Starting your SEO journey and finding a challenge to be in position #1? This might be the perfect time to add a competitor analysis to your strategy. Think it objectively: if they are in top positions, it is because they are doing something correctly in their organic efforts.
On board with the idea? There are many things to check on them. All of them are in the process, and we officially call SEO competitor analysis. To break it down in parts, in this article, we’ll review the following:
- Why competitor analysis is important in SEO
- Steps to perform competitor analysis in SEO
- How to find and analyze SEO competitors
- Tips on how to beat competitors in SEO
Let’s start with why is all this process is worth the time and resources:
Why is Competitor Analysis Important in SEO?
SEO competitor analysis allows businesses to understand their strengths and weaknesses better online, taking as a reference the efforts of top-ranking sites. This helps us to fine-tune the SEO strategy, focusing not only on the best practices but also on the unique selling points that will give a market advantage.
Beware! This is not a once-in-a-lifetime research project. Every day, competitors are implementing their SEO efforts, new content is being created, new online competitors are showing up, search engine algorithms are changing, etc.
Therefore, either if you are starting your SEO strategy or at a more advanced level, your competitor’s analysis must include a review of the following:
- Keywords they use
- Content they included in their pages
- Backlinks profile
- Indexed pages
- Site architecture and user experience
- Organic performance
Now that expectations are set, let’s learn how to choose your online SEO competitors.
How to Find SEO Competitors?
Depending on the type of business and time invested in working on your overall marketing strategy, this selection might be tricky or not. Our main takeaways to not to die in the attempt are:
Your Online Competitors and Physical Competitors Might Not Be the Same
Even though you might have a clear list of competitors in the physical world, they might have a strong online presence. On the other hand, websites ranking at the top are the ones taking away the available market share in SERP.
To spot them, we recommend researching the keywords you want to rank for. For example these are examples of digital marketing agencies. (Pro Tip! Use a VPN to be sure you are searching for the location of your target location).
Competitors Will Vary Depending On the Type of Content (Search Intent)
However, more than spotting top-ranking sites is required. You have to be clear that depending on the search intent of your content, you might find different sites. For example, we have already noted that marketing agencies rank at the top in commercial terms.
Nevertheless, for more informational queries such as “How much to spend on PPC,” we have different results:
Use Your Google Ads Competitors as a Guide
If the case is that you are running Google ads, we recommend you use the auction insights report to spot sites that are outranking you. Be careful with these sites as they might be outranking you due to the budget invested and not the SEO efforts. However, looking at them and spotting the areas of opportunity in the site will help not only the organic rankings but also the ads’ performance.
Even though this research might take some time, spotting these sites is your first step to having a clear guide for your subsequent organic efforts. Now, what do we do with all these sites? Let’s discover the things you should analyze on them below.
How to Analyze Competitors’ SEO
✅ The list of competitors is done!
Now is time to check the following information in each of the sites to compare it to your site:
Target Keywords
Using a tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or even Google Ads Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to know what their top-ranking keywords are. For example, these are top-ranking queries for White Shark Media (and no, with these tools, you don’t even need access to the backend, Google Search Console, etc).
A more manual way to do it is to pay attention and read carefully the words used in the headings.
Competitor Content
A checklist of things to review in the content is:
- Service/product pages
- Sections in each page
- Word count
- Topics in blog posts
- EEAT
- Site architecture
Competitors Backlinks Profile
With the help of tools like the ones mentioned above, you can know:
- Amount of backlinks a site has
- Domains that link to your competitors
- Authority score
Organic Performance
Finally, use the same tools to check the following metrics:
- Organic traffic
- Amount of ranking queries
- Pages per visit
- Average visit duration
How to Beat Competitors in SEO: 5 Tips
Phew! Tons of information, right? 😟
No worries! All these will be essential to take decisive steps to outrank these sites. For that, these are our tips to master the competitors’ research:
- Create a SWOT analysis with the metrics and efforts that you now know the competitors have and you don’t.
- Work on having clear and strong unique selling points to highlight them across your site.
- Reach out to the domains from backlinks that the competitors have and you don’t.
- Have real expectations about the amount of traffic you could reach in top positions.
- Revamp your content strategy writing outlines that have at least the same sections as the competitors.
Keep Your Friends Close And Your SEO Competitors Even Closer
Do not obsess over it, but remember that top-ranking sites will always serve as a guide and inspiration. As long as you keep implementing SEO best practices and creating original and relevant content, you’ll see improvements in your organic metrics. If creating an SEO strategy from scratch sounds overwhelming, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
