Competitor Analysis: “How To” Guide for Replicating & Beating Competitors at SEO

If you’re developing a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you’ve likely learned one of the hardest aspects of making a campaign successful: dealing with the competition.

That’s where an appropriate SEO competitor analysis comes in.

In its simplest form, a competitor analysis will help you:

• Understand the winners and losers in your industry and what separates the two
• Understand your weaknesses, compared to competitors
• Capitalize on the strength of your competition by replicating their strategies
• Prioritize your own internal SEO process for maximizing ROI

While the analysis itself is only the beginning (you may have a great deal of catching up to do with your competitors), the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

Get walking!

What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?

An SEO competitor analysis can take a few different forms, but the basic idea is the same. You’ll identify and study the companies and individuals most likely to compete with your business in search engine results pages (SERPs), learning not only how they’re performing, but which tactics they’re currently using.

Much more than a complete analysis of the business itself, a competitor analysis focuses on all aspects of SEO and online marketing.

Why Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis?

What’s the point?

It’s not just to satisfy your curiosity. Analyzing your competition will help your SEO campaign in several ways:

• A better understanding of your competition. First, you’ll have a better general understanding of your competition. How big of a threat are they? Which demographics are they targeting? What seem to be their greatest strengths and weaknesses as a business? You can use this information in your brand strategy, product development, and when developing long-term strategic goals.
• Keyword strengths. Looking closer at SEO, an SEO competitor analysis can help you identify the keywords strongly targeted by your top competitors. In other words, which keywords and phrases seem to be dominated by your competitors? In many cases, you’ll want to avoid these, but if you see a promising opportunity, you may be able to usurp their position.

• Keyword weaknesses. More interestingly, you’ll be able to see highly relevant keywords and phrases for which your competitors aren’t ranking. These are perfect opportunities for you to swoop in and rank quickly, without expending many resources in the process.
• Link profile strengths. Similarly, you’re going to learn the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ backlink profiles. Link building is an important element of SEO, and having a diversity of strong, unique links can make you practically unstoppable. So where are your competitors getting their best links? There’s a good chance you can capitalize on the same resources and linking opportunities.
• Link profile weaknesses. You can also see where your competitors’ link building strategies are failing. Which types of sources haven’t they used? Which links or link building mistakes seem to be weighing them down?

You’ll bring all these pieces of information together to choose new strategic targets, and tweak your execution.

Step One: Identify Your Competitors

Before you can analyze your competitors, you need to know who your competitors are. In this phase, you’ll create a definitive list of your top competitors. Make sure you identify at least one or two; if you’re looking for something more exhaustive, you may look at five or more competitors.

You can start this step with some simple brainstorming. What are some of the most prominent companies that operate in the same space as you? Who do you initially consider to be your biggest competition?

From there, you can conduct a handful of searches for keywords related to your business. For example, you might search for something like “cloud storage services” or “law firms in Kentucky.” When you search for multiple related terms, which brands and websites seem to appear most frequently?

You can also add new competitors to your analysis in the future; for now, jot down the competitors who present the biggest threat to your online visibility.

Step Two: Analyze Competitor Keywords

This step and the next several steps can be completed in any order, realistically. But for our purposes, we’re going to look at keywords next.

For each competitor, you’re going to break down the current keywords they’re targeting, the keywords and phrases for which they’re currently ranking, and more.

You can try to do this manually, but it’s much easier to use a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs. Most tools, including these, allow you to gain access to a limited amount of information for free; you may have to sign up for a free account and/or begin a free trial. After that, you’ll need to pay for their services.

If you’re doing a preliminary competitive analysis, or making a one-time research effort, the free option should be sufficient.

Most platforms work similarly, but we’ll look at SEMRush as an example for how to conduct a competitive keyword analysis. You’ll start by entering your competitor’s domain, or a specific page you want to know more about.

From there, you’ll be able to open the “Organic Research” tab on the left, and click on Positions. There, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of which keywords and keyword phrases this domain is currently ranking for. You’ll also be able to see specific metrics, like their exact current position, the typical search volume for the term, and the cost per click (CPC) associated with the term.

Additionally, you’ll want to look at “Position Changes.” Here, you’ll be able to see major changes in your competitors’ strategies; for example, if you see fast ranking growth within a specific family of keywords, there’s a good chance they’re targeting those keywords in their latest push. If their rankings for a different family of keywords seems to be falling, they may be moving away from them.

Take note of both general trends and outliers:

• Which keywords are dominated by your competitors?
• Which keywords and phrases seem to be missing?
• What kind of momentum is each competitor seeing, and where are they seeing it?
• Which unusual keywords or types of momentum do you notice?

Note that most keyword research tools also have a built-in competitive analysis tool. Here, you can enter your own domain and generate a list of competitors and keywords they’re ranking for, as generated by the tool itself. Don’t exclusively depend on this, but feel free to use it as a complement to your own independent efforts.

Step Three: Read Their Content

By now, you should know that content is the heart of any SEO strategy.

It serves several distinct purposes; it provides you a medium for including keywords on your site, it improves your authority, it helps you earn and build links, and it even influences your onsite user behavior. Accordingly, there are both objective and subjective variables to consider.

We’ve already taken a look at one objective factor (keywords) and will look at links (which are related to content) in step five. In the meantime, let’s do a subjective competitive analysis of your competitors’ content.

The best way to start is to read your competitor’s blog, and see what kind of offsite content they’re promoting. Ask yourself:

• What kinds of topics are they covering?
• How long are their posts?
• What kind of mediums are they using?
• Which keywords seem to be most prevalent? This is especially important, now that you know which keywords they’re ranking for.
• What kind of keyword density are they using?
• What external links are they including?
• What cadence are they using for internal link building? What anchor text are they using for their internal links. This will show you what keywords they are attempting to rank for.
• What kind of comments and shares are these posts receiving?

If you want to take a deeper dive, you can use a tool like BuzzSumo to conduct a search on a specific domain. You’ll be able to review a wide range of content, analyzing it in terms of social media performance, number of links, and a “total engagement” score that attempts to estimate its overall performance.

There’s a lot you can learn here, and not just for your SEO strategy; what success factors can you attempt to replicate for your own campaign? What weaknesses do you see? If you want to get really technical, you can perform a complete content audit on your most successful competitors.

Step Four: Analyze Their Social Media Presence

Social media doesn’t have much of a direct effect on your SEO success, but it plays a powerful secondary role in promoting your content, earning you links, and generally improving your brand presence.

None of them will have the following of Justin Bieber:

But, it’s still worth competitively analyzing.

Again, the best place to start is at the source. Ask yourself:

• Which social media channels are they using?
• How often are they posting?
• What kind of comments and engagements are they receiving?
• How much value does this add to their core content?

You can use BuzzSumo’s Facebook profile analyzer to get more details, or another tool to get an objective rundown of their social media accounts.

Step Five: Study Their Backlink Profile

This is arguably the most important step of your competitive analysis, and in many ways, the most exhaustive. This is because link building is the crux of any SEO strategy; without links, it’s nearly impossible to improve your domain authority.

Essentially, you’ll be performing a complete backlink profile analysis on each of your competitors. To do this, you’ll need the help of a tool. We like to use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Moz’s Link Explorer, but there are many backlink analysis tools that function similarly.

With both Keywords Explorer and Link Explorer, you’ll get a ton of information about each domain you enter. You’ll learn its domain authority, number of linking domains, number of inbound links, and top ranking keywords. You’ll also be able to do a deep dive to study the individual links pointed to the domain, and export data to perform more exhaustive analyses.

I actually like to build a keyword matrix like this:

A keyword matrix can help you really understand and execute on a strategy. It’s one thing to know your competitors and know your keywords. It’s quite another to know how to use that data to beat them.

A keyword matrix maps your competitors, their keywords (and the relative difficulty of the keywords) juxtaposed against your landing pages you want to rank, particularly for local SEO. This will provide you with more of an action plan on anchor text, landing pages and an overall SEO link building strategy.

Ultimately, you’ll want to answer these questions:

• How many links do they have? The sheer number of links pointing to the site can tell you a lot about how active this competitor is.
• Which sources are they using? Pay attention to the number of linking domains? Which powerful domains seem to be conferring the greatest authority? Which ones are they utilizing over and over? These could be potentially powerful sources in your own campaign.
• What is their homepage to internal link ratio? Homepage SEO and backlinks are often more powerful for building authority, but internal links are easier to build, while offering more relevance. What does their ratio look like?
• How many follow and nofollow links do they have? Similarly, you’ll want to see how many standard links they have, compared to their nofollow links.
• What kind of anchor text are they using? Anchor text often includes keywords and phrases, but may also be purely natural. Learn from their choice in tactics.
• Are there broken links? If you find a broken link, you’ll have a critical opportunity to volunteer a replacement link to the publisher—one that points to your own site. Read more about broken link-related SEO tactics here.
• Are they using redirects? Redirects can tell you more about their backlink infrastructure.
• Do you notice anything suspicious? In some cases, you may notice unusual linking activity. For example, you may notice a very high domain authority score with a dearth of links to support it; if this is the case, it could be a sign that your competitor is “hiding” their links by limiting crawling in a PBN. You can learn more about PBNs here.
• How quickly did they build their links? In other words, what is their link velocity? What is the breakdown of dofollow vs. nofollow links, domain authority and TLD extension share?
• How long did their backlink strategies take to start working? Did it take 6 months? 6 years? If you could replicate their strategy, how long might you expect it to take to rank? 

During your analysis, remember that correlation doesn’t equal causation; just because your competitor is using a specific tactic and doing well doesn’t mean that tactic is responsible for their success. In many cases, you’ll find a competitor using a wide variety of different strategies, some of which are questionable and some of which are objectionable; consider many factors when forming your conclusions.

SEO Competitor Analysis: What Now?

At this point, you’ll have a ton of data about your competitors’ SEO strategies, including the tactics that are working and the ones that are failing. What are you supposed to do with this information?

There are several possibilities:

• Mirroring. If a competitor is using an effective strategy, why not try to use it for yourself? That’s the philosophy behind mirroring. This doesn’t always work for keyword targeting or content development; if you try to employ the same tactics here, you’ll encounter more competitive pressure. However, mirroring is exceptionally effective with regard to link building. If your competitor is attracting lots of links from high-profile sources, it probably means those same sources will be willing to link to you. You work in the same industry, so if your content is good enough, these could represent great additions to your backlink profile.
• Low-competition keyword targeting. It’s not impossible to challenge a competitor for dominance over a keyword when they already have a reinforced position. However, if you want faster, less effort-demanding results, it’s better to seek keywords that are both relevant to your brand and less contested. An SEO competitive analysis will introduce you to the keywords that your competitors aren’t ranking for, so you can take them for your own use.
• Brainstorming. There’s a kind of subjective art to SEO. While crunching numbers and mathematically planning different tactics are reliable strategies, it’s also important to occasionally take a step back and think about the qualitative features of your work. For example, how can you make your content “better?” How can you elicit more positive responses from your readers and fans? Competitive research gives you an excellent jumping-off point for your consideration.

Conclusion

SEO competitor analyses can help you better understand your competition in the realm of SEO, and work actively to either avoid or directly challenge those competitors. It’s not a one-time strategy; it’s an analysis you’ll want to conduct periodically as you learn more about SEO and adjust your campaign. But once you’ve got some competitive information in your analysis, you’ll be much better equipped to dominate the SERPs, outranking even the biggest websites.

If you need help with your SEO competition analysis, or if you’re in the market for a link building company or SEO company, contact SEO.co for a free consultation today!

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Sam Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at SEO.co

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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