If you’ve ever wondered why those pesky competitors continue to show up higher than you on Google’s search results despite your SEO efforts, it might be time to roll up your sleeves and delve deep into a competitor analysis.
Why do a competitor analysis?
First of all, you might be thinking, what’s the point in analysing competitors’ SEO when you really want to focus on how your website is ranking and what needs improving. Whilst we don’t want to copy what our competitors do, carrying out an analysis of the SEO they are doing can highlight areas we may have missed and identify opportunities we can take advantage of to further improve our own efforts.
A competitor analysis becomes even more important if you’re in a competitive industry or if there are keywords you’re struggling to rank for and feel like you’ve tried everything. A competitor analysis could shed some light on where you might be going wrong.
Where to start
The key thing you need to get right before starting any analysis, is to identify who your competitors are. A simple way to do this would be to type into Google your keywords and see who comes up above you. The problem with using this technique is it becomes time consuming to do this for all your keywords. To accurately find your true competitors, you’ll need to record your findings somehow and analyse who consistently outranks you. This can become cumbersome over time, so we’d recommend finding an alternative.
There are lots of SEO tools out there that will do this analysis for you. They’ll be able to identify which websites are ranking for your keywords based on data from thousands of searches from across the globe. Whilst SEO tools are very rarely free, they’ll save you a huge amount of time.
We like SEMrush.com.
What should you include?
It makes sense to analyse where your competitors rank for your chosen keywords compared to where you rank. However, this will only give you a snapshot of the competition and it won’t tell you why they perform so well, so we’ll need to dig a little deeper into what they’re doing well.
Keywords
A competitive keyword analysis will help you identify keywords and phrases that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. There could be keywords you haven’t thought about and variations of your current keywords that could be responsible for driving traffic to your competitors’ websites, but you’re missing out on.
Doing this manually becomes a laborious task, so utilise one of the SEO tools out there such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
Links
A competitive link analysis will help you identify how many backlinks your competitors have and, more importantly, where they’re getting them from. The aim here isn’t to copy your competitors’ backlink profile as they may not be getting links from ethical sources. The aim, instead, is to assess the links they do have for quality, relevancy and authority. Identifying links that your competitors have acquired can provide a useful list of target sites for you to acquire links from.
Backlink tools are abundant, so pick one that gives you the best results. Try SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz’s Link Explorer.
Content
A competitive content analysis will help you identify your competitors’ overall content strategy. Using the right tools, you can identify the top pages that rank for your competitors and the top pages that attract the most links.
The objective here, is not to duplicate your competitor’s content; it’s to take their content and add your own spin on it and make it 10 x better. If you really want to outrank your competitors, you need to be thinking about quality when it comes to content. Don’t just write a blog post, write the best blog post you can by doing more research, finding relevant examples and adding better visuals.
An SEO competitor analysis is a time consuming job to do well. It’s something you’ll want to dedicate a good proportion of your SEO activity to in order to find new opportunities to rank better and for more keywords. It’s not a quick fix solution to all your rankings woes, but if done consistently, over time, you should start to reap the rewards.
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