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What is a seo competitor analysis?

SEO competitor analysis is the process where you get all the information and details about your competitors regarding their SEO strategy and techniques. Through understanding this analysis, you get the opportunity to know your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in SEO.

It is through this data that you can get the techniques that your competitors use and then build an SEO strategy that can help you beat your competitors to rank high in search results.

Good SEO competitor analysis can also benefit you by helping you understand your SEO niche more effectively and help you reevaluate your website.

If we were to summarize the role of SEO competitor analysis, it would be:

Learning what works in your industry and what doesn’t in your SEO niche
Finding competitors weaknesses and use them to understand and build an effective SEO strategy
Finding competitors strengths and learning from them
Understand which competitors are difficult to outperform
Analyzing competition
Rank higher while spending less and get a high ROI

Reasons that SEO competitor analysis is important

Helps you identify your competitors

When you conduct SEO competitor analysis, it will help you in understanding who your competitors are. After knowing who your competitors are, you can start to learn all about your competitors through analysis.

Get the right keywords

You can conduct keyword analysis to determine the right keywords that are working for competitors and which aren’t.

If there are keywords that rank high for competitors but you aren’t using them, you are missing a great opportunity to rank for these keywords.

For that very reason, you got to use them to rank in a higher position.

Keeps you well informed about competitors

When you have information about what your competitors are doing, you can learn all there is about competition which will help you rank higher in Google.

You learn about their SEO strategies, keyword research, and much more so that you can use this knowledge to improve your SEO strategy.

Steps to conduct SEO competitor analysis

1- Find out who are your competitors

In this step, you work on finding who your competitors are. This is done by identifying who is your primary and secondary competitors.

The primary competitors are those who target the same target audience as you and sell the exact product or service. Secondary competitors are those who are interested in ranking for the same keywords as you but don’t sell the same products or services.

There are many ways to help you find out who are your competitors:

Use the SERPs

All you have to do in this step is to type your main keywords to find out who is your primary and secondary competitors that rank in those keywords.

You can also search for alternatives to your product or service to find out who is your SEO competitors.

Use competitive analysis tools

Another way to discover your SEO competitors is through competitor analysis tools. By doing so, it will help you know who your competitors are provided with data.

Examples of those competitive analysis tools are Ahrefs Site Explorer and SEMrush’s competitive analysis tool.

To use these tools, you only need to enter your domain name in this SEO tool which will generate a list of competitors below helping you get a clearer understanding of who your competitors are.

You can easily navigate any of the competing domains and can sort them through the common keywords tab that will bring out the competitors closest to you.

When you perform competitor keyword analysis, you get data that will help you in your SEO strategy.

2-Conduct competitor analysis

Keyword difficulty
This is the difficulty to rank for a certain keyword that competitors are already ranking high in. To get all the data behind the keyword difficulty, you can use a tool such as Site Explorer from cognitive SEO to understand the factors that affect the ranking of your competitors such as domain authority and web traffic making the keywords used more difficult to rank for.
Keyword gap analysis
This is the identification of keywords that your competitor is ranking in but you aren’t ranking in them.
Useful keywords
This is identifying keywords that both you and the competitors didn’t use. These keywords may rank easily due to not having high competition.

There are many other metrics that you need to evaluate when analyzing competitors. These metrics are:

1- Domain rating

Domain rating is a metric that is developed by Ahrefs to show the strength of your backlinks profile through a scale from 1- 100.

It is an important metric where it plays a major role in the way that search engines rank websites because backlinks convey trustworthiness and higher authority.

Ahrefs will help you determine where you stand in domain rating. If your domain rating is low, you will need to build more backlinks that offer value and trustworthiness.

2- Domain authority

The domain authority is a metric that is used to predict how likely a website is to rank on search results, calculating it from a scale from 1- 100.

Knowing your competitor’s domain authority can help you plan and execute an SEO strategy that can raise your domain authority if it’s lower than them so that you can outperform them.

3- Traffic trends

The goal of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website. So, checking out your competitor traffic can help you understand the strategies and keywords that they use to drive traffic.

The metrics that are used to understand your competitor’s traffic are:

Monthly organic traffic: You can learn all about the competitors’ monthly organic traffic through analyzing their traffic at the domain, subfolder, subdomain, and URL level. To find the best traffic opportunities.
Organic traffic growth: Through understanding your competitor’s organic traffic growth, you get to know all about whether the traffic is growing, staying the same, or declining.
Paid Traffic value: This is a metric that shows the value of organic traffic for all keywords that a website targets using PPC. It is traffic brought through paid means.

4- Analyze the number of indexed pages

Another crucial way to find out more about your competition is through knowing the number of pages that your competitors have that are indexed. Because to rank in Google search results, search engines need to find these pages and index them.

Indexing pages are pages that search engines visit, analyze, and add to their database of web pages.

To check the number of competitor’s indexed pages, you can search for it by writing “site: domain” in the search box.

You can follow this process for all competitors and put the data in a spreadsheet. Then, you can compare the number of indexed pages from your competitors with yours.

If you have fewer indexed pages, then you will need to create more content so that it can get indexed and you can overtake your competitors.

5- Evaluate on-page optimization

On-page optimization is all about all the tactics that you use on your website in order to rank through search engines. It includes creating great content, optimizing title tags, H tags, internal linking, image optimization, and more.

You can also evaluate competitors ’ on-page optimization by analyzing competitor’s top-performing content that has high traffic and conversion rate.

Analyzing competitors’ content can include knowing:

Content-type: This is the type of content that they use such as long-form vs. short-form articles, listicles, reviews, informational content, how-to guides, eBooks. By understanding the type of content that generates the most traffic and conversions, you can know what type of content to use on your website.
Content format: This is how the content is formatted such as written content, video content, audio content, and visual content.
Internal linking: Building internal links are part of building a successful on-page SEO strategy where you help users navigate through your website while also distributing links throughout your website.

6- Evaluate off-page optimization

Off-page optimization refers to all SEO activities done outside your website that are used to improve a website’s search rankings. The most common activities are link building that helps to drive traffic to your website.

When analyzing competition, you have to look at the competitor’s backlinks analysis because these backlinks can actually boost a site’s ranking.

You have to consider three primary factors when considering link building:

Authority: The authority of a website is how trustworthy the website is to the users, websites, and search engines. The more authoritative a website that links to your website, the more that you are likely to rank higher in search engines.
Unique root domains: There have been studies that show a clear correlation between the number of linking root domains and high ranking; it’s also important to have diversity.
Relevance: It’s important that the sites that are linking to your site be relevant to the idea behind your website and content.

7- Examine competitors UX

UX, also known as user experience, is made up of factors such as ease of use, attractiveness, and informativeness in your website to provide a positive experience for the user.

These elements also include any elements such as web design that enhances the user experience. Therefore, when conducting an SEO competitor analysis, you will need to see what areas your competitors are effective in and what areas they are missing so that you can capitalize on them for your website.

In conclusion, SEO competitor analysis is crucial for any business because it helps you determine what competitors are doing and build a strategy based on what you find from this analysis.

Osolutions

We hope you enjoy reading this guide

What is a seo competitor analysis?

Reasons that SEO competitor analysis is important

Helps you identify your competitors

Get the right keywords

Keeps you well informed about competitors

Do you want more traffic?

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Steps to conduct SEO competitor analysis

1- Find out who are your competitors

Use the SERPs

Use competitive analysis tools

2-Conduct competitor analysis

Keyword difficulty

Keyword gap analysis

Useful keywords

1- Domain rating

2- Domain authority

3- Traffic trends

You can easily drive massive amounts of traffic to your website

4- Analyze the number of indexed pages

5- Evaluate on-page optimization

6- Evaluate off-page optimization

7- Examine competitors UX

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