Do you find it frustrating when all your SEO efforts go in vain when your website does not rank well? However, you would find it interesting how the number 1 site on the Google page managed to rank and retain that position. Sometimes, even if you manage to gain the number 1 position on Google SERP, that celebration won’t last forever.
Mark this as a thumb rule that your competitors are consistently working on ways to outrank your website. That’s why it is said that SEO competitor analysis is a continuous and quick process.
In this article, we will cover the following topics:
- What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
- How Do You Run an SEO Competitive Analysis?
- How to Create a Competitor Analysis Report?
What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
An SEO competitor analysis is also called a competitive analysis. It is a data-driven process to research your competitors to gather insights pertaining to a specific keyword, content, and backlink strategy. SEO competitor analysis helps in improving our own SEO.
To put it simply, competitor analysis is an SEO comparison between two websites that compete in the same industry. SEO competitor analysis includes:
- SEO Keyword analysis
- Backlink Analysis
- Top Content Analysis
This analysis is important and more effective because you don’t need to start the whole analysis from scratch. You can easily track what your competitors are doing by employing a data-driven strategy.
Marketers learn how to do competitor analysis SEO to keep up their rankings and make sure they remain competitive in their industry.
How Do You Run an SEO Competitor Analysis?
Now that you know what is SEO competitor analysis, it’s time to understand how exactly you conduct SEO competitor analysis. You can follow the following procedure to conduct a thorough competitor analysis:
1. Manually Identify Your True Competitors
Your true SEO competitor might be right in front of your eyes, they might rank higher or lower than you. To check your competitor you need to understand that not every competitor will rank higher than you. You need to be really vigilant in your approach to identify your true SEO competitors by SEO analysis.
You need to start with SEO comparison and research multiple keywords. Take note of the top 10-20 websites that appear on the initial SERP pages.
2. Conduct a Page Analysis
The next step is a very obvious one. Take a look at the competing websites, and their top-performing pages. What keywords they use, how they use it, what type of content they write, what performs better, etc.
This is also known as keyword gap analysis. You might come across keywords on the competitor’s website that rank well on their site but might not work for you.
Once you’re able to identify keywords that also apply to your brand, you can create keyword-dedicated pages. In this way, you can redirect customers to your website instead of the customers.
3. Utilize the Keyword With Higher ROI
A successful and popular business can easily harness the power of keywords. The point is that large companies already have enough budget to rank at the top. You can start with unique content. Focus on delivering content that your competitor cannot even think of.
4. Create a Content Strategy
Now that you have all the relevant data, the next step is to create SEO competitor analysis report. With the help of this report, you can build your content strategy. Plan your content, create calendars, draft planners, and start posting.
5. Track Your Progress
Once you have planned your content, created new blogs & posts, published it & reoptimized the old content. Now, at this stage, you need to track the performance of your content. Conduct regular keyword audits, and check if your strategy really worked. You can also use free SEO tools for this analysis.
When Should One Conduct SEO Competitor Analysis?
As you know ‘change’ is the only constant. And that is the reality of digital marketing. With the advent of large businesses and startups, the competition is just getting started. With the same spirit, conducting an SEO competitor analysis is not a one-time activity, instead, it’s an ongoing process. This helps one to stay informed about the dynamics of the market.
Consider conducting SEO competitor analysis in the following conditions:
- When you launch a new website
- When you launch a new product or service
- When you expand into a new market
- Your competitor is performing better than you
- You are implementing a new SEO strategy
Takeaway
True marketing should be counted as nothing without a true competitor analysis. Business owners might find this extensive research a little overwhelming. If you’re serious about getting ahead of the competition, we recommend researching your competitor entirely. Identify your competitor, conduct keyword & SEO analysis, plan your content, execute, track, and win the SEO game!