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SEO competitor analysis is crucial for the success of your SEO strategy. Consider that many businesses are fighting over the same piece of cake. If you do not invest your time and resources into understanding your competitors’ strategies, you will not be able to stay competitive. That is why we bring you this guide about performing SEO competitor analysis. Let’s take a look at what it includes and how you can use it to improve your search engine optimization approach!
Start by identifying your competitors
In order to benefit from digital marketing strategies, the first step is to know who you are going against. This is simple research. All you need to do is to create a list of businesses in your niche and focus on the ones that have the same products or services. Also, focus on companies that operate in the same region as you.
Understand how strong their strategy is
Once you have a list of competitors, you should use software to determine their current search engine ranking. You should mostly pay attention to those who rank higher than you. However, do not lose sight of those who rank below you. They might also have some good ideas.
Testing them for specific keywords is the best way to know how they rank. That way, you will know how powerful their strategy is. You should use the following:
- High-competitive keywords
- Low-competitive keywords
- Short-tail keywords
- Long-tail keywords
The more information you find out, the better. By doing detailed research, you will understand more about the SEO strategy of your competitors. If you find out that they rank higher for the exact keywords you are using, it is crucial to make a change.
Do a website structure analysis
A website structure analysis will tell you everything about their website. What pages they have, how many are there, how they structure links, organize content, and so on.
This is very good to get inspiration for new ideas on your website. Also, it is an approach that will tell you if there are things on your website that you must fix immediately. As an example, you might discover that your competitor’s website uses a much better page structure, and your website looks unorganized. That is when you want to introduce change.
This is why you should do SEO competitor analysis in WordPress. The platform has an SEO-optimized structure, and it will help you organize your website more efficiently and SEO-friendly way. You should definitely consider WordPress for this approach because it makes things simple for you.
On-page SEO analysis
A considerable part of any SEO strategy is on-page SEO. This includes all elements located directly on the website. The most important ones to analyze are keywords, meta descriptions, image alt and caption attributes, and the use of internal links.
All of these elements contribute to on-page SEO and significantly impact a website’s overall ranking factor. The idea is to understand how they use on-page SEO to boost their strategy.
Remember that you might not be able to use all aspects of their on-page SEO. Your website could be structured in a different way. However, it is crucial to understand the general idea behind their strategy, not to clone it.
Backlink analysis
Backlinks are the most important part of off-page SEO. They contribute to brand awareness and help businesses build authority and credibility in the market.
When it comes to backlink analysis, you want to know where your competitors are getting backlinks from. Also, it is crucial to see where they post guest content.
Partnerships are vital for any online business. If you know that a competitor’s website works with a couple of leaders in the industry, and they share content, try to get the same deal. Observe what kind of content they create in exchange for backlinks, and see if you can improve it.
If you do manage to create quality content, your backlink strategy will substantially improve. As a result, that will lead to a higher SEO rating.
Content type analysis
Everything revolves around content. It drives traffic, conversions, and any other relevant SEO metric. If there were no content, there would be no customers.
The type of content can significantly affect the success of an SEO campaign. When choosing what type to use, always consider what your clients want. That is where competitor analysis will help. For example, if you are looking at their blog or social media page, you will see what content has the most engagement.
The most important types of content are:
- Video
- Infographic
- Social media post
- Blog article
- Case study
- eBook
- Podcast
- Newsletter
- Report
- Image
As a good suggestion, try to use multiple types of content. That is how you can appeal to a larger audience and improve customer experience. Additionally, that introduces content diversity, which is crucial for search engine optimization.
Identify gaps in competitor’s SEO strategy
Performing SEO competitor analysis is not just important because you can see all of the things they do well. It is also crucial to identify gaps in their strategy. Those gaps represent your opportunities.
As an example, if you analyze their website and discover they are not using schema markup, that is an opportunity for you. Also, if they are not focusing on local keywords, that means you could use that chance to improve local SEO.
Opportunities are all around you. All you need to do is to know where to find them and how to use them!
Performing SEO competitor analysis is important for your business
As you can see, there are many reasons why you should approach performing SEO competitor analysis with great diligence. Every moment invested in understanding your competitor’s strategy is a moment well spent. It is impossible to stay ahead of the competition unless you learn their advertising strategy. However, once you identify all of the opportunities, you have everything you need to create a winning strategy for your business.
