To run a comprehensive SEO competitive analysis, identify who you compete with in search, then compare their keywords, on-page SEO, backlinks, social activity, site UX, ad spend and most-linked content with yours. Turn the gaps you find into a plan, and track your rankings as you work through it.
Beating competitors in organic search costs less over time than outspending them on ads. A B2B SEO agency can speed up the analysis, but you can run it yourself with the 11 practices below.
Before we begin, let’s understand what a comprehensive SEO competitive analysis is.
A comprehensive SEO competitive analysis is an in-depth comparison of your competition’s search engine optimization efforts with yours. This analysis can be performed for both organic and paid search results. By looking at your competitors’ tactics to rank higher than you, you can adjust your approach accordingly.
Do you know how your website compares to those of your competitors? Competitive analysis can help you understand where your site stands and how to improve. By examining your top competitors’ search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you can determine what methods are working for them and which aren’t. This information can help refine your SEO efforts and give you an edge over the competition.
You might want to conduct a comprehensive SEO competitive analysis for several reasons. Perhaps you’re unhappy with your current position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Or maybe you want to know how much effort it will take to achieve a specific ranking. Regardless of your reasons, a competitive analysis can provide valuable insights into your competitors’ SEO efforts.
In short, when you look at what your competition is doing, you:
- Understand what works and what doesn’t work in your industry.
- Discover your competitors’ weaknesses and use them to your advantage.
- Identify your competitors’ strengths and emulate them.
- Learn to prioritize SEO tasks going forward.
- Uncover the probability of outperforming competitors in the SERPs.
Use the 11 practices below to identify your competitors, understand why they outrank you and plan how to overtake them.
But before that, look at your website’s analytics. This will give you an idea of where your traffic is coming from and what keywords they use to find you.
1. Know Your Competitors
You probably know the key players in your industry, but are they your SEO rivals? You cannot be sure about the answer without a competitive analysis. There might be multiple SEO competitors that are not even in your niche. Your main competitors rank on the first page of the keywords you’re targeting, irrespective of their business and industry. This means that to compete with them, your website also needs to rank on the first page for those keywords. If you are not ranking on the first page for your chosen keywords, there are many steps you can take to improve your website’s SEO.
To identify your top competitors, enter your focused keywords in Google or use competitor analysis tools like SpyFu to do the heavy lifting. You’ll then see who comes up first in the search results. From there, you can analyze your competition and determine which areas to focus on to improve your rankings.
2. Keyword difficulty
To get an edge on your competitors, before you build on your on-page and off-page SEO strategy, it’s essential to understand the strengths of their keywords. Reviewing this data can help you make better decisions about your keyword-targeting strategy. Understanding your competitor’s strengths can give you a significant advantage in the marketplace. With competitor analysis tools like Searchmetrics, you can assess your domain strength and other specific attributes, such as domain authority, search engine indexing, backlink data, traffic volumes, and social signals.
You can gather all this information about your SEO competitors, identify weaknesses, and capitalize on them. Remember, the stronger the SEO, the more complex the competitor keywords. Therefore, your focus should be on websites with lower scores ranking well for specific keywords.
3. On-Page Optimization
Using competitive analysis tools like SEMrush to study the on-site SEO of your competitors can open a goldmine of information, such as the frequency of publishing content, the type of content being published, word length, the depth of the content published, and the keywords your competitors are targeting. Focus on Metadata and headline strategies and discover your competitors’ internal link-building strategy. Keep track of your on-site SEO performance using this information as a benchmark. This will help you identify areas for improvement and ensure your SEO efforts are paying off.
4. Off-page SEO and backlinks
Looking at where your competitors earn their backlinks is important for building your off-page SEO strategy. Tools like Ahrefs can help you gather high-quality backlink data from your competitors. When you have the list of backlinks used by your competitors, you can find new link-building opportunities to increase your page and domain authority.
5. Keep An Eye On Social Media
Use a reliable social media listening tool, such as Meltwater or Talkwalker, to analyze your competitors’ social media strategies. IT can help you understand how your competitors use social media platforms, what kind of content they publish, how often they publish, how they engage with their followers, etc.
All this can indirectly boost your SEO since social media tools inevitably increase website traffic, track brand mentions, and monitor user sentiment.
6. Analyze Site UX
Google has focused on improving the user experience, and most of its major algorithm updates have focused on better mobile experiences, improved page results, and faster page load times. Optimize your sitemap and page download speeds to stay ahead of the pack and ensure your website content is created with the user’s intentions in mind. Look at your competitor’s landing pages to understand their click depth and check their PageRank distribution. If you don’t have someone on the team to manage it, get help from a web agency.
7. Track Ad Spend
If your competitors still outrank you despite following all these tips, then chances are they’re spending a lot more on ads and running paid traffic campaigns to drive conversions. While it may not be wise to blindly match your competitors, it is recommended that you review their Google Ads campaigns, promoted content, paid posts, and banner ads to understand the types of content they promote through advertising.
8. Most linked Content
It would help if you could identify the most linked content on your competitor’s site. This will help you create your page and potentially generate more referrals and buzz online. Use the ‘skyscraper’ technique to create such content. The method involves creating even better content on a similar topic, making it visible to everyone who links to your competitor’s page, and asking people to link to your page because it has superior content.
9. Discover new keyword opportunities
If you are wondering how to enrich your existing content and discover new keyword opportunities, there is a simple method called Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) analysis. This process is a bit complicated, but once understood, should become a key component of conducting competitive analysis and overall content strategy. TF-IDF is a formula to measure the frequency of a keyword on a page and the number of times the keyword is expected to appear.
With TF-IDF, you may find that the top-ranking pages for a keyword have similar terms and phrases, which you might have missed targeting. Once you’ve identified such phrases, you should enrich your existing content with them or create new pages to increase relevance in semantic search.
10. Analyze your findings and develop a plan of action
Now that you have your SEO competitive analysis findings, it’s time to devise a plan of action. What does your competition do well? What could you do better? How can you capitalize on your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses?
By creating a plan of action based on your SEO competitive analysis, you can give your business the best chance of succeeding online.
11. Implement your plan and track your progress
It’s time to implement your SEO plan and track your progress. This is how you’ll ensure that your efforts pay off and that you’re on the right track. By monitoring your progress, you can make necessary adjustments to ensure you get the most out of your SEO plan.
So get started today and see how well your SEO plan works!
How Often to Repeat Your Analysis
Competitive Analysis is a critical piece of your SEO strategy
Run a full competitive analysis once or twice a year, and a lighter check on your top keywords every month. Competitors publish, earn links and change their sites all the time, so a one-time analysis goes stale fast.
Keep the findings in one document, update your action plan each time, and give changes a few months to show in your rankings before you judge them.