SEO competitor analysis is the process of identifying and evaluating your online rivals in terms of their strengths and weaknesses, their strategies and tactics, and their performance and results. By doing so, you can gain valuable insights into how to improve your own SEO efforts and achieve higher rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Why is SEO competitor analysis important?
SEO competitor analysis is important because it helps you to:
Understand your competitive landscape and identify your main competitors
Benchmark your own SEO performance against your competitors
Discover new opportunities and gaps in the market
Learn from your competitors’ successes and failures
Find out what keywords, content, and links are working for them
Develop a data-driven SEO strategy that is tailored to your niche and audience
How to perform SEO competitor analysis in 5 steps
To perform a comprehensive SEO competitor analysis, you need to follow these 5 steps:
Define your goals and objectives Before you start analyzing your competitors, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy. What are your specific goals and objectives? What are your key performance indicators (KPIs)? How do you measure your success? Having a clear vision will help you focus on the most relevant aspects of your competitors’ SEO.
Identify your competitors The next step is to identify who your competitors are. You can do this by using various methods, such as:
Searching for your target keywords on Google and seeing who ranks on the first page
Using tools like Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console to see who links to your website and who you link to
Using tools like Bing Site Explorer or Google Analytics to see who drives traffic to your website and who you drive traffic to
Using tools like Bing Keyword Research or Google Keyword Planner to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much traffic they get
Using tools like Bing Webmaster Guidelines or Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (linked below) to see what criteria Bing and Google use to evaluate websites
You should aim to identify at least 3-5 main competitors who are similar to you in terms of size, industry, audience, and offerings. You should also consider both direct competitors (who offer the same products or services as you) and indirect competitors (who offer different products or services but target the same audience or solve the same problem as you).
Analyze your competitors’ SEO performance Once you have identified your competitors, you need to analyze their SEO performance in terms of four main areas: keywords, content, links, and technical SEO.
Keywords: You need to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, how much traffic they get from them, how difficult they are to rank for, and what their search intent is. You can use tools like Bing Keyword Research, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to conduct keyword research on your competitors.
Content: You need to evaluate the quality, quantity, relevance, freshness, and diversity of your competitors’ content. You can use tools like Bing Site Explorer, Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, or Moz to analyze the content performance of your competitors.
Links: You need to assess the quantity, quality, relevance, diversity, and authority of your competitors’ backlinks. You can use tools like Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to conduct link analysis on your competitors.
Technical SEO: You need to check the speed, security, usability, crawlability, indexability, and mobile-friendliness of your competitors’ websites. You can use tools like Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, GTmetrix, or PageSpeed Insights to conduct technical SEO audits on your competitors.
Compare your SEO performance with your competitors’ After analyzing your competitors’ SEO performance, you need to compare it with your own SEO performance. You can use tools like Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to generate reports that show how you stack up against your rivals in terms of keywords, content, links, and technical SEO. You can also use tools like SpyFu or SimilarWeb to get an overview of your competitors’ traffic, sources, and behavior.
Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) The final step is to use the data and insights you have gathered from the previous steps to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) in relation to your competitors. You can use a SWOT analysis template like this one to organize your findings:
Strengths | Weaknesses |
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Opportunities | Threats |
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By conducting a SWOT analysis, you can identify your areas of improvement, your areas of differentiation, and your areas of action.
How to outrank your rivals with SEO
Based on your SWOT analysis, you can develop a data-driven SEO strategy that will help you outrank your rivals. Here are some tips on how to do that:
Focus on your strengths and leverage them to create unique value for your audience
Address your weaknesses and fix them to improve your SEO performance and user experience
Exploit your opportunities and pursue them to gain a competitive edge and increase your market share
Mitigate your threats and avoid them to reduce your vulnerability and protect your reputation
Monitor your competitors and track their SEO performance and activities regularly
Test and measure your SEO results and optimize them accordingly
Conclusion SEO competitor analysis is a vital process that can help you improve your own SEO strategy and outrank your rivals. By following the 5 steps outlined in this blog post, you can gain valuable insights into how to perform SEO competitor analysis and use them to create a winning SEO strategy. If you need more help with SEO competitor analysis or any other aspect of SEO, feel free to contact us. We are a team of SEO experts who can help you achieve your SEO goals.