A competitive SEO analysis can help you understand why you are outranking your competitors, and how to increase your rankings. This is how it’s done.
Getting your product noticed by potential customers means you are explaining why it is the best solution for their needs. To do so, you have to know what your competitors are offering to the customers. And to accomplish this, you have to study your competitors. In this guide, you will learn to identify your competitors, how they rank their websites, and what you can do about it. And be sure to unite these tips with your preferred competitor research tools.
Identify your SEO Competitors
In the SEO world, your top SEO competitors are those who rank on the first page of search results for your target keywords, regardless of whether they’re business competitors.
For each service you offer, you may even have distinct lists of competitors with little or no overlap between them if you operate in more than one niche. It is easy to find who your competitors are by entering your top keywords into Google and writing down their domain names (or entering your keywords into a competitor analysis tool and let it do all the work).
No matter how you use a tool, it’s important that you monitor the SERP landscape you’re entering (e.g., if your target keyword is dominated by videos, you might want to create video content). Take note of competitors who occupy local packs and position zero in SEO business, then you will definitely market yourself for these positions.
Go for New Keyword Opportunities
If you’re hoping to enhance your existing content with “correct” keywords your competitors are using, the Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency analysis (or TF-IDF for short) can be a worthy option. In addition, you will discover low-competition keywords you missed by properly optimizing your pages for search engines.
A TF-IDF calculation is simply the difference between how frequently a keyword appears on a page (its frequency) and how often a keyword is expected to appear on the page (the inverse document frequency). But, it is possible to find many similar terms and phrases on top-ranking pages for your target keywords when analyzing the TF-IDF. In order to boost your relevance in semantic search, you need to either add the topic-relevant terms to existing relevant pages, or create new content.
Assess Keyword’s Complexity
It’s always a good idea to investigate the strength of your competitors’ SEO strategies before analyzing your link-building or on-page strategies. While you can theoretically beat out any competitor in any niche and for any keyword, the amount of resources it would take for some keywords renders them unfeasible.
Analyze the total domain strength of your competitors with your competitor analysis tool and analyze specific factors, such as, domains authority, age and the country of domain, search engines indexing, catalog listing, backlink data, Alexa’s rank, and social signals.
After this, note down all the information and search for loopholes so that you get desired results.
Evaluate On-Site Content and On-Page Optimization
You will find plenty of new information to work with if you analyze your competitors’ on-site SEO using the competitive analysis tool. You’ll find out how often and what types of content they publish and which keywords they target. Give special interest to metadata, headline strategies (like, title’s length, keywords in title, title tags, etc).
Take a look at their internal linking strategies, too. This will also serve as a benchmark for your own on-site SEO efforts. Focus on what they are doing well and then learn from it. Also, try to know what they are missing, and make an advantage for yourself from it.
At the time of evaluating content, keep a track of these things:
- Topic relevancy
- Types of content or media used
- Length of videos and word count
- The details covered
When Googlebot works and searches your website, all these factors have an important role to play.
Check Site Structure & UX (User Experience)
Google has started focusing increasingly on improving the user experience. So if you are not developing your content in a user-friendly way, you’ll miss out on most levels. Most of the major algorithmic changes in the past several years have focused on user experience, such as faster page loads, better search results, and better mobile experiences.
If your website is slower than your competitors’, then you should absolutely need to make things faster. With the help of these steps, you can easily do that:
- Optimizing your sitemap to have good search ability
- Prioritizing page speed optimization for landing pages which have high-value
- Ensuring that every aspect of your website is built with searchers in mind
However, always be attentive and keep an eye on competitors’ work on their websites because when you analyze competitor sites and see that they are ranking well despite having an outdated website or a poor mobile optimization, you have a great chance to gain some grip on the SERPs.
