How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis?

When you want to tell someone they are unique, you usually use the phrase, “You are one in a million.” But when it comes to business, even though you may like to think that your company is ‘one in a million,’ the fact of the matter is, there are probably many other companies that offer the same services as you. If you want your business to stand out from the competition, you need to find out what your competitors are up to and what their online marketing strategies are. In a nutshell? You need to work on your SEO competitor analysis. An SEO company will help you identify multiple SEO competitors and come up with the best counter-strategy to boost your website’s organic traffic. If you are new to the world of SEO, this blog will give you a general overview of how to perform an SEO competitor analysis. 

What is an SEO Competitor Analysis?

In simple terms, SEO competitive analysis mainly includes researching the online content, keywords, and website or blog links of your SEO competitors. The main motive behind hiring a digital marketing company for SEO competitor analysis is to identify the most successful elements of their SEO tactics in order to optimize your own SEO strategy. Since the data is readily available online, rather than just guess what type of content to create or which keywords to target, you can actually study what is already working for other companies and then use that analysis as the foundation for your own growth.

The best way to understand SEO competitor analysis is by using a real-world example. Imagine that you run a business that sells sports merchandise. Your shop is just one of five different shops in the area. Even if you treat your customers in the best way and even if they are happy, they will sometimes visit the other stores in case they do not find what they want in your shop. If you want to get a clear idea about what your customers are looking for, you will need to visit the other sports stores yourself to see what they are selling. These visits to gather competitive intelligence is known as competitor analysis. In the virtual world, you can work with an SEO Agency to “visit” competitor websites and find out what attracts customers. 

What are the Benefits of SEO Competitor Analysis?

While different companies may have different business goals when it comes to SEO, the goal is pretty much the same; get the top rank on search engines and boost organic reach. Here’s a look at the key benefits of SEO competitor analysis:

• Helps you understand what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t, in terms of online marketing in your industry.
• Allows you to identify competitors’ weaknesses, so that you can use them to improve your SEO strategy.
• Highlights the strengths of your competitors so that you can replicate them and achieve the same, or better, results.
• SEO competitor analysis is essential to organize what SEO tasks to prioritize when implementing your marketing strategy.
• Gives you an insight into how challenging it will be to outperform your competitors when it comes to organic traffic in the SERPs.

If done properly, competitor analysis will allow you to transform your whole approach to search engine optimization. You can consult an SEO company and work with a team of marketing experts to explore what you can do to outrank your competition online.

How to Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis?

Effective SEO competitor analysis can be quite intimidating because there a lot of technical aspects that go into it. However, working with a UNIbizTEC will help you gain a secure handle on competitive analysis and improve your position online. Here’s a quick look at the steps to perform an SEO competitor analysis:

1. Identify Your SEO Competitors: The very first step in a competitor analysis is to identify who your competitors are. As a general rule, the top SEO competitors for any business are the companies who rank in the first search page of your targeted keywords. You can consult an SEO company or use a competitor analysis tool to identify your main competitors.
2. Evaluate Keyword Difficulty: The next step is to study your competitors’ total domain strength, including domain authority, country, indexing in search engines, catalogue listings and so on. If you can focus on specific factors like backlink data, Alexa rank and traffic volumes, you will be in a good position to pick out weaknesses that you can turn to your advantage later on.
3. Look for New Keyword Opportunities: Any digital marketing agency will tell you that proper keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO. You can figure out how to optimize your content through term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis or TF-IDF analysis. This analysis will help you identify low-competition keywords that your competitors are using, but you might have missed.
4. Analyze On-Page Optimization & On-Site Content: An efficient, competitive analysis tool will allow you to run through your competitors on-site SEO content to get a general idea about the types of content they’re publishing, how often do they publish and the keywords they target. These factors can serve as a benchmark for your own on-site SEO strategy.
5. Dig into Competitor Backlink Profiles: No matter how creative your content is, or how much effort you put into keyword research, all will be in vain if you do not create relevant backlinks for your site. You can work with an SEO company to figure out where your competitors are earning their backlinks from so that you can replicate the results.
6. Examine Site Structure & UX: Improving user experience is the primary focus of Google. It is no surprise that all major algorithmic changes are directed towards better mobile experiences and faster, more relevant results. You will need to analyze competitor sites to gain insights into how you can optimize your webpage for better crawl ability.