Hey everyone, Digital John here! As an SEO strategist with over 6 years of experience, I’m often asked by clients – “How can I better understand my SEO competitors to boost my own business website search engine rankings?”
How to do SEO competitor analysis?
Competitor analysis is a crucial part of any effective SEO strategy. By studying what your rivals are doing, you uncover optimization opportunities and gain insights to inform your own approach.
In this post, I’ll walk through my proven step-by-step process for doing a comprehensive SEO competitor analysis. Whether you’re just starting out with SEO or are a seasoned pro, you’re bound to pick up some useful competitive intelligence which I follow for my SEO clients!
1.Identify Your Core Competitors
First, make a list of who you consider your main competitors. These should be websites offering similar products, services or information aimed at your same target audience.
For example, if you run an online shoe store, your competitors would be other eCommerce shoe retailers. For a local pizza restaurant, you’d look at other pizza places in the same city or geographic area.
Make sure to include competitors of all sizes – large players in your broader industry as well as niche sites going after a similar market segment.
Places to find competitors:
– Keyword research – See what sites rank for your core keywords
– Google searches – Review results for searches related to your business
– Advertising – Check ads/links on Google, Bing, Facebook etc.
– Review sites – Look at sites referenced as alternatives
Spend time searching across these sources to build the most extensive competitor list possible.
2.Analyze Their Technical SEO Elements
Next, dig into the on page SEO to check whether the site is meeting on page seo ranking factors and technical SEO aspects of your competitor sites. Look at key elements like:
URL Structure: Do they use keyword-optimized URLs? How are they formatting URLs for pages, products, categories?
Page Speed: How fast are their sites loading? Page speed is a ranking factor. Usually, page should load in less than 2 seconds. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool for analysing the loading speed. Check GTMetrix and tools.pingdom.com for analysing the pages speed
Mobile Friendliness: Is the site optimized for mobile? With Google’s mobile-first indexing, this is crucial. Google indexes your site first for mobile only.
Schema Markup: Do they use schema for richer results snippets?
Site Architecture: What’s their internal link structure like? How are they organizing site content?
Keyword Targeting: Which keywords are they optimizing pages for? Check page titles, meta descriptions, headers etc.
Doing a technical audit reveals both strengths and weaknesses to inform your own on-page optimization efforts. So that you can create strategy as per your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths.
3.Analyze Their Backlink Profile
The quality and quantity of a site’s backlinks remains one of the most important Google ranking factors. Use a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush or Moz to analyze competitors’ backlink profiles.
Look at metrics like:
– Number of referring domains
– Domain authority of backlinks
– Anchor text of backlinks
– Link velocity – how rapidly are they acquiring links?
See where competitors are getting links from – such as:
– Guest posts
– Link roundups/mentions
– Directory listings
– Sponsored posts
Identify new quality link building tactics and opportunities to pursue for your own site.
4.Review Their Content Strategy
Next, dive into your competitors’ content and social media strategy:
– What types of content do they produce – blogs, videos, ebooks etc?
– How often do they publish new content?
– What topics/keywords are they targeting with content?
– How well is their content optimized for SEO?
– What engagement do they get on social media?
This bird’s eye view of their content and social activity will reveal where there are gaps or areas you can improve in your own SEO strategy for your business. Analyse overall content marketing strategy. Because, SEO is all about content and links.
5.Check Out Their Search Visibility
Now it’s time to see how your competitors stack up in terms of search visibility. Use a tool like SEMRush to compare their organic rankings vs. your own site. Personally, I use Ubersuggest tool to understand the keywords which I do not rank and competitors are ranking for.
Look for keyword opportunities where competitors rank highly but you still have room to climb the SERPs. Identify areas where you can realistically overtake competitors by further optimizing targeted pages/content.
6.Monitor Their Site Changes
Your competitor analysis isn’t a one-and-done project. You’ll want to regularly monitor their websites for changes that could impact your own approach.
Set up Google Alerts to receive notifications anytime competitors appear in search results. Check their sites every month or two for updates.
See if they’ve launched a new content section, started ranking for new terms, gotten links from an influential site, ramped up their social media activity or made big technical changes.
Staying on top of their evolutions allows you to continually adapt and improve your SEO game. Few SEO tools have site changes feature where SEO tool checks your competitor pages and website and notifies you whenever competitor updates their content.
Gain Your Competitive Edge
That sums up my in-depth blog on how to do SEO competitor analysis.
Remember to analyze competitors of all shapes and sizes across multiple sources and metrics. Make it an ongoing process – insights from today will inform your future optimization strategy.
Hope this guide gives you a head start on unlocking greater SEO potential. Feel free to reach out with any other digital marketing or SEO questions!
I will be launching SEO training course soon where I teach practical SEO in live classes. You can hire me for SEO services such as SEO consultation or for your SEO projects.
