What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?
SEO competitor analysis means looking at what other websites do for search engine optimization and learning from them.
The main goals are to understand:
What important word combinations (keywords) do competitor websites try to get found for
How do they try to rank higher in search results
Where do they get links from other sites
How well do they perform for important SEO factors
Doing this research helps you see what SEO methods work well for your type of business. You can get ideas to make your own SEO plan and website better.
Why Is It Important?
Studying your competitors in SEO is important for several reasons:
Finding New Opportunities
By looking at competitor strategies and performance, you can find new opportunities in the market.
This could include finding keyword topics that your competitors have not targeted yet, allowing you to get ahead.
Learning What Works
Studying competitors allows you to see what strategies are working well for them. By understanding their successful tactics, you can use similar approaches for your own SEO.
Addressing Weaknesses
It's not just about learning successes - you can also identify weaknesses in competitor strategies. This helps you avoid making the same mistakes and develop a better plan.
Adapting to Changes
Search engines constantly change algorithms, and competitors may change SEO tactics accordingly. By monitoring their changes, you can adapt your own strategies.
Discovering New Keywords and Topics
Competitor analysis can help you discover new keywords and topics that are relevant to your industry. This expands your content opportunities and potential avenues for attracting organic traffic.
Improving Backlinks
Backlinks are essential for SEO. Studying competitor backlinks can reveal valuable sources to strengthen your website's authority.
Understanding Customer Behavior
By examining competitor content and engagement, you can gain insights into what content resonates with your shared audience. This helps you create content to meet their needs.
Allocating Resources Wisely
Competitor analysis allows you to focus resources on the most effective strategies, instead of wasting time through trial and error.
When Should You Study Your Competitors for SEO?
Studying your competitors is an important part of your online marketing plan. It should be done regularly because your competitors' actions, changes by search engines, and other market factors can impact when you need to do an analysis.
Here are some key times when you should study your SEO competitors:
When Planning Content
Before creating new website content, study what content is working well for your competitors. Look at the keywords and topics they effectively target.
This allows you to strategically plan your own content to be visible in search engines. It also helps you gauge the effort needed to surpass them for certain keywords.
After Publishing Content
Once you publish new content, monitor how it performs compared to your competitors.
Look at rankings, website traffic, and user engagement metrics. This shows if you need to adjust your content to improve its visibility.
When Rankings Change
Fluctuations in rankings can occur due to algorithm updates and changes in competitors' strategies.
If you notice another website outranking you for certain keywords, study them. Understanding why they improved can help you adapt your approach to regain the advantage.
If You Experience a Ranking Drop
If your website rankings unexpectedly drop, study your competitors. Compare their strategies to yours to identify gaps you need to fix to regain lost rankings.
Download our free competitive analysis template to improve your site's SEO.
Types of Competitive Analysis
There are three main types of analysis you can do to study your competitors for SEO:
Competitor Content Analysis
Content is one of the most crucial aspects of any site. Analyzing your competitors' most popular pages allows you to gain ideas to enhance your own strategy.
See what types of content rank high and get a lot of traffic - this means they are doing something right. However, make sure your content matches what your audience wants and provides a better user experience.
Two methods to outrank your competitors' content:
Content Gap Analysis
This method identifies gaps or weaknesses in your competitors' content and fills those holes with valuable content on topics they are missing.
Learn more about Content Gap Analysis here.
The Skyscraper Technique
Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, popularizes the Skyscraper Technique.
This method helps improve your website's search rankings. It involves creating amazing content that is better than other content on the same topic.
First, you find a very popular and widely shared article in your industry that has lots of links from other websites. This popular article is the foundation.
Next, you create a new article on the same topic. But you make it even better by:
Adding more detailed information
Including updated facts and data
Adding helpful visuals like images and videos
Your new article provides much more value than the original popular one.
The goal is to make your new article so incredibly good and valuable that other websites will naturally want to link to it instead of the original.
Once your new super-article is ready, you contact all the websites that previously linked to the foundation article. You show them your new, improved and more valuable article. You suggest they update their link to point to your better article instead.
If those websites add links to your new article, it really helps boost your website's authority and rankings in search engines.
Backlink Profile Analysis
Getting high-quality backlinks from reputable websites is very important for improving your rankings. Backlinks act like recommendations - they signal to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy.
However, not all backlinks are good. Links from low-quality or fraudulent sites can actually hurt your performance.
To catch up to your competitors and improve your backlink profile, try these strategies:
Relevance of Backlinks
Make sure new backlinks you get point to very relevant content on your website.
When other sites link to your pages on similar topics, it increases your site's credibility and authority. Aim to get a variety of backlinks across different pages on your site.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
Look for mentions of your brand name or website online where there is no clickable link.
Reach out to the website owners politely and ask if they can add a link to your site. This turns those brand mentions into valuable backlinks.
Competitor Link Analysis
Pay close attention to how your competitors are building backlinks.
See what types of content they use to get other sites to link to them. Then create even better content offering more value to attract those same backlinks.
Technical SEO Analysis
Technical SEO auditing means looking at the behind-the-scenes technical elements of your site and comparing them to your competitors.
The goal is to identify and fix any technical issues that could negatively impact your rankings.
Key technical areas to analyze include:
Internal Linking
Implement internal links with descriptive anchor text to improve user-friendliness and help search engines index your site properly.
Website Structure
Maintain a clean site structure to enhance user experience and crawler rating. Ensure pages are easily accessible within four clicks from the homepage.
Page Speed and Security
Make your pages load quickly, as fast websites are better for users. Also, have proper HTTPS security to keep visitors safe while browsing.
Mobile-friendliness
Ensure your whole website looks and works well on mobile phones and devices. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly content in its search results.
How to Do Competitive Analysis for SEO?
It involves several steps to gain valuable insights for improvement in your own SEO efforts.
Here are some of the most important steps:
Identify Your Competitors
First, identify your SEO competitors. Your biggest market competitor may not be your biggest SEO competitor. Smaller companies might be doing well with SEO.
Look at the top 10-20 websites ranking for various keywords in your industry to find all relevant competitors.
Conduct Page Analysis
Next, analyze your competitors' websites and their top-performing pages. See what keywords they rank for that you don't.
This can help you make a plan to improve your rankings for those keywords by creating new pages or updating existing ones.
Also, look at your competitors' backlinks - how many they have, what kind of sites are linking to them, and if the content is relevant. This data can give you insight into a good backlink strategy for your own site.
Target High-Value Keywords
Instead of trying to rank for every keyword, focus on the ones that can make your business the most profit or bring in the most customers/leads.
Look for keywords your competitors may have missed that could be opportunities.
Create a Content Plan
Create a content plan and strategy based on the data from your analysis. Develop a list of content ideas and target keywords.
Put your plan into action by creating new content and optimizing existing pages. Consider trying to get backlinks from other sites if needed.
Track Your Progress
Finally, track your progress by regularly checking your keyword rankings, traffic share, and other SEO metrics. This will show if your SEO strategy is effective or needs adjusting over time.
Other Things To Do
In addition to the above-mentioned steps, there are plenty of other options you can use to fine-tune your SEO strategy.
Check Backlink Growth
Look at how many new backlinks your competitors are getting each month. Find the main competitors in your industry.
Use a backlink analysis tool to see how many referring domains they had a year ago compared to now. Calculate the average monthly backlink growth for each competitor. Use this number as a target for your own link-building efforts.
Analyze Organic Keywords
See what keywords are driving organic traffic to your competitors' sites. Use SEO tools to find these high-traffic organic keywords.
Sort the keywords into categories like ones for landing pages or blog posts. Focus on relevant, achievable keywords rather than very difficult ones.
Study Featured Snippets
Identify competitors who rank in the featured snippets at the top of Google. Analyze the type of content and formatting they use for featured snippets.
Create content optimized for featured snippets related to your target keywords.
Analyze Traffic Breakdown by Country
Check what countries your competitors get the most website traffic from. Prioritize the top countries, but also look for untapped potential in other locations.
Find Broken Pages
Find pages on competitor sites that had backlinks but no longer exist. Create high-quality replacement content on your site for those topics.
Reach out to sites still linking to the broken pages and suggest your new content.
Identify Competitors' Most Linked Content
Use tools to find your competitors' pages with the most backlinks from other sites. Analyze why this content attracts links and consider making similar link-worthy content.
Focus on Search Intent
Don't just target high-volume keywords. Understand the user's intent behind searches and create content directly addressing those intents.
Explore Long-Tail Keywords
Look for opportunities with long-tail, more specific keywords that are easier to rank for than general terms.
Remember that long-tail keywords may have lower search volumes, but they often have higher conversion rates.
Check Traffic Sources
Monitor competitors' site traffic on topics you hope to rank for. Pay close attention to the traffic generated from organic search, social media, referral links, and other channels.
This information will give you insights into which channels are driving the most visitors.
Improve on Competitors' Results
Don't just copy your competitors. Create content that provides significantly more value and insights than what already ranks.
Analyze Multiple Competitors
Look at more than just one competitor to get diverse insights, spot market gaps, find new opportunities, and understand customer needs better.
Best SEO Competitive Analysis Tools
Ahrefs
It is an all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to research your competitors.
Features
Access competitors' backlinks and organic traffic.
Analyze their top-performing pages.
Check Domain Rating (DR), URL Rating (UR), and Ahrefs ratings.
Investigate competitors' PPC campaigns, paid keywords, and landing pages to gain insights into their ad strategies.
SEMrush
This is another versatile tool that provides competitor analysis, keyword research, and more.
Features
Discover your competitors' successful keywords, traffic, audience, and lead-generation sources.
Use the Gap Analytics tool to compare keywords and backlink gaps.
Use the Organic Research feature to understand competitors' content performance.
Page Optimizer Pro
It is an on-page tool that focuses on content, metadata, and technical aspects.
Features
Compare your site directly against competitors for specific keywords.
Get data tailored to each keyword.
Follow recommended best practices to improve your page content, metadata and technical SEO factors like site speed.
Looking at Google's search results can give you helpful information about your competitors' best-performing pages and rankings.
Features
Search Google for one of your target keywords to see which sites rank at the top.
Analyze the content and metadata of the top-ranking pages.
Identify high-quality backlinks.
Consider different devices and regions to tailor your strategy.
PageSpeed Insights
Google's PageSpeed Insights helps analyze page speed which is important for user experience.
Features
Analyze competitors' page speed.
Aim to create a fast-loading page.
Moz Link Explorer
Moz provides a set of powerful tools for various purposes.
For instance, Link Analysis, Keyword Research, Domain Authority comparison, SERP Analysis, Site Crawl, Competitor Benchmarking, etc.
Features
Use SERP Analysis to assess competitors' pages and their DA and PA.
Utilize Link Explorer to track backlinks for your own link-building strategy.
Majestic SEO
It mainly tracks the backlinks of any website.
Features
Identify link-building opportunities.
Focus on acquiring backlinks from websites that link to competitors.
Ubersuggest
It helps find competitors' top-performing keywords and backlinks.
Features
Analyze competitors' content and keywords.
Identify sites linking to competitors and outreach to get backlinks.
Screaming Frog
It is useful for checking competitors' metadata and technical SEO.
Features
Review competitors' metadata and identify areas for improvement.
Analyze their on-page elements.
Takeaway
Looking closely at what your competitors are doing for SEO is extremely important for having a successful SEO strategy yourself.
Regularly checking on your competitors' activities and making adjustments based on what you learn will allow you to make good decisions and maintain a strong position in your market.