SEO Competitor Analysis - Practical Tips to Outrank Your Competition

By Ali, Having 13 years experience in the IT & Servicing Industry. A.I Lover, Startup Enthusiast, IoT Implementor, and Blockchain Follower.

Posted on: October 24, 2022 9:31 AM

If you’re starting a new online business or are simply sick of losing to competitors in organic search, you should conduct an SEO competitor analysis.

Other websites, most of which are competitors, will eventually discover how to optimize their content and overtake your website in search results. This is why any organization should continually pursue an SEO competitive analysis strategy.

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitive analysis is the process of assessing the strengths and shortcomings of your own and your competitors’ SEO.

An SEO competitor analysis is a process of researching your industry’s online competitors, assessing your SEO rivals, and using the data you unearth to improve the SEO of your own website and move up the search engine results pages.

Your competitors are a rich mine of knowledge that can boost the organic traffic to your website and inform every facet of your SEO approach.

Is SEO competitor analysis important?

You can examine your market as a whole, your competitors, and the state of the search market for key terms by conducting a competitive analysis.

You must keep an eye on your SEO performance even if you are already at the top of the search results for your most crucial keywords to prevent losing your position to a rival.

In actuality, Google doesn’t even send any search traffic to 90% of websites! But who is getting all that traffic if not you? Your SEO opponents for sure!

The truth is that if your competitors are doing all of these things and doing them better than you, you will find it difficult to appear in search results. An SEO competitor analysis can help with that.

How To Identify Your SEO Competitors?

First and foremost, you should be aware that your SEO rivals may not always be the same players as your direct business rivals.

So what exactly is an SEO rival? how to find SEO competitors? Websites that rank for the organic search terms you are also competing for are your SEO rivals. This implies that your SEO rivals will vary depending on the topic. Before publishing or optimizing any pages aimed at ranking for a certain keyword, it’s crucial to know exactly who you are competing with – and for what.

Finding search competitors that you might not be aware of is where the first phase of competitor analysis comes into play. This is a very crucial step to do if separate parts of your website focus on different business areas and have numerous rivals across industries.

Guesswork is not the proper strategy for this first step. Even if you could believe you know who your rivals are, analyzing the data is the most reliable way to identify your SEO rivals. Utilizing an enterprise SEO platform, such as Siteimprove SEO, to automate this process is something you should think about doing because you may be evaluating thousands, if not tens of thousands, of web pages and keywords.

When To Conduct An SEO Competitor Analysis?

Your SEO performance is continually compared to your competitors; it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It is also dynamic. You can find areas for improvement before they negatively influence your rankings by regularly evaluating your competition to understand where you are (relative to them).

Here are some crucial actions and occasions that you should never miss while conducting an SEO competitor analysis. You can learn more about how to do an SEO analysis:

By producing content, you can make sure that your website provides a better and more detailed response to user search intent than your rivals.
Organizing content: Finding out what your competitors are doing right and then giving it your own special twist is a terrific strategy to increase your website’s relevance in search results. The amount of work necessary to outrank competitors for a certain topic may also be determined via SEO competitor analysis.
After a sharp decline in ranking: In order to ascertain what your search competition is doing to suddenly outrank you as well as what is currently effective and ineffective in your sector.
If your page’s position in the SERPs is constant: Competitive analysis can show you where there are opportunities for optimization if your page is stalling and isn’t among the top search results.
In case the SERPs have altered: You should employ SEO competitor analysis to identify the strengths of a website that has surpassed you for the top spot for a certain search keyword.

Tips For SEO Competitor Keyword Analysis

why would you want to run competitive analyses of keywords Competitor keyword analysis is the act of identifying important keywords that your search competitors are ranking highly for but your website isn’t – and then using that information to move their traffic to your web pages instead.

Keywords To Include In My SEO Competitor Analysis

Not every keyword is worth the same level of attention You should concentrate your efforts on specific keywords that are appropriate to your business, are highly searched for top pages, and are not too challenging to rank for.

You will still have a huge selection of things to choose from. The “Top keywords by domain” filter in Siteimprove SEO is a useful tool for reducing the shortlist. Find the top 100 keywords by search volume that a competitor ranks for by searching for that domain. Determine which keywords you should be actively monitoring and optimizing for using this information. From there, you may make a list of all the target keywords you can customize to suit your tastes and, ideally, outrank.

Concentrate More On Search Intent Than Search Volume.

A high search volume does not guarantee that ranking well for that phrase will result in a significant increase in search traffic. Instead, it is advised to concentrate on achieving user intent, often known as search intent.

Google gives preference to websites that create a useful and satisfying user experience, and this includes increasing search results that do so by satisfying users’ search requirements. Therefore, your material is likely to benefit from a ranking boost if you can better and more thoroughly address the user’s search intent than your search competitors. A sizable incentive exists for doing so as well; after approximately one in ten searches, the user returns to the search results page to choose a different result. These are the users whose search queries you want to more fully address through content optimization.

Create valuable material that distinctly suits the user’s search intent rather than merely the keywords they employ. This is one example of how you may create, or optimize, your content to better respond to user search intent.
Include more interesting and diverse content types on your pages, such as videos, infographics, and step-by-step instructions.
Make use of Google’s “People Also Ask” function to look for opportunities for missing content categories and solutions.
Enhancing their current material. If a rival of yours has a list of the top ten historical sites in your state, you could improve upon it by compiling a list of the top 50 sites.

Explore Long-tail Keywords

Finding long-tail keyword variations can appear to be an endless task. Fortunately, a lot of the legwork is done for you when you use an SEO tool to conduct an SEO competitor analysis. Make sure you’re examining your competitors’ lengthier, more specialized keywords in addition to the shorter, most competitive ones. Long-tail variations typically have lower search volume but tend to bring more targeted, relevant visitors to your website and generally take less work to rank for.

Monitor Your Keyword Rankings

Since SEO is a long-term effort, carrying out these competitive analysis SEO actions is just the beginning. Rankings fluctuate over time, thus it’s critical to constantly check your position for your goal keywords as well as the positions of your search competitors.

However, manual monitoring is a poor use of resources when there are hundreds or even thousands of keywords to keep track of. Use an automatic keyword monitoring tool to stay current with the most recent search engine rankings. You’ll be able to recognize and respond quickly to changes in website rankings with regular, automatic monitoring before your search traffic plummets.

Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis

Backlinks continue to be one of Google’s top three ranking factors. This indicates that you will find it difficult to outrank your rivals if they have a larger list of backlinks than you do. Therefore, your website’s first objective should be strengthening your backlink profile. This process can be expedited and your own backlinks strategy can be improved by looking into the existing backlinks of your competitors. Sometimes, this is referred to as SEO link gap analysis.

Conducting your backlinks analysis is made much simpler by the “Backlinks” tool in Siteimprove SEO. Use it to identify which authoritative, sector-specific websites your rivals are receiving backlinks from and then devise a successful plan for closing the gap. It’s also crucial to keep in mind that not all links are created equal.

Key Technical SEO Elements To Analyze Your Competitors

The following are important technical SEO components to look out for in your competitors:

Internal linking: Internal links assist search engines in locating, indexing, and comprehending a website’s pages. The use of distinct, emotive anchor text for internal links is recommended by Google.

Website structure: A website’s structure affects both how users interact with it and how readily search engines can crawl it. A good site should have a straightforward layout that makes crawling simple and easy.

SSL certificates: Is the website HTTPS secure? Giving users a secure browsing environment is a top priority for search engines. Google uses HTTPS-safe encryption as a ranking signal.

Some Best Tools Used For SEO Competitor Analysis

You must allow some clever tools to do the work for you rather than spending too much time trying to spy on your rivals. We will discuss some overall best tools used for SEO competitor analysis.

SEMRush

It is one of the most commonly used tools for SEO competitor analysis. To begin with, you can utilize SEMRush to retrieve the backlinks of your rivals and track changes in their ranking.

Ahrefs

Another essential competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs‘ site explorer, which is used to verify any URL’s top organic keywords. You can also get an approximate idea of how much traffic an opponent receives for such keywords.

MozBar

A free Chrome Extension called MozBar makes it simple to acquire link analytics and do all of your SEO tasks while on the move. The Domain Authority, Page Authority, and amount of backlinks for websites are all displayed by MozBar as you search, along with link metrics for pages and domains.

Conclusion

In short competitor analysis helps you by integrating your organic research, daily morning tasks, and target audience. it provides a precise SEO score for your website and individual pages that allows you to compare the SEO performance of your website to sector averages. SEO competitor analysis will help you by providing specific recommendations on how to make the most impactful adjustments to your site’s content and technical SEO.

SEO Competitor Analysis—- Frequently Asked Questions

What’s good to include in a competitor’s SEO analysis?

SEO Competitor analysis must always include Competitive keywords, focus on search intent, explore long tail keywords and keep an eye on the SEO competitors.

Why is competitor analysis important for SEO?

The ability to identify your main market competitors is the first advantage of competitor analysis in SEO.

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