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 search engines optimization (SEO) competitor analysis comes in.
In its simplest form, a competitor analysis will help you:
While the analysis itself is only the beginning (you may have a great deal of catching up to do with your direct competitors), the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with a single step.
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 and email marketing.
Analyzing your competition will help your SEO campaign in several ways:
You’ll bring all these pieces of information together to choose new strategic targets, and tweak your execution.
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 in depth.
What are some of the most prominent companies that operate in the same space as you?
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.”
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.
For each competitor, you’re going to break down the current keywords they’re targeting for their target audience, the keywords and phrases for which they’re currently ranking, in search engine rankings and more.
You can try to do this manually, but it’s much easier to use a keyword research tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs (or the complete list we’ve outlined below).
Most SEO 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 begin a free trial.
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.
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 or search traffic 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.
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.
By now, you should know that content is the heart of any SEO strategy.
It serves several distinct purposes; it provides you with 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 behaviour.
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.
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 platforms performance, number of links, and a “total engagement” score that attempts to estimate its overall performance.
If you want to get really technical, you can perform a complete content audit on your most successful competitors.
Social media platforms 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.
But, it’s still worth competitively analyzing.
Again, the best place to start is at the source. Ask yourself:
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.
This is arguably the most important step of your competitor analysis, and in many ways, the most exhaustive. This is because inbound links are still 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.
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, organic keywords 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.
A keyword matrix can help you really understand and execute on a strategy. It’s one thing to know your competitors and knows your keyword difficulty. 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 keyword difficulty) juxtaposed against your landing pages you want to rank, particularly for local SEO.
This will provide you with more of a strategic planning on anchor text, landing pages and an overall SEO link building strategy.
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 business strategy, some of which are questionable and some of which are objectionable; consider many factors when forming your conclusions.
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?
SEO competitor analysis software tools are essential for companies and businesses looking to identify their position in the market, gain insights into the competition, and develop effective strategies for success.
By analyzing the dominant players in your industry, you can gain invaluable insight into their marketing strategies, SEO efforts, keyword targeting, content topics and more.
SEMrush provides an extensive range of features to help companies identify their position in the market, gain insights into their competitors and develop effective strategies for success.
With SEMrush, you can track your competitors’ organic and paid search performance through detailed and comprehensive keyword lookups, monitor their backlinks, and research their content, digital marketing strategy vis-a-vis top competitors.
Ahrefs is another popular tool for SEOs. It allows you to research your competitors’ organic rankings, analyze their backlinks and keyword targeting, and monitor their social media activities. Ahrefs also provides comprehensive competitive data that includes traffic sources, current ranking keywords and referring domains.
Moz Pro is a comprehensive suite of SEO tools that help you identify your competitors, measure their performance and develop strategies to outperform them. With Moz Pro, you can track keyword rankings, analyze links, research content topics and keep an eye on competitor campaigns and customers.
SpyFu is a powerful tool for SEO competitor analysis. It helps you gain insights into your competitors’ organic and paid SERP results, monitor their backlinks and research areas of opportunity that can be leveraged to improve your own performance. In addition, SpyFu offers an extensive range of features for keyword analysis.
KWFinder, built by Mangools, can help businesses gain insights into the competition and develop effective strategies for success. It offers a comprehensive set of features to track competitors’ organic and paid search rankings, analyze their backlinks and keyword targeting, research content topics, and monitor their social media activities.
Serpstat offers an extensive range of features to help businesses identify their position in the market, gain insights into their competitors and develop effective strategies for success.
With Serpstat, businesses can track their competitors’ organic and paid search rankings in order to gain insights into their strategies. By analyzing backlinks and keyword targeting, Serpstat enables users to identify areas of opportunity that can be leveraged to improve their own performance. For example, by examining the keywords their competitors are targeting, businesses can gain an edge by targeting keywords their competition hasn’t yet discovered.
Keywords Everywhere is a powerful SEO resource & tool that enables businesses to gain insights into their competitors’ search engine optimization and content or digital marketing strategies. It offers an extensive range of tracking features. With Keywords Everywhere, users can quickly uncover the keywords their competitors are targeting, identify areas of opportunity they may have missed, and develop strategies to outperform them.
Ubersuggest, a Neil Patel software product, offers an extensive range of features to help businesses identify areas of opportunity they may have missed and develop effective strategies for success.
The competitive analysis features of Ubersuggest include keyword rankings analysis, and tracking, as well as backlink monitoring. It also offers an in-depth analysis of competitors’ organic rankings, allowing businesses to gain insights into their performance and identify areas they may be able to exploit.
By leveraging the features of Ubersuggest, businesses can gain an edge against their competition by identifying new keyword opportunities, analyzing backlinks and properly targeting their content. With this valuable information, businesses can develop effective strategies that improve their performance and help them outpace their competitors.
RankRanger, by SimilarWeb, is an all-in-one SEO competitive analysis software tool that enables businesses to gain valuable insights into their competitors’ SEO and content marketing strategies. It offers a comprehensive set of features to help businesses identify areas of opportunity they may have missed, develop effective strategies for success, and track results. With RankRanger, users can track their competitors’ organic and paid rank, analyze backlinks, research content topics, and monitor keyword performance. It also provides detailed reports on competitors’ strategies, such as their top-performing keywords, pages, and landing pages.
SearchMetrics is a comprehensive SEO analysis software product that provides businesses with invaluable insights into their competitors’ organic optimization and content marketing strategies. It offers an extensive range of features to help businesses identify areas of opportunity they may have missed, develop effective strategies for success, and track their results in order to optimize their performance.
SearchMetrics offers a wide variety of features for keyword research, analysis, and tracking. It also provides an in-depth analysis of competitors’ organic rankings and backlinks. In addition, it provides detailed reports on competitor’s strategies, such as their top-performing keywords and pages.
By using the tools mentioned above, businesses can quickly uncover their competitors’ strategies and develop effective strategies to outpace them. These powerful tools offer comprehensive features that enable businesses to monitor their competitors’ actions, identify areas of opportunity, research content topics and track results in order to develop strategies that improve their performance and increase their visibility.
SEO competitor analysis 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 Technical SEO competitor analysis, you’ll be much better equipped with key technical SEO elements for getting competitive edge & specific keywords to dominate the SERPs, outranking even the biggest websites in search results.
If you need help with your SEO competition analysis, email marketing or if you’re in the market for a link building company or SEO company, contact SEO.co for a free consultation today!