Tips for SEO competition analysis
If you are developing a new website or are tired of losing the competition in organic search then you must do competitor analysis. SEO competitive analysis includes researching the keywords, links, content and more of your SEO competitor.
Performing such an analysis will help you know what works in your field or industry, your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths and understand how difficult it is to outperform a competitor.
The following are the tips for doing competitive analysis for SEO:
First you should find out your SEO competitors. You can enter your primary keyword in Google Search and see which websites are ranking.
You can use a tool like Moz’s SEO Domain Analysis Tool. In the tool enter the domain name and it will show your competitors who compete for the same keyword.
Another tool is Moz Pro’s True Competitor tool, it gives you a list of top 25 competitors.
Do a competitive keyword analysis or the Keyword Gap analysis. This will help you find all the valuable keywords that your competitor ranks for and you don’t. Keyword Gap analysis can also be done at page level to optimise individual pages.
You can use Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool to do Ranking keyword analysis. You can find the valuable keywords that you don’t rank for and high-volume keywords that you rank for that need a boost.
Look at your competitor’s top performing content. Find the content that got your competitor the most links. Links are necessary for ranking and are a ranking factor. You can find your competitors top content and significantly improve upon it by adding more features and data.
You can also find your competitor’s top pages by traffic. You can find the top pages and then use the data to find good topics.
You can use Link Explorer in Ahrefs to find the content that has got the most links. It gives all the URLs with the link metrics.
Do Link Gap analysis to find out all the links your competitor has acquired which you can also try to get. Sites that link to your competitor are already interested in the topic. You can show them that your resources are better than your competitors and you have a chance to earn a link too. This also helps you find highly relevant pages to get links from.
You can use tools like Link Intersect to get the domains and the URLs that link to your competitor and not you.
Analyse and get a view of the competitive landscape. Use Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool to find out the Domain Authority (DA) for all the competitor websites. Check the DA of your website with that of the competitors. If your DA is 30 and the competitor’s is 50 then they are slightly higher but if the competitor’s DA is 90 then they are not your ideal competitor.
You can find ‘Superfans’, these are the ones who link to your competitor a number of times. You should try to develop a relationship with them as they may link to your website regularly. Use tools like Ahref Site Explorer for this.
Find out if your competitor has any broken pages. You can find out what the dead page was about and try to create something better. Find everyone who linked to the dead page and request them to swap the dead link with your resource. Use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer for this.
Find out from which country your competitor gets organic bulk traffic. This will help you to know where the opportunity lies in your niche. You can create content for people of those countries. For this use Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Find out the keywords that are driving the traffic to your competitors website. You can find this out through the Organic keyword report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. This is a great option to find more keywords to target.
Find out the featured snippets your competitor ranks for. If your competitor is ranking for a lot of them then you can do so too. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer for this.
You can analyse your competitors on-site SEO to get valuable information about keyword density, metadata and internal link. Finding out the keyword density will help you find how aggressive you need to be with your target keyword placement. Examining metadata to find if the competitor is using LSI, CTA and more. Analysing the internal links will help you understand their site structure and how authoritative their website is.
Analyse your competitor’s content and find out the number of words, uniqueness, whether they use images and videos and outbound links. You can research and create a larger well-crafted unique content as long form content performs better.
Analyse the design of your competitor’s website. If your competitor has a better design than yours, you may want to spend some time / budget on revamping your website.
If you are a local business then you can analyse your competitors Google My Business page. You can find out if their page is updated regularly, their posts have engagement, they use images and reviews and do people follow their page. If your competitor uses these then you should do too. If your competitor is not using these then you should go ahead and use these.
Find out your competitors PPC keywords because if they are paying to get traffic from a keyword then the keyword is profitable. You can use the tool Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Look at the PPC ads copy of your competitor as this will help to find title tags and descriptions that help to increase the CTR.
You can find out if your competitor is using offline marketing strategies. Due to offline marketing efforts people may want to know about your brand. People may go to Google to find out more. Branded searches are important as they show Google that they want to learn more about a brand.
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