SEO Competitor Analysis Tips
An SEO competitor analysis is something that all website owners should be doing. It helps improve your website SEO ranking to match those of your competitors. It identifies your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This way, you will learn what SEO strategies work and what do not in your industry.
In this post, we will go through some SEO competitor analysis tips on identifying your top SEO competitors, find out how you can outdo them.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
What Is SEO Competitive Analysis?
SEO competitor analysis means analyzing your SEO competitors’ links, keywords, content, etc. and incorporate their successful tactics into your own SEO strategy.
We will talk about the ways you can do to perform a simple SEO competitive analysis without any special tools.
Who are Your SEO Competitors?
The simplest way to find out who your SEO competitors is to enter your keywords on Google and write down the domains of your top competitors. Alternatively, you may use SEO competitor analysis tools like Neil Patel Digital’s Ubersuggest, Moz’s Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool, Spyfu’s SEO Competitor Analysis, Alexa’s Competitive Analysis, etc.
You should analyze your competitors’ domain authority including country and age, number of referring domains, SEO traffic, number of keyword rankings, backlinks, Alexa rank, and social signals. Look for any weaknesses that you can use to your advantage. Focus on competitors with lower overall scores ranking well for niche keywords. This way, you can more easily outrank them than those with higher scores.
What are Keyword Gaps?
Keyword gaps are SEO keywords that your competitors rank highly for and you don’t. These keywords should have high search volume, relevant to your business, and be likely to convert.
Besides analyzing keyword gaps at the domain level, you should optimize each webpage by identifying your competitor’s pages that rank for the most keywords and that have the most traffic.
How to Analyze Content?
You should identify your competitors’ best content, improve and make it your own, and promote it to similar audience. Such content can be blog posts, videos, infographics, webinars, etc. which have many shares and links.
Competitive On-Page SEO
To find out information on your competitors’ On-Page SEO, you can easily check the source code of each webpage of your competitors on any web browser. For instance, in Chrome right mouse click on the page you want to view source of and click on “View page source.”
The SEO title is designated by <title>……</title> located at the top of the source code after the <head> section. The SEO description is designated by <meta name=”description” content=”……” />. You should note the length and keywords in the SEO titles and descriptions of each webpage.
You should find out the <h2> and <h3> headings of each webpage of your SEO competitors. They are designated by <h2>……</h2> and <h3>……</h3> respectively.
What are External Link Gaps?
External link gaps or backlink gaps are external links or backlinks that your competitors rank highly for and you don’t. If these missing backlinks have linked to many of your competitors, make sure to get your webpages linked too. be sure to check the backlinks to all the top webpages of your competitors.
Competitive SERP Features
You should identify your SEO competitors’ SERP features like People also ask, Recipes, Videos, Images, Top Stories, etc. on Google. For instance, you identify your competitors’ featured snippets on Google and rewrite your content for pages that are ranking in the same featured snippet. This makes it easier to take over your competitor’s featured snippets.
Competitors’ PPC
First, you should find out what PPC (pay-per-click) keyword your SEO competitors are paying for on Google and the pages those keywords are ranked for. Then you identify keywords with low search volume e.g. 50 searches per month which have higher conversion rates than high-volume keywords e.g. 2,000 searches per month. Finally, you should find out the SEO titles and descriptions of the PPC ads.
However, never match each competitor’s PPC ad because they may be just testing the water. Therefore, it is better to monitor their PPC ads on search engines, social media, and third-party websites.
Conclusion
Now you get the hang of SEO competitive analysis. Depending on the number of pages and SEO competitors of your website, you need to continue making tweaks, tracking your SEO competitors, monitoring your rankings, and redo an SEO competitor analysis every year. This is especially true because Google Search algorithms are updated regularly.
