How to Perform a Competitor SEO Analysis

Starting a competitor analysis in SEO is a very powerful research strategy that can help you rank your website in high places, increase traffic and get more conversions. It’s also a great opportunity to increase your revenue and get more visibility.

With a competitor analysis, you can find out who your SEO competitors are, what keywords to target, what topics to cover and generally what you need to beat your competition and outrank them. There are many ways you can approach an SEO competitor comparison, but the basic principles are all focused on analyzing what works for your competition and use the information to improve your own SEO efforts.

What is an SEO competitor analysis?

Doing an SEO competitor analysis means researching everything your competitors do. You’ll need to research their content, keywords, backlinks and anything else you see they’re doing in their SEO strategy. With the help of this information, you’ll be able to implement different tactics your competitors use and create your own SEO strategy. Instead of having to guess or start blank with the content you need to have and keywords you need to target, you can just see what works for others and build on that success.

So how do you perform competitor analysis?

Finding your competition

Although it may seem like an obvious thing to do, you’ll first need to find out who your competition is. The main SEO competitors are all the websites that are ranking on the first page for any of the keywords you want to target.

The simplest way to identify your SEO competitors is to type in a keyword that’s related to your business on Google and see who comes up on top of the results. You’ll need to do this multiple times for 10 to 20 of your business keywords to cover all aspects and find everyone with your SEO market analysis. Make sure you also pay special attention to any competitors that occupy local packs and even position zero.

However, you need to beware of guessing with this approach. When looking into your competitors like this, you need carefully check through the data. Websites can rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords at a time, which means that checking all the rankings manually can often be a laborious and sometimes inaccurate process.

The best way to perform a competitive audit and see who your competition is to use an SEO tool that can help you automate things. Tools can automatically look at all the keywords and give you accurate information about who your search competitors are. You can choose from many SEO tools that will help you see your competition and you can even look into some great task management apps that will help you keep track of what websites you have checked. Using tools for all of the aspects of an SEO competitor analysis is a must - not only will it only save you time, but it will also help you in other areas of your business, for example if you’re working from home and tasked with managing remote teams.

How do you perform competitor analysis for keywords?

In order to get the keywords you want to target, you’ll need to see what your competition has. You’ll need to look into the content they post - pages, services, blog posts and anything else they might have on their website, and see what keywords they targeted.

With a competitive keyword analysis or keyword gap analysis, you’ll be able to identify some great and valuable keywords your competitors use and rank on the top results. Once you get these keywords, you can use them to create your own content and do a better job with the keyword implementation. However, there are some things you’ll need to consider before “stealing” these keywords.

First of all, you’ll need to make sure the keywords are valuable. You’ll need to see if the keywords are actually related to your business, if they have a high search volume (i.e. how many people actually search these keywords) and whether or not these keywords will be able to convert. If you already have a website that has some rankings, you’ll need to choose the keywords you already rank for and the ones that could rank higher. You’ll also need to look at the keyword difficulty that’s sometimes defined with different external factors (like domain and backlinks). You should check more competitors to get a richer analysis and better overview.

Apart from keywords, you’ll also need to look into different domain and website factors like:

• Domain’s age
• Country of business (and domain)
• Domain authority
• Traffic volumes
• Backlinks
• Social signals

With SEO tools you can get this information together, but it’s a good idea to take notes about any weaknesses you find that you can use to your advantage. If the difficulty is high, that means they have strong SEO efforts in place and it can be much harder to outrank them. It’s best to put your focus on competitors that have lower overall rankings at first, and once you build a strong website, aim for the ones with higher rankings.

Do your own on-page optimization

With a competitor analysis, you’ll get a lot of information you can use to create your own SEO strategy. You can learn what keywords you need to target, what content you need to post and how often to publish it. While you’re looking into all of this, you should also see how they’re handling their metadata, headings and the length of the content they post, as well as the topic relevance.