Have you noticed that you wrote an amazing content still your content is not ranking well in Google? But, your competitor’s content is ranking in SERP. Its time to do competitors SEO analysis.
This article is going to guide you through the process of finding what is working well for your competitors. Competitors SEO analysis helps you find the opportunity for your business.
What is SEO competitor analysis?
Competitor analysis is an activity that is done to find out our main SEO competitors and to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors.
If you have a new business or if you are thinking about setting up a new business, then this activity is crucial for you.
Our competitors are not less than a treasure for us. They have already done the hectic and tedious task. Therefore, you don’t have to do it again.
Competitor analysis is imperative for the following reasons
- You find out who are your main SEO competitors.
- You want to know what is working out for them and what is not working out for them as well.
- What is their SEO strategy?
- Keywords on which they are ranking. You have to incorporate those keywords on your site as well.
- The sites from which they are generating high-quality backlinks? You can also generate backlinks from the same domain for your site as well.
- It will work as a guide for you.
- You will get to know the factors you have to focus on, and what are the things that you may need to avoid.
- Learn from their past mistakes and failures.
It will give you a brief idea. The competitor analysis will help you to formulate plans and strategies for your site accordingly.
So, now you are clear about what is competitor analysis, and why we do competitor analysis.
Now the next thing that comes to the mind is, how to do competitor analysis? We have to do it manually or is there any tool that can help you to do this task?
Let me clear this thing to you, SEO competitor analysis is incomplete without using any tool.
Let’s talk about tools first.
Tools for competitor analysis
There are multiple tools available which you can look for.
Some top industry tools are: –
All these tools are great tools.
There are some free tools available in the market, but I will suggest you to go for a paid one.
Paid tools will get you quality information, and that’s what you are looking for. Right?
Now the next big question arises, how to do competitor analysis. Here I will explain you the process to do the competitors SEO analysis.
How to do SEO competitor analysis?
#1 Identify Competitors
The first common way to identify your competitors is to put your seed keywords (main keywords) in google search, your top competitors will be the ones that will rank on the first page of the search engine result page. Therefore, the top search results will be your top competitors.
For example- Suppose you have a Digital Marketing Agency, so for you, your main keywords will be – Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing.
Hence, you will put these seed keywords in google search, and the results that you will get will be your top competitors.
The second way to identify your competitors is to use any tool like Ahrefs.
Note: One tool will give you enough information that you will be needed. You don’t have to use each and every tool.
These tools will generate you an absolute report of your top competitors.
This report will give you information such as- The keywords on which your top competitors are ranking for, the sites from which they are generating high-quality backlinks, and all the additional information that you may need.
This report will help you to take action and formulate a plan accordingly. This report is definitely a goldmine for you. Use this information wisely.
I firmly believe any data is in itself a treasure.
If you don’t want to pay for any tool, then you can simply go for organic search that I have discussed earlier in the first step.
This way you can easily identify your top competitors in your industry.
#2 Identify competitors top ranking keywords for SEO
Tools will generate a list of keywords that your particular competitor is using. I have used Neil Patel’s tool for this.
From this report, you can easily mind map which are those keywords which you might want to incorporate on your site as well and what you need to avoid.
Suppose, if a keyword is generating enough traffic for your competitor, then you might want to go with that keyword for SEO.
If my competitor is ranking on that keyword, that means that keyword is highly dominant. And, I can also rank for that particular keyword.
I will list down all the high traffic keywords of my top competitors and therefore, I will start incorporating all such keywords on my site as well, because these are the keywords that whenever a user will enter it in the search engine, I want to showcase my site to him.
This whole process is known as Keyword Research.
This is one of the crucial aspects of doing Competitor Research.
#3 Identify competitors SEO backlinks
Now here comes the biggest reason why you perform competitor analysis. Building high-quality backlinks are always the biggest SEO activity for any business.
The authority of your site mostly depends upon the quality of your backlinks. The more the high-quality backlinks, the more will be your authority, and the higher you will rank in the organic search.
Identifying and analyzing competitor’s backlinks becomes more significant here.
Again, you can use any tool to perform this activity.
Our objective behind this activity?
Yes, this question might strike in your mind before doing backlink analysis, and it is ok to think so.
The reasons why we do backlink analysis of our competitors because
- We want to know where they are generating high-quality backlinks. Which are those sites?
- Can I approach those sites as well to build backlinks for my site?
- How many backlinks they are generating on a monthly basis.
- How many sites are linking back to them?
- How many new referring domains are linking to them?
- Which site is linking back again and again to them? Hopefully, that site might also generate a number of backlinks for my site as well.
Note: – Don’t build a backlink from the same site, again, and again, google might consider you as spammy, and google might impose a penalty on you. So, try to go for new referring domains.
So, any tool you are using will generate you a backlink report of your top competitors. Monitor this data keenly. Evaluate and examine this report very closely. It can turn out to be of the utmost benefit for your business. So, make the most of it.
#4 Analyze broken pages and content gaps
a) Find out all the broken pages on your competitor’s website. Every big site might have some broken pages.
We have to identify those broken pages. Write better content for such pages, and at last, ask our competitor if he can swap that dead page with our page.
b) Content gaps are the keywords on which most of our competitors are ranking, but we are missing out on the opportunity. These are probably the high traffic keywords or the most common keywords in our industry.
We have to evaluate all those content gaps and start using them on our site as well because we don’t want to lag behind from our competitors.
#5 Analyze the traffic country-wise
The tool which you used in backlink analysis, will help you in traffic analysis as well.
You can easily determine which country or which particular state is generating most of the traffic for your particular competitor.
It will give you a complete traffic percentage report that will help you to determine which country is generating the most traffic.
We have to primarily focus on such countries and states more because these are the places where I can generate traffic for my site as well.
You can consider such places as the watering hole to bring out the relevant traffic on your website.
#6 Identify most popular & linked content
By this we mean, determine the most popular and most backlinks generated content on your competitor’s site.
Firstly, you have to analyze that content closely.
Secondly, write 5 times better content than that. Want to know why we do that? I’ll tell you why.
If that content is able to generate hundreds or sometimes thousands of high-quality backlinks. Then my content which is 5 times better than that, then it can surely generate an ‘N’ number of backlinks for my site, where ‘N’ is any number that you can expect.
This is the whole logic of doing this thing. It is a time-consuming activity, but it may generate you some high-quality backlinks. That’s the whole point.
This is often called the Sky-Scrapper link building technique.
Conclusion
Competition analysis is the most fruitful activity in terms of SEO. While doing competition research you should mainly focus on two things: –
- Keywords your competitors are using for ranking and driving traffic to their website.
- Which are those sites from which your competitors are getting high-quality backlinks?
This is all about Competition Analysis in SEO.
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