough analysis of your competitor’s performance.
What Is an SEO Competitive Analysis?
An SEO competitive analysis is an in-depth look at your competitors’ marketing strategies and tactics. This type of analysis can be extremely useful because it helps you understand what your competitors are doing, how they’re doing it, and how successful they are with their online marketing efforts.
Once you have this information, you can use it to improve your own website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and make sure that you are better than the competition at optimizing for search engines like Google.
Why Perform an SEO Competitive Analysis?
If you want to be successful with SEO, it's important to understand your competitors. You need to know what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. By conducting an SEO competitive analysis, you'll get a clear picture of how your competitors are performing in search engine rankings.
An effective SEO strategy requires significant research and planning—the same goes for a competitor analysis. If you don't have any idea where to start, here are some ideas:
- What keywords are they ranking for?
- How many links do they have pointing back to their site?
- What kind of content do they produce on their site (in-depth articles vs blog posts vs videos)?
If you want specific answers about these questions, then this guide will help walk through the process of conducting an effective competitive analysis so that you can better understand your competitor's strategy before trying to beat them at their own game!
Step 1: Use Techinical Audits Great
A technical audit is a good way to evaluate the SEO health of your website. It helps you uncover opportunities to improve your SEO and identify issues that are causing your website to rank poorly. Technical audits can also identify issues that prevent your pages from ranking on search engines at all.
Step 2: Analyze Competitor Backlink
Using a backlink checker is the best way to quickly identify which of your competitors' backlinks are relevant to your business, and which ones aren't. This can help inform your future strategy in terms of link building.
Relevant links are those that point to or come from similar sites as yours; for example, if you're selling beauty products on Etsy and you notice that one of your competitors has a lot of links from beauty blogs, you should try to get some links from those blogs as well.
Unrelevant links are any other types—like links coming from PR sites or news articles unrelated to your niche (see Figure 1).
And harmful links are anything that could potentially harm the reputation of your site or brand—for instance, if you run a medical clinic and one of your competitors has received negative press coverage by an unreliable source like Wikipedia or Yahoo News because someone else wrote about them (see Figure 2), then this type of link would be considered harmful because it may negatively impact both their reputation as well as yours when potential customers see these articles pop up during search results due to Google's algorithms being able link based on quality signals like PageRank.[1]
Step 3: Using Google Search Console to Identify Organic Keywords
Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to see search queries that are driving traffic to your site. You can see which keywords are driving traffic to your site and how many impressions each keyword generates. This data can be used in an SEO competitive analysis by comparing it with the same information from competitors.
For example, if you have a website related to dog training and nutrition, you would want to see what keywords are bringing in organic search traffic for sites like Dogster or PetMD (two other large sites about dogs). This will give you insight into what topics people are searching for when they're looking for information about dogs online.
Step 4: Uncovering Keywords Related
The first step to doing a competitive analysis is to learn about the main keywords that your competitors are targeting. This can be done using Google Trends, which is a free tool that lets you see what people are searching for on Google.
If you don't have an account with Google yet, create one here first. Next, type in any keyword related to your business (for example "dentist") into the search field and then click on "Explore" next to it:
As soon as you do this, you'll see a graph that shows how many times this keyword has been searched over time (based on worldwide searches). You'll also see another graph showing its relative popularity compared with other similar keywords:
In this case we can see that there's been an increase in searches over time but they're still relatively low compared with other related terms such as "toothache". In fact we can also see what people have been searching for before coming across our desired term - dental insurance being one of them!
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Step 4: Finding Your Keyword
SimilarWeb is a website analytics tool that can be used to identify the keywords with high search volume and low competition.
To do this, you need to use the "Keyword Research" tool within SimilarWeb:
- Click on “Keywords” in the left column of your dashboard
- Use their built-in filters to narrow down your results based on keyword type (either “headline” or “URL/domain”), language, country and category (e.g., industrial equipment or pharmaceuticals). The lower down this list is populated with keywords, the less competition you will face when optimizing for these terms
Step 5: Compare Keyword Rankings With Your Competition
A ranking report is a great way to see where your site ranks on search engines. You can use this information to compare the number of pages that rank for a keyword with your competitors, identify gaps in content and opportunities for new keywords, and more.
The first step is opening up a ranking report for the keyword you want to analyze, which will look something like this:
This shows us that there are seven pages that rank for our target keyword “how to do SEO” (including this one!). There are also other terms related to it that aren't showing up in our results yet—they're what are called keywords with high volume but low competition (because they've been searched less often), which is why they don't show up as popular searches yet.
The bottom line is that SEO competitive analysis is a powerful tool for improving your site’s performance. It can help you identify areas where your content needs improvement and make sure you’re not missing out on any opportunities to improve your rankings. This process can be time-consuming and requires some technical know-how, but it will ultimately save you money in the long run by helping increase traffic from search engines without needing to pay for advertising.