Marketing is all about telling people why your product is the best choice for their needs. You can find out by looking at what your competitors are selling.

The only way to do that is to look at what your competitors are doing through SEO analysis and competition research.

You need to make the best product and contentyou can, and part of that is knowing what your competitors are doing.

This guide has tips on how tofind your competitors, how they rank, and what you can do about it. And make sure to use these tips with the tools you already use to learn about your competitors.

What Is SEO Competitive Analysis?

SEOcompetitive analysis is the process of looking at the links, keywords, content, and other parts of your SEOcompetitors' websites to figure out which parts of their strategies work best and how to use them in your own SEO strategy.

SEOanalysis and competition research is the process of figuring out what your SEO and that of your competitors are good at and what they are not so good at.

You're trying to find any differences between you and your competitor, just like you would in normal competitive analysis. But you'll focus on SEO strategy instead of marketing strategy.

You don't have to guess which keywords to use, what content to make, or what links to build. Instead, you can look at what's already working and build on that.

Think about a real-life example: Imagine that you own and run one of three grocery stores in town. You know that your customers are happy, but you also know that they go to other stores because they can't get everything they need from you. So you go on a road trip to learn about your competitors. You go to the other stores to find out what their most popular items are. By selling these items - or even better ones - yourself, you save your customers a trip, which brings you more business.

A competitor analysis can help you:

• Check how well your SEO is doing right now.
• Find ways to make your SEO strategy better.
• Find out the gaps or weaknesses of your competitors.
• Discover the winning tactics of your rivals

How To Run An SEO Competitive Analysis

Identify Competitors

You are probably aware of the major businesses in your sector, but who are your top SEO competitors? These are the websites that are vying for our targeted organic search terms.

List the companies you regard to be your competition first. If you are working with a client, request participation from their marketing team or stakeholders. Try to concentrate on websites that appear frequently or highly for both your primary goal keywords and any important supplemental keywords.

If you're developing a new website, you might not be aware of your rivals.

Even if they're not in the same businessas you, your top SEO competitors are the ones who rank on the first page of search results for the keywords you're targeting.

If you work in more than one niche, you may have different lists of competitors for each service you offer, with little or no overlap.

Luckily, it's easy to find out who your competitors are: just type your top keywords into Google and write down the domains of your top competitors (or enter your keywords into your competitor analysis tool and let it do all of the heavy liftings for you).

Even if you use a tool, it's in your best interest to keep an eye on the SERPlandscape (e.g., if your target keyword is dominated by videos, you probably want to think about creating video content to compete).

Pay close attention to the people who are in the local packs and in position zero. You should definitely try to get these coveted spots.

Evaluate Keyword Difficulty

Before you start analyzing specific link-building strategies or on-page SEO, it's a good idea to figure out how strong your SEO competitors are.

In theory, you could beat any competitor in any niche and for any keyword. However, the amount of time and moneyit would take for some keywords makes that impossible.

Use your competitor analysis tool to look at the total domain strength of your competitors and then look at specific factors, like:

• Social signals.
• Traffic volumes.
• Alexa rank.
• Backlink data.
• Catalog listings.
• Indexing in search engines.
• Domain country and age.
• Domain authority.

Pay extra attention to the keywords that you already rank for, but not as well as your competitors. Pay special attention to keywords where you are just one or two spots behind your main competitor.

Use the Keyword Gap tool to find out which keywords of your competitors you share and which you don't. Start by putting in your site and up to four of your competitors' sites to see the Overview report. This will show you your top keyword opportunities:

Write down the information and look for any weaknesses that you can use to your advantage. The harder a competitor is to beat, the better their SEO is, and the harder it will be to beat them.

Analyze On A Page By Page Basis

Once you've found specific keywords and search results, you'll need to start comparing your pages to those of your competitors that are ranking higher.

By comparing pages, you can find specific problems on each page that are making your competitors rank higher than you. It will also help you figure out what you need to improve on those pages.

Using your competitive analysis tool to look at the on-site SEO of your competitors will give you a wealth of new information to use. You'll find out how often they post content, what kind of content they post, and what keywords they're trying to rank for.

Pay close attention:

• Metadata.
• Headline strategies (title length, keywords in the title, proper title tags, etc).

Title

Google does change the title tags of the search results based on the query, but most of the time it's to add the site name to the title tag or highlight the keywords being searched for, especially if Google thinks the page is relevant for the keywords. Still, the title doesn't have the keywords. So look at both the title from the title tag and the title that Google makes for specific keyword searches.

Be aware that if you do a "site: search" for your competitor, Google will show you titles that are very different from what they really are. So, instead, make sure that you get the title tag from the page itself or from the one that Google shows for that keyword search.

Meta Description Tag

Google may or may not use the description in the meta-description tag, but it is important for analysis to look at what is in the tag. This is often forgotten, especially on large sites.

Sometimes it will be useless because it is a generic description tag, and sometimes the description will be well written. It's a good idea to look at how your competitors use their sites compared to yours for the pages in question.

Meta KeywordsTag

This isn't because Google uses the meta-keywords tag to determine rankings, but because it can show you what keywords your competitor is trying to rank for on that page or on the site as a whole. Sometimes it won't help because they use the same set of keywords on every page in the whole area, but sometimes it can be useful if someone has spent time on the keyword tag for SEO that doesn't involve Google.

H2ss, H3s and other Headings

We know that <h> tags are important for SEO because Google gives them weight. Make sure that your site uses real <h> tags instead of CSS to define headers.

Google can also use these headings for featured snippets and other search features, so it's important to look at how your competitors are using them and how it affects their search features.

Breadcrumbs / URL Structure

Using breadcrumbs and a good URL structure can help Google figure out the order of the site's content and rank it accordingly.

If you make sure yours is strong and doesn't have any technical problems, it can give you an edge over a competitor who doesn't do as well in that area. This is something you should look at as part of your overall competitive analysis for each site, but it is also important to see how it affects the pages you want to rank higher for.

Dig Into Competitor Backlink Profiles

One of the most important parts of a competitive analysis is finding out where your competitors get their backlinksand using that information to build high-quality links for your website.

When a competitor has a backlink profile that is much better than yours, especially if they have high-quality backlinks from well-known websites, it will be harder for you to compete with them until you can build up a similar backlink profile.

It is also important to know the difference between high-quality and low-quality backlinks.

With the Penguin update, Google changed how they deal with low-quality links. If a competitor has a lot of low-quality links, those links may not be helping them at all.

If you copy them and put quantity over quality when it comes to links, it could hurt your SEO. Since you can't see what your competitor's disavowal file is, you shouldn't try to copy their spammier links directly.

High-Quality Backlinks

You should focus on backlinks from important news sites, high-profile sites, or experts in your market area. When looking at the backlinks of your competitors, think about these questions:

• Have they been talked about in major news outlets? If so, is there a way for you to get into stories like that?
• Are they a source that is recommended on high-traffic, non-commercial sites in your field?
• How can you get to be one of those resources that are recommended?

Backlink Gaps

You should check your backlinks for important gaps, especially links that more than one of your competitors has from the same page or site. If they've linked to a lot of your competitors, it's usually easy for them to link to you as well.

Don't forget to also look at your competitors' backlinks to strong pages on their own sites. For competitive analysis, many people only look at links to the home page, but links to internal pages can be just as important. Some of their best-performing internal pages could have links coming in that are a big reason why they rank well.

Examine Site Structure & UX

You haven't been paying attention if you don't know that Google has been putting a lot of effort into making the user experiencebetter.

Most of the big algorithm changes we've seen in the past few years have been about improving the user experience (UX) in some way, such as by making mobile experiences better, pages load faster, and search results better.

If your website is slower than your competitors', doesn't work as well, or is harder to get around, you need to fix that right away. What we suggest:

• Optimizing your sitemap so that it can be crawled more easily.
• Putting page speed optimization at the top of the list, especially for landing pages with high value.
• Make sure that every part of your site is made with the searcher's goal in mind.

You should look at your competitors' landing pages to see what they are doing:

• Look at how many times they click.
• Check to see if there are any missing pages.
• Look at how their PageRank is spread out.

If you look at your competitors' sites and see that they're ranking well even though they have old websites or bad mobile optimization, that's a great chance for you to move up on SERPs.

What is a Competitive Analysis? | SEO Competitive Analysis | Learn from Fiverr

People Also Ask

What Is Competitor Research In SEO?

SEO competitor analysis is assessing the links, keywords, content, and other aspects of your SEO rivals in order to incorporate their most effective strategies into your own.

How Do You Analyze Competitors Keywords?

• Utilize sample competitive analysis templates.
• List the top SERP competitors you face.
• Determine content and keyword gaps.
• Recognize your audience and the audiences of your rivals.
• To cover content gaps, create audience-focused and SEO-optimized material.
• Track the results of your rivals.

Why Is A Competitor Analysis Important?

The goal of a competitor analysis is to find a gap in the market and find out what your competitors' strengths and weaknesses are compared to your own. An analysis of your competitors is important because: It will help you figure out how to improve your own business strategy.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to do SEO analysis and competition research, you just need to keep doing it.

Keep making small changes, keeping an eye on your competitors, and keeping track of where you stand in the rankings.