Have you ever felt like you’re playing catch-up with your competitors for digital success?

Imagine having a clear understanding of exactly what your competitors are doing to outrank you and more importantly, what they’re missing out on, that could give you the edge to surpass them. With SEO competitor analysis, you can gain valuable insights into their strategies and uncover hidden opportunities to improve your own.

SEO competitor analysis evaluates your competitors’ online marketing strategies to enhance your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. By understanding what your competitors are doing, you can craft strategies to elevate your SEO game and capture that coveted top spot in search engine results.

Ready to dominate your industry with a winning SEO strategy? It does not comprise just technical steps using SEO Competitor analysis tools but also foregrounds work and post-analysis work. Let’s break down how to master a holistic SEO competitor analysis to outsmart your competition.

1. The Holistic Approach to SEO Competitor Analysis: Beyond Technical Tactics

SEO competitor analysis involves studying and evaluating the strategies employed by your competitors to determine their strengths and weaknesses in Search Engine Optimization. By dissecting their SEO tactics, you gain valuable insights into what’s working in your industry and can apply these learnings to enhance your SEO efforts.

This analysis is crucial as it helps you understand the competitive landscape, identify areas where you can outperform your competitors, and adjust your strategies to better capture search traffic.

Why is it Important?

• Identify Market Trends and Opportunities: Analyzing competitors’ performance helps you spot emerging trends and capitalize on new opportunities.
• Optimize Website Content and Performance: Understanding competitors’ keyword strategies and website structure aids in optimizing your content and improving your rankings.
• Gain Insights into Competitor Strategies: Examining backlinks and social media activities provides valuable insights into their marketing strategies.
• Improve Search Engine Rankings: Identify areas where competitors are outperforming you and take steps to improve your rankings. Implementing strategies to outrank others will help you gain visibility. And it is a known fact that the more visible you are, the more likely you are to be clicked on.

2. Identifying Your Competitors: Knowing your Competitors

To identify your competitors, consider using these approaches:

• SEO Tools: Platforms that offer various functions of SEO are invaluable for identifying competitors. These tools can show you which sites are ranking for similar keywords and provide insights into their overall SEO strategies.
• Search Engines: Start by performing searches for your target keywords. The businesses that appear on the first page are likely your direct competitors. This method is the simplest technique and gives you a quick overview.
• Industry Research: Look into industry reports, market research, and trade publications. These resources can help you identify additional competitors and also help us get a look into the expert’s analysis.

3. Key Steps in Conducting Technical SEO Competitor Analysis

Domain overview is a fundamental aspect of SEO competitor analysis, providing essential insights into a competitor’s website. Begin by collecting a broad understanding of your competitor’s domain:

• Domain Authority (DA): This metric measures a domain’s overall strength and likelihood of ranking well in search engines. SEO Tools provide DA scores based on factors such as backlinks and site quality, helping you gauge the competitive position of a domain.
• Page Authority (PA): PA assesses the ranking potential of individual pages within a domain. By evaluating factors like internal and external links, it indicates which specific pages are more likely to rank highly for targeted keywords.

Domain Age: This refers to how long a domain has been active. Older domains may have an advantage due to established authority and trust, which can influence their search engine rankings.

Domain age can be checked using SEO tools like ‘Small SEO Tools’. Once you’ve opened the website, you have to begin by entering the domain name into the input bar with “http://”. Once you’ve entered your domain details, the tool gives a detailed report about the domain age including its history and active status over the years.

Top SEO Competitor analysis tools we use for Domain Overview: Moz, Small SEO Tools

Step 2: Technical SEO Analysis

And finally, the technical foundation on which the functioning depends. Evaluate technical aspects that affect search engine crawling and indexing. Here’s how you can do that-

• Site Architecture: A navigation without proper road structuring leads to losing activity in important regions. Analyse your competitor’s site architecture like you’re the consumer and check if the navigation is seamless and how the information sharing is prioritised. Ensure clear, logical site structure for better navigation.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Check if the site is optimized for mobile devices. 
• URL Structure: A clear, descriptive URL structure aids in both user navigation and search engine understanding. Assess competitors’ URLs for best practices in relevancy and clarity to optimize your own.

Step 3: On-Page SEO Factors

Attention to detail is what helps brands outrank others. Review on-page SEO elements to understand optimization practices:

• Meta Titles and Descriptions: Check if they are optimized for keywords and click-through rates.
• Headers and Structure: Assess the use of headers (H1, H2, etc.) and their effectiveness.
• Internal Linking: Review how they link related content together to enhance navigation and relevance.

Step 4: Off-Page SEO Factors

Off-page SEO factors refer to activities done outside the website like link building, local SEO, influencer marketing, and more to increase traffic to it. A few of the primary off-page SEO tactics are:

• Social Media Presence: One of the best factors that could help traffic to a website is well-executed social media presence. Analysing your competitors’ platform engagement, followers route and number, and content strategy can help you get an insight into how you can plan the face of your social media.
• Citations: Citations are a good way to convert traffic from sister topics and websites to your site. A well-executed citation digital footprint analysis of your competitors could help you see the strategy behind how they’re using online directories, local citations, and how consistently they’re being cited to gain traffic. 
• Brand Mentions: Blogs, articles, online forums, and more are a perfect way to market and find the audience’s image of the brand. This gives us an insight of the public eye on the brand and competitors’ brands. This can also be used as a traditional research-modeled review technique.

Step 5: Traffic Analytics

The audience being the forefront focus, as usual, traffic analysis is an important step because Analyticsthis helps us understand what helps attract the audience. Delve into traffic analytics to understand how much traffic your competitor is driving to their site:

• Monthly Search Traffic: Evaluate the volume of organic traffic your competitor receives each month to gauge the overall effectiveness of their SEO efforts. This data can reveal how well their content and keyword strategies attract visitors from search engines.

Traffic by Device: Analyze traffic trends across different devices, such as mobile, desktop, and tablet, to see how well your competitor’s site performs on each. Understanding the device distribution helps assess how effectively their site is optimized for various user experiences. If a significant portion of their traffic comes from mobile devices, it could indicate a well-optimized mobile site and a focus on mobile user experience, which is increasingly important in today’s digital landscape.

Traffic by Channel: Examine the different sources of traffic, including direct, organic, referral, and paid channels, to understand how visitors are finding your competitor’s site. This breakdown reveals the effectiveness of their marketing strategies across various channels and highlights where their traffic is coming from. 

 

Country-Wise Traffic: Understand the geographical distribution of your competitor’s traffic to determine where their visitors are coming from around the world. This information helps you identify which countries or regions are generating the most traffic for them. It can indicate where they have a strong market presence or where they may be focusing their international marketing efforts.

• Brand vs. Organic Traffic: Compare the traffic driven by branded searches (queries including their brand name) versus non-branded (organic) keywords to evaluate the strength of their brand recognition. This comparison helps determine how reliant they are on brand visibility versus their ability to attract visitors through non-branded search queries. 

• Keyword Intent: Analyze the intent behind the keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s site to understand what users are seeking when they perform those searches. Keywords can have various intents such as informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial investigation, each indicating different user goals and needs. By dissecting keyword intent, you can gain valuable insights into the types of content and offers that resonate with your audience.

• Top Ranking Pages: Identify which pages on your competitor’s site are performing the best in terms of search engine traffic and engagement. These top-ranking pages often reflect successful content strategies and effective keyword optimization.

Organic Keywords: Review the organic keywords for which your competitor’s site ranks well in search engine results to understand their keyword strategy and SEO focus. This analysis helps you identify the specific search terms driving traffic to their site and assess how effectively they are targeting various keywords.

Top SEO Competitor analysis tools we use for Traffic Analytics: SEMrush, Ubersuggest

Step 6: Backlink Analysis

A backlink, also known as an inbound link or incoming link are links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Evaluate the backlink profile of your competitors to understand their link-building strategies:

• Backlink Count: Measure the total number of backlinks pointing to your competitor’s site to gauge the overall volume of external links they have accumulated. This metric provides a high-level view of their link-building efforts and indicates the level of authority they might be leveraging.
• Referring Domains: Analyze the number and quality of unique referring domains linking to your competitor’s site to understand the diversity and credibility of their link profile. Unique referring domains are important because they represent distinct sources of traffic and endorsement, which can enhance the site’s authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines.

• Do-Follow vs. No-Follow Links: A do-follow backlink is a link that tells search engines to consider the linked page when ranking search results. A no-follow backlink is a link that tells search engines not to consider the linked page.
  Determine the ratio of do-follow to no-follow links in your competitor’s backlink profile, as do-follow links are more influential in passing SEO value and improving search engine rankings. Do-follow links contribute directly to the site’s authority and search engine ranking, while no-follow links do not pass link equity but can still drive traffic and provide visibility.

• Backlink Type: Identify the types of backlinks your competitor is acquiring, such as text links, image links, or others, to understand the nature of their link-building strategy. Different types of backlinks can have varying impacts on SEO; for instance, text links with relevant anchor text are often more valuable for search engine rankings compared to image links.

Top SEO Competitor analysis tools to help with Backlink Analysis: SEMrush

Step 7: Website Speed Analysis

Begin by evaluating various aspects of your competitor’s website speed to understand its performance and user experience:

• Grade: This metric provides an overall rating of the website’s speed performance. Tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights offer grades based on various speed factors, helping you assess how quickly a site loads and performs relative to best practices.
• Fully Loading Speed: This measures the total time it takes for a website to fully load, from the moment a user requests the page until all content and elements are completely rendered. Faster loading times generally lead to better user experiences and can positively impact search engine rankings.

• Speed by Device: Analyse the loading speed of the website across different devices, such as mobile phones and desktops. This helps you understand how well the site performs on various devices and whether there are discrepancies in speed that could affect user experience.

• LCP: The largest Content Paint is the amount of time it takes to load the largest visual content on a page. Analysing the LCP of your competitors will help you understand how to optimise your visual content.
• Core Web Vitals: Including LCP, two other key Web vitals are INP (Interaction to Next Paint) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). INP measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions. Your INP should be 200 milliseconds or less for a fast and responsive experience. CLS measures how much your page’s layout shifts unexpectedly as it loads. Your CLS should be less than 0.1 for a good user experience. Cumulatively, these ensure the smooth operation of the website. 

Top SEO Competitor analysis tools we use for Website Speed Analysis: GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights 

Step 8: Content Analysis

Everybody loves well-written content. Here’s how you can assess the content quality and strategy of your competitors:

• Content Formats: Examine whether they use blogs, videos, infographics, etc., and determine which formats engage their audience most effectively.
• Content Depth and Quality: Evaluate the thoroughness and engagement of their content.
• Engagement Metrics: Look at social shares, comments, and interaction levels to gauge content effectiveness.
• Content Structure: Examine how the competitors structure their content. It usually represents how they adapt and prioritize the audience’s content preferences.
• Word Count: Examine the competitor’s word count limit for content. It helps to analyse the word limit ranges across content and how they arrange it accordingly on the site.

Find content opportunities. Identify topics or questions competitors haven’t covered and fill these gaps with high-quality, unique content.

4. Strategies for Effective SEO Competitor Analysis

Regular Monitoring and Updates

SEO is not a one-time task, it requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. Regularly review your competitors’ SEO activities and update your strategies to stay competitive.

• Track Changes: Regularly monitor changes in competitors’ rankings, content updates, and backlink profiles. This helps you compare their online activity with the SEO changes. It is beneficial to go out of track to well-performing digital sites that are out of your competitor range to identify new trends they might be following and then subsequently implement the adapted version to your brand.
• Adjust Strategies: Adapt your SEO strategies based on new insights and industry trends to maintain your competitive edge. What works for others is not always what works for you. Self-analysis is the twin sister of competitor analysis.

Turning Competitive SEO Insights into Strategic Opportunities

With the technical information in your hand, the next step is to implement it into the SEO strategy. Use the insights gained from your competitor analysis to develop strategies that set you apart.

• Leverage Opportunities: Capitalize on areas where competitors are weak or missing opportunities and capitalize on these to gain a competitive advantage.
• Innovate: Implement innovative SEO tactics and strategies that differentiate your brand and offer unique value. SEO tactics are ever-evolving and keeping up with the trends and innovations will help the digital visibility of your brand.
• Enhance User Experience: Utilize insights to improve user experience on your site. By addressing user needs and preferences better than your competitors, you can increase engagement, reduce bounce rates, and foster greater customer loyalty. Post SEO analysis and optimization, user experience gains great impression points and traffic to your digital presence.

SEO competitor analysis is essential for improving online visibility and driving organic traffic. By following these steps and using the right tools, your brand can gain valuable insights into competitors’ strategies and develop a more effective SEO approach. Competition is key to growth, and understanding your competitors is the first step to success.

Haven’t started your SEO competitor analysis yet? We’re here to help! At The Go-To Guy!, we understand that every competitor is unique. Our approach to the process is tailored to your specific industry and goals. We’ll assist you with:

• In-Depth Competitor Research: Analyzing competitors’ keyword usage, content structure, on-page optimization, and backlink profiles.
• Customized SEO Strategy: Develop a strategy based on comprehensive analysis to align with your business goals.
• Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation: Keeping track of search engine algorithm updates and industry trends to ensure your SEO strategy remains effective.

With our years of expertise in digital marketing strategy, optimization, and brand development, we are your trusted partner for all things branding! Ready to elevate your brand presence? Contact us today for a free consultation, or join us for a cup of coffee to discuss your goals. Let’s make your vision a reality!