SEO Competitor Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide
If you want to climb up the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s helpful to do a competitive SEO analysis to learn where your competition ranks and for what keywords. When you know what your competitors are doing well at and what opportunities they’re missing out on, you can use those insights to increase your own rankings. A proactive approach to SEO competitive analysis helps you understand:
- Where keyword opportunities are
- What types of content users respond to for specific keywords
- What SEO strategies are working for competitors in your space
- Where you should focus your time to optimise for conversions
What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis SEO is the process of identifying any related website that ranks higher than you on SERPs for search terms related to your product, service, or company. Learning about what’s working for your competition enables you to apply those insights to your own SEO strategy.
Your business might have done competitor analysis for everything from product development to marketing strategy. But it’s important to be aware that your main business competitors may be different from your main SEO competitors. That’s why an SEO competitor analysis can help you identify the brands to pay attention to for SEO strategy.
Use this SEO competitor analysis guide to learn about the benefits of competitor analysis in SEO and how to execute it effectively.
1. Identify Your SEO Competitors
The first step in a competitive SEO analysis is to learn who your competitors are. The goal for this stage of your SEO competitive analysis is to analyze your target competitors based on the search terms you’re targeting. This will help you learn more about whom you’re up against, including:
- Their current business initiatives
- What content drives traffic for them
- How they’re positioning their product in the market
2. Compare Your Rankings and Content with SEO Competitors
Next, spend time analyzing your target keywords so that you know your biggest competitors are in search. You’ll likely discover several previously unknown competitors scaling the SERPs for your top keyword targets. Consider these different kinds of competitors:
1. Direct competitors: These are likely competitors you know about who provide similar services/products/software you do. For example, say you’re a window manufacturer that sells a type of uPVC window. When you search that specific type in a search engine like Google, you’ll likely see other retailers of that window type pop up in the results.
2. Indirect competitors, including content creators and publishers: These are brands or websites outranking you who are not your direct competition. They can be news sources, social media sites like Pinterest, content creation sites like YouTube or individual bloggers. Going back to the window type example, you may find articles on DIY blogs or in online news sites that mention that type of window in the SERPs.
These indirect competitors are still worth considering when you’re doing your competitive analysis. You must understand where your competitors are outranking you on the SERPs and what kind of content is performing for the keywords you’re targeting.
While it’s smart to focus on companies you already know are your competitors, make keywords your basis for analysis. This allows you to identify the full scope of brands, publishers, and bloggers competing with your content. That way, you can gain more insights into the type of content ranking for those keywords.
You’ll also want to find keywords that competitors are ranking for that you’re not. This is called a competitive content gap analysis. Using this knowledge, you can integrate high-value keywords into your own SEO strategy.
3. Discover Content Opportunities Where You Can Outrank SEO Competition
Approach your response to your SEO competitive analysis using the SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) framework. See:
- Your competitors’ strengths
- Their weaknesses
- Opportunities to replicate their strengths and capitalise on their weaknesses on your own site
- Where your competitors are outperforming you and ways to improve upon those areas
The biggest rule of a successful competitive analysis is to never assume anything. Base your SEO campaign on hard facts obtained from three main channels.
- Consider the data channels available to you. You can analyze the competitive landscape using tools such as Google Ads. You can use Google Sheets to pivot large quantities of data and mine for trends. Advanced SEO platforms can automate SEO competitive analysis and discovery, deepening your insight into your competitive landscape.
- Conduct off-page and on-page analysis. This involves studying your competitors’ backlinks, anchor texts, social media strategy, tools used, content and page-by-page traffic figures. When you discover your competitors’ backlinks, you can reach out to those same websites to see if they’d link to your content, as well, or even swap out competitor links for yours. You can incorporate the successful on-page optimisation strategies of your competitors on your own site for target keywords.
- Analyze your competitor’s marketing strategies. These include past and present digital marketing programs and changes in website traffic before and after implementation of those marketing programs.
Analyzing the competitive landscape typically involves a lot of up-front effort. SEO competitor analysis is an ongoing process that should be completed continuously since the SERPs are highly dynamic. The more you focus on SEO competitor analysis, the better you can ensure you don’t miss out on opportunities to boost your own rankings.
4. Create or Optimise Existing Content Based on Your Discoveries
Once you discover keywords, your competitors rank higher for, it’s important to determine whether your site needs to be optimised or whether you need new content for SEO. Your site may have technical issues like slow site speed or broken links that could be hindering your search engine results. Or, you may not have enough high-quality content that’s optimised for conversions.
Google’s algorithm changes periodically. Pages ranking on page 1 this month for a keyword may drop to page two or worse the next. That’s why monitoring page rankings and updating content accordingly should be a crucial part of your content and SEO strategy.
Analyze where your pages rank for target keywords and look for opportunities to optimise existing content based on your findings. Pages that rank on page 2 for target keywords are usually the best opportunities for optimisation. These keywords are called “striking distance” keywords because they have a high potential to generate more traffic if they’re better optimised and make it to page 1.
If your target keywords are ranking too far outside the striking distance, it may be time to create new content that addresses your customers’ needs.
When you’re creating new content, look at your competitors’ top-performing content. Then, identify ways you can significantly improve upon it, whether it’s by using newer data to better inform a piece of content, adding in visuals that create more engagement or doing a deeper dive on the topic that uses more industry knowledge or original research. Then, promote your new content to a similar audience your competitors targeted.
SEO Competitor Analysis Benefits
- Insight into Competitor Strategies: Understand what strategies your competitors are using to rank well in search engines and replicate them on your website.
- Identify Keyword Opportunities: Discover high-performing keywords your competitors are targeting.
- Content Gap Analysis: Find gaps in your content compared to your competitors.
- Backlink Analysis: Identify valuable backlink opportunities and assess your competitors’ link profiles.
- Reputation Management: Monitor and manage your online reputation compared to competitors.
- Benchmark Performance: Set realistic SEO goals by comparing your performance with competitors.
- Adapt and Improve: Use insights to adapt and improve your SEO strategy. This is something you should constantly do – adapt to what your competition is doing and stay in the loop.
SEO Competitor Analysis Tips and Tricks
- Identify Competitors: Begin by identifying your main online competitors in your niche or industry.
- Keyword Analysis: Analyze competitors’ keyword usage and prioritise those that are driving the most traffic.
- Content Analysis: Evaluate the quality, format, and depth of content your competitors are producing.
- Backlink Analysis: Assess the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your competitors’ websites.
- Technical SEO: Check for technical SEO issues and improvements in competitors’ websites.
- Social Media and Off-Site Analysis: Look at competitors’ social media presence and off-site SEO efforts.
- Local SEO: If relevant, examine competitors’ local SEO efforts, including Google Business Profile profiles.
- Mobile Optimisation: Check how well competitors’ websites are optimised for mobile devices.
- Page Speed: Analyze the loading speed of your competitors’ websites.
- User Experience: Evaluate the user experience and design of competitors’ websites.
- Content Promotion: If possible, investigate how competitors promote their content through channels like email marketing or social media.
- Monitor Changes: Regularly monitor your competitors’ websites for changes in their strategies.
SEO Competitor Analysis Tricks
- Use SEO Tools: Utilise SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and SpyFu to gather data on competitors.
- Reverse Engineering: Look at the HTML source code of competitor pages to identify meta tags and other on-page SEO elements.
- Track Rankings: Monitor your competitors’ keyword rankings over time to identify trends.
- Set Alerts: Set up alerts to notify you of changes in competitors’ websites or rankings.
- Competitor Content Analysis: Use tools to compare the word count, keyword usage, and readability of competitors’ content.
- Competitor PPC Analysis: If relevant and possible, analyze competitors’ paid advertising campaigns.
- Social Media Listening: Use social media monitoring tools to track competitor mentions and engagement.
Remember that SEO competitor analysis is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor your competitors and adapt your strategy accordingly to stay competitive.
This strategy can help you:
- Reach a newly interested audience
- Get you linked on more sites, some of which may even swap out a competitor’s link for your better piece of content on their site
- Establish you as an authority in your space
Whether you choose to optimise existing pages or create new content, these strategies can help you rank higher on Google SERPs.
