SEO Competitor Analysis
Introduction
SEO competitor analysis is a powerful strategy that involves looking for direct search competitors that will help you understand their target keywords, content strategies, backlink profile and more. The reason to do this is to understand the different techniques that you can apply to your website and apply various maneuvers to your SEO strategy.
Don’t break your head thinking about what content you should create or links to build, target keywords, etc. Instead, look out for your competitors, analyze their work, and build upon it. Then, note down the question that will help you to explore and work for your website. Look for some of the questions given below to get an idea.
- What Topic are you going to cover?
- Who are your SEO Competitors?
- What are the target keywords?
- Where can you find authorized links?
Importance of SEO Competitor Analysis
The SEO competitor analysis will help you understand the current search landscape and essential keywords, basically reviewing the whole market and competitors.
So now, even if you rank at the highest of search results, you need to be updated about the current essential keywords and monitor your SEO performance so you don’t lose your position.
How can you Run the SEO Competitor Analysis Test?
This is not rocket science to run an SEO competitor test. However, you need to follow these steps to do that. So let us look at them, what they are and how they can help you:
Look for your Competitors:
The initial thing you need to do is create a sheet of your competitors. Then, if you work with the client, request their marketing team’s details to contribute. Please focus on the websites that are highly ranked and look for their target keywords.
Online you will get many tools to help you find your competitors. You can follow this step if you have just built your website. One tool that you can use is the Market Explorer tool. In this tool, you will get an option of “Find Competitor” and then enter your domain name. You will get the list of all the players in your game as soon as you do this.
Then if you are already in the business, you can use the same tool. First, select “Create a list.” then enter your and your competitor’s domain name.
Let us put this straight for you when doing this SEO analysis. You might think your only competitor is not only the one who ranks at the top in search results. Instead, you are competing with sites with long-tail or good keywords. So don’t use common keywords that won’t help you in any way.
Competition is Not Good with Everyone
Do you know what this means? Not everyone is your competitor. Therefore, it is not viable to compete with outranked websites. To check which sites are not your competitor, you can look for factors like their resources, current ranking position, and time investment. So in this way you can help yourself to work on your website.
Outranking websites like Wikipedia are useless. Instead, just focus on the sites that affect your ranking position as your competitors because these websites will contribute the most traffic loss to your website.
Content
Look for each competitor’s website content. So if you find any problem, gaps or anything that you know needs to be corrected, then note that point so you can take advantage and avoid those problems. A “Content Analyzer” tool will help you analyze your content’s weaknesses and strengths.
This tool will help you check the number of clicks, impressions, and related search queries. Once you connect this google search console, it will also help you with headings, the page’s metadata and content improvement.
Authority
Ahh. This is something to worry about. If your competitor has higher authority, you will have difficulty outranking them, especially for highly ranked keywords. This is necessary to look at keyword gaps.
Initially, you can use long tail keywords or keywords not used by your competitor-authorized websites. Now what happens here is you are building your authority. Once you build your authority, focus on competitive and top-ranked keywords.
Other things to Look out for SEO Competitor Analysis
Let us put this in simple points, so you don’t have a hard time understanding them:
Analyze how the competitor has structured its website. Link the building of links like internal and external links. For this, you can use the “Backlink Analyzer Tool.”
Focus on title tags. Yes, we know google writes it based on our keyword, but you also need to work on it. It would be superlative if you did not compromise or ignore anything on this platform. Then comes other things like meta descriptions, headings, URL structure, or breadcrumbs.