Competitive Analysis of SEO: The Ultimate Guide
There is no denying the fact that competition is one of the healthiest parts of every industry. Also, Google has completely changed how marketers are thinking currently, as stated by https://time.com. Competition is capable of:
- Preventing complacency.
- Encourages innovation.
- Forces businesses to perform much better.
Determining how you can understand your competitors is also crucial. It is important to identify the top competitors, understand why they can outrank you so easily and explore the things that you can do to control this. Given below is a list of tips that you should follow if you are interested in understanding your competitors and why they are moving ahead of you.
Identify the competitors
You already know the big players present within your industry but you should be capable of naming the SEO rivals. You have to understand that the big players are not going to be the same as the SEO rivals. You can have more than one SEO competitor, who is responsible for existing outside your niche and you also have to compete with them to make sure that you have the top rank within the search engine. For instance, a bakery in New York City can try to rank for important keywords like, “best bread in New York”. This bakery has to compete with several other bakeries to make sure that the first result is reserved. However, if this bakery is also trying to rank for a blog, it is going to compete with huge publishing giants as well.
If you are operating in several niches, you might have a huge list of competitors for all the services that you are offering. However, it is not so easy to find out your competitors. Make sure that you are using proper tools to make the job easy. Pay attention to those competitors who are occupying the local packs and it is your responsibility to make sure that you are competing for that coveted spot as well.
Evaluate the difficulty level of the keywords
Before you are analyzing certain strategies of link building or on-page search engine optimization, it is a great idea to assess the SEO competitors and understand their strength. You can indeed beat the competitors theoretically, however, the resources that it is going to take is going to make it impossible. Make sure that you are using the competitor analysis tools for looking at the complete domain strength of your competitors. You need to concentrate on analyzing factors that include:
- Domain authority
- Domain age and country
- Social signals
- Indexing within search engines
- Catalog listings
- Alexa rank
- Backlink data
- Traffic volumes
Write all the important information down and try to spot any weakness, which can be advantageous for your business. If you find that the difficulty of any target competitor is high, you have to understand that their SEO is also strong and it is going to be hard to outrank them. Therefore, you need to concentrate on competitors that have lower overall ranking scores for popular niche keywords.
Look for new opportunities of keywords
One of the most useful methods for enriching the existing content with great keywords is the term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis. This is something that all the competitors are constantly using and optimizing the pages for their search engines. They also use this technique for discovering the low competition keywords, which you may have missed out. This method is the perfect measurement of how keywords appear on a particular page multiplied by the number of times the keyword is supposed to appear on that page.
When you are analyzing this, you will be able to discover the top-ranking pages, for all the target keywords, and find out that many competitors share similar phrases and terms. If you are not targeting these terms, you have to consider adding them to the applicable pages or you can also create new content for boosting relevance within semantic search. This concept is undoubtedly complicated and you should have proper knowledge about this.
Analyze on-site content and on-page optimization
You should make use of your analysis tool for analyzing the onsite SEO of the competitors. You are going to learn how often your competitors are publishing content, what are the kinds of content that they are publishing, and what are the keywords that they are going to target. You need to ensure that you are paying attention to:
- Metadata
- Headline strategies like the length of the title, keywords within the title, appropriate title tags, etc.
- Make sure that you are trying to understand the strategies of internal linking that they have as well. When you are analyzing content, you should track:
- Topical relevance
- The types of content as well as media that your competitors are creating
- Word count or video length
- Depth of all the details covered
When Google bots will start checking your website, these are going to play an important role.
Dig into the backlink profiles of the competitors
An important part of the competitive analysis is to understand where the rivals are earning the backlinks from. You should use that particular information for building high-quality links for your website. Dissecting the link profiles of your opponents is undoubtedly an amazing way of finding link opportunities. For this step, you have to consider a great SEO tool, because it is impossible to pull this off manually. To receive help regarding this, you can consider taking help from the professionals of the SEO Company Toronto.
Examine the site structure and user interface
You need to know that Google is constantly focusing on improving the experience of the users. All the algorithm changes that you have spotted in the last few years are focused on user experience, like faster pages, improved search results, and better mobile experiences. If your site is slow, confusing, and unresponsive in comparison to your competitor site, you need to:
- Optimize the sitemap for improved crawlability.
- Prioritize optimization of page speed.
- Ensure that all the elements of the website are being built with the intent of the searcher on your mind.
You should also make sure that you are looking at the landing pages of your competitors:
- Analyze the click depth.
- Understand whether they have orphan pages.
- Click the PageRank distribution.
Conclusion
As soon as you are done with competitive analysis, you need to make sure that you are making tiny improvements constantly. Make sure that you are keeping a tab on all your competitors and monitoring the rankings. With time, your effort is going to pay off and your position will be improved.