Did you know that carrying out a robust competitor analysis is crucial if you want to rank your website at the top of the search results? At its foundation, an SEO competitor analysis is basically researching the competitor websites’ SEO practices. Alongside this, the outcomes of those websites need to be analyzed so as to gather insights that can help you improve your results as well.
In the SEO field, your competitors are those websites that will show up higher on the search engine results page(SERP) for your niche-specific search engine queries. The higher SERP positions occupied by your competitors can take your target audience away and can lead to the decline of your online business. That’s more of the reason why you need to carry out the right type of competitor analysis for your website’s growth.
In this blog post, you’ll learn about how you can analyze your competitors and use the generated insights to your advantage. So, let’s begin by first understanding the importance of SEO competitor analysis.
What is the Importance of SEO Competitor Analysis?
You would be surprised to know that carrying out an SEO competitor analysis can help in generating several insights. These helpful insights can help in outranking the competitor websites across different search engines.
Particularly, analyzing the competitor websites can help you in:-
- Finding out the right type of SEO strategies and replicating them for your own website.
- Knowing about the SEO weaknesses of your competitors and doubling down on them.
- Analyzing the current SEO performance and measuring the extent to which your website’s SEO performance changes.
By carrying out a foolproof SEO competitor analysis, you’re bound to improve your brand awareness, get a lot more traffic, and even boost your overall market share.
How Can You Carry Out an SEO Competitor Analysis?
You need to carry out an SEO competitor analysis every 3 to 6 months. It will help you in identifying the changes in your niche and tweaking your strategy.
You should also analyze your competitors’ SEO practices before you venture out and launch new products or services. It can help you a lot in understanding the market you want to enter. In case the SERP rankings decline, you’ll be able to get a much better understanding of the potential issues.
To carry out a robust SEO competitor analysis, you need to do the following:-
Know About Your SEO Competitors
When it comes to finding out your SEO competitors, you must search for your target keywords in Google. In this way, you’ll know the websites you’re competing against on the SERP.
You need to understand that the SEO competitors may not be your business competitors. For example, an industry portal might not provide the same products or services to your target audience. However, it surely has the potential to snatch your search traffic away from your site. So, you may lose your potential leads that might have converted into paying customers.
Identify the Keyword Gaps
Keyword gaps are nothing but those keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t. Just by filling these keyword gaps, you can get a lot more traffic to your site.
You should look for relevant keywords that have great potential and target them, along with saving them for future use. Afterwards, you can craft a plan to target those keywords.
Know About the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Competitors
By finding out the sitewide strengths and weaknesses, you can direct your SEO efforts in the right direction.
To know about the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you need to check out your competitors’ content performance and technical SEO health.
Content Performance
Check out the content performance of your competitors to know what’s working for them. Then, the next step can be to replicate what they’re doing best.
In this analyzing stage, you can find out the content pieces which are attracting a variety of comments on their website. You can even attract a great amount of engagement on social media.
Try to find out the patterns in your competitors’ top-performing content pieces. To find out those patterns, ask the following questions:-
- Are they crafting long-form content or short-form content?
- Are they using videos or images in their content pieces?
- Are they publishing blog posts, product pages, or different types of content pieces?
The answers to these relevant questions will guide your content creation process in the right direction. In fact, it will help you double down on what’s already working pretty well for your competitors.
Technical SEO
Are you aware of the fact that analyzing the technical SEO health of your website and comparing it against your competitors is an important step? The reason behind such competitor analysis is that technical SEO health can prove to be a game-changer in your SERP rankings.
You can use Google Search Console to find out about your website’s technical SEO health. This tool can help you with different types of reports, such as:-
- Page Indexing: Discover the pages that have and haven’t been added to Google’s index.
- Core Web Vitals: You can see how the website scores on three distinct page experience metrics. All of them together are known as Core Web Vitals.
- HTTPS: Check whether the pages on your website are using the secure HTTPS protocol, which is recommended by Google.
In case you are using the Google Search Console to know about the technical SEO health, you should also do the following to analyze your competitors.
- Analyze the Core Web Vitals of your competitors by using the PageSpeed Insights tool.
- Manually check the webpages of the competitors that are utilizing the HTTPS protocol.
- Look at how the websites of your competitors are performing on smartphones.
- Check out the XML sitemaps of your competitors to know which pages have been flagged for indexing.
Don’t forget to compare the results of your website with those of your competitors. You can even try to match your competitors in areas where they have a strong hold. Alongside this, try to beat your competitors in areas where they can be beaten.
Carry Out a Page-by-page Analysis of Your Competitors’ Websites
There are a lot of on-page SEO factors that can influence the performance of a webpage in the SERP. That’s why it’s important to review the webpages as a crucial element of your SEO competitor analysis. Some of the specific elements that you need to analyze on each web page are as follows:-
- Title Tags: It is an HTML element that indicates the title of a particular webpage. It is commonly displayed in the SERP, social media posts, and browser tabs.
- Meta Descriptions: This is a short snippet of text that summarizes the content of a webpage. It appears in the SERP beneath the search results.
- URL Structure: It is the order and grouping of the URLs of a particular webpage within a website.
- Content & Keywords: This step is a detailed one, as you need to analyze all of the web pages that you want to outrank. So, you need to focus on the type of content that your competitors are posting. Furthermore, don’t forget to check out the keywords that your competitors are targeting.
Identify All of the Backlink Gaps
In case there’s a reputable website that links to a competitor but doesn’t link to you, you have a backlink gap that must be focused on. Getting rid of these backlink gaps is necessary in SEO because Google uses backlinks to know about the authority of your website.
You can check your website’s backlinks by using Google Search Console. If you want to find the backlinks of your competitors, you can search for your competitors’ names in Google. Then, you can check each result, which will show up on the SERP.
Find Out the Serp Features of Your Competitors
In case your competitors are appearing in the SERP features, which are non-traditional search results for target keywords, you need to take notice. It’s because they might get a lot more attention on the SERP as compared to your website.
However, when you optimize your website for those exact SERP features, you can replace your competitors and grab that attention for your own website.
To know which competitors are appearing in the SERP features, you can check manually on Google.
Wrapping Up
When you think about carrying out robust competitor analysis for doing the SEO of your website, the guide you just read is only the starting point. It’s because when you practically implement all of the steps mentioned above, you are going to get a lot more insights and ways to carry out competitor analysis.
However, it’s good enough to get started in analyzing your SERP competitors. So, begin the process sooner rather than later, and also apply the insights generated in your website’s SEO strategy.
Looking to get the right type of competitor analysis for your website? If your answer is in the affirmative, SEO Toronto Experts can help you a lot. Get in touch with us now to analyze your competitors and even have a followable SEO strategy for your website.
