A thorough SEO competitor analysis can be transformed into your roadmap of what you need to do to improve your website, so that it beats your competitors.

It can also be used to identify strengths and weaknesses on both your and your competitors’ websites. By using this information, you can discover the areas both you and your competitors are weak in as well as further benefit from this for your website and search results.

An SEO competitor analysis means that you examine your competitors’ links, keywords, content and more in order to transform the most successful parts of their tactics into a more optimized own SEO strategy . Instead of guessing which keywords to target or which content to create, you can instead see what works for others and build on that success. An SEO competitor analysis works as a powerful research strategy to help you rank higher, get more traffic and more conversions. Its magic happens when you discover SEO opportunities that you might not have seen otherwise.

An SEO competitor analysis helps you answer questions such as:

• Who are my actual SEO competitors?
• Which keywords should I target?
• What topics should I address?
• Where can I find links?
• What do I need to beat the competition?

The idea is not to copy your competitors, but to use data to get better and use knowledge to create better experiences for your visitors.

Identify your real competitors

This may sound obvious, but before you can start competing, you need to know who your search competitors really are. You may think you know, but it may turn out that your organic search competitors are not the same as your direct business competitors.

The most basic way to identify your competitors is to simply enter your top keywords on Google and then see which domains rank highest. Do this for 10-20 of your most important keywords, track everything in a spreadsheet and calculate which domains appear most often and in which position.

Compare your site with that of your competitors

What to focus on:

• Web Design:
  • Overall Web Design – Is Their Website Appealing And Engaging?
  • Website responsiveness – Is the layout adapted to both desktop and mobile devices?
  • Website structure – Is the structure flexible and easy?
  Website Load Speed ​​- Are their valuable landing pages optimized for speed?
  • Navigation – Is it easy to find products / services / contact info / CTA on their website?
  • Sitemap – Is their Sitemap optimized for crawlability?
  • PageRank distribution – What is their PageRank distribution?
  • Positioning CTAs – What positions do they use to place their Call-to-Action buttons?
• Websites:
  • Website
  • Individual product and service
  pages • Browse pages (pages with multiple products for easy browsing)
  • News / Blog / KnowledgeBase pages
  • FAQ page if they have any

By comparing websites, you can determine if your website is also appealing, has easy navigation, special features, simple shopping process, clear CTAs and a good user experience. If not, you should start working on all of these factors right away. This analysis will also help you improve your site’s bounce rate.

Keyword analysis

A competitive keyword analysis is a process of identifying valuable keywords that your competitors, but not you, rank high for. Are their keywords the same as yours? Do they do something different with their keywords? Do they focus more on long tail keywords or are they focused on topics rather than keywords? This is your opportunity to find keywords and topics that you have missed or not known about.

Important to keep in mind:

• Keywords should be valuable (ie high volumes and related to your business or high conversion rate).
• The keywords should be ones that you can rank for, or can rank higher for.
• Comparing multiple competitors often gives you a richer analysis.

Content analysis

When analyzing your competitors’ websites, the most important part is analyzing their content. Why? Because content is king. Content is one of the factors that most clearly affects your success with SEO.

There are several tools for analyzing your competitors’ content. Do not hesitate to use them. Examine the type of content they create. Do they only create content that will benefit their business? Do they use the kind of content that will help their customers and improve their knowledge base? Or do they use both techniques to rank on the search engine?

In the analysis you should take into account:

• Number of words
• Type of content – text, video, photo or podcast
• Type, variation and quality of the information in the posts
• Keyword frequency
• Headings and subheadings
• Length of headings
• Content structure
• Link strategy in the post
• The relevance of the content to keywords
• Depth of the subject being treated

What your competitors miss or can get better at, you can use to gain an edge. You can use analytics to provide the content your audience may be looking for, but not finding in competitors. In addition, it gives you an insight into what is missing in your content and what you can do better.

Link analysis

Similar to keyword analysis, a link analysis aims to identify competitors’ backlinks that you could also get. Backlinks refer to the websites that link to your competitors’ websites. Earning high quality backlinks is crucial in the SEO world. When high authority sites link to your site, it indicates that your site is authoritative enough that they would like to recommend it and display the content to their visitors.

In theory and practice, this works because the websites that link to your competitors have already shown that they are interested in your topic. If you can show them that your resource is significantly better than your competitors, you have a better than average chance of getting a link as well. Another benefit is that this process helps you find highly relevant pages to retrieve links from.

Conclusion

By now, it’s easy to see how insightful an SEO competitor analysis can be and how it can help you increase your brand awareness , improve rankings, and gain the trust of your online audience.

Of course, you can do well even without a competitor analysis. But with one, you get to see your business from a new perspective, decide if it really feels good or not, find out if you miss important opportunities and see how you perform in relation to competitors.

Finally, do not think of competitor analysis as a one-time strategy. It is rather a long-term strategy whose process you will need to repeat regularly, as new companies are constantly entering the market and no website stays in the top position forever.