A lot of businesses find SEO traffic to be one of the most profitable traffic. This makes a lot of sense because if someone’s searching for exactly what is that you offer, then the likelihood is they have some commercial intent.
What is SEO Competitive Analysis?
SEO competitive analysis is the process of finding the strengths and weaknesses of you and your competitors’ SEO.
More like a typical competitive analysis, you’re working to find any gaps between you and your competitor. But instead of focusing on marketing strategy, you’ll aim on SEO strategy.
A competitor analysis will help you:
- Measure your present SEO performance
- Find areas of improvement in your SEO strategy
- Disclose any competitor gaps or weaknesses
- Find your competitors’ winning strategies
Here are simple steps for the SEO competitor analysis process that you can use to crush your competitors into the ground and get all of the traffic.
01Identify Your SEO Competitors
Your main SEO competitors are the ones who rank on the first search page of the keywords you’re targeting, disregarding whether they’re your business competitors.
If you function in different niches, you might even have distinct lists of competitors for each service you provide with little to no overlap between them.
Fortunately, discovering who your competitors are is as simple as getting your top keywords into Google and writing down the domains of your main competitors (or entering your keywords into your competitor analysis tool and letting it do all of the heavy lifting for you).
It’s in your best interest to monitor the SERP landscape you’re entering into even if you’re using a tool.
02Conduct Page Analysis
The next process to do competitive analysis is to look at a competing website and its well performing pages. What keywords are these pages utilising and how was it used in their content?
This is known as keyword gap analysis. This is the process of your competitor’s SEO analysis where you discover keywords on a competitor’s site that they are ranking for and your site is not. The Ahrefs competitor analysis tool has a special feature called Content Gap to find keywords that rank for particular domains you specify. Here’s what it looks like:
When you exhibit appropriate keywords that also apply to your business, you can then develop a page dedicated to ranking these keywords. When this takes place, you have the chance to lead customers to your site rather than competition.
03Evaluate Keyword Difficulty
It is always good to evaluate the strength of your SEO competitors, before you start analysing specific link-building strategies or on-page SEO.
Although you can theoretically defeat any competitor in any niche and for any keyword, the number of resources it would take for some keywords renders them unfeasible.
Make use of your competitor analysis tool to look at your competitors’ total domain strength and then check specific factors, like:
- Domain authority.
- Indexing in search engines.
- Domain country and age.
- Catalogue listings.
- Alexa rank.
- Backlink data.
- Traffic volumes.
- Social signals.
Aim on competitors with lower overall scores ranking better for niche keywords.
The next step is to use this data to develop an SEO competitor analysis report. Depending on the report, you can create your SEO content strategy. To begin developing your content plan, make a keyword list or a content ideas list and save it in a simple spreadsheet or use a tool like Ahrefs or any other tools.
04Track Your Progress
When you have published new content or re-optimized old ones, you will have to track their performance. Frequent keyword audits must be done and competitor analysis SEO reports generated to find whether or not your competitive analysis strategy worked. You can use any free SEO tool for this.
05Try To Track Competitor Ad Spend
After doing everything you can to optimise your website but you’re still getting beat in the SERPs, it’s possible that your competitors are just outspending you and using paid traffic campaigns to generate conversions and sales.
06 Wrapping up
Technically a competitive analysis will never be complete, whether it is watching for new pages, new keywords, or a rise in search features such as featured snippets. As sites change and search results transform, keeping up with your competitor’s means you will surely stay one step ahead of them.
