SEO Competitor Analysis
SEO Competitive analysis is something that all website owners should be doing in today’s digitally competitive era. Yet, too many are either not doing it at all, or are doing it just halfheartedly.
A thorough and complete competitive analysis can be turned into your map of what you need to do to improve your website to be as good as your competitors.
It can also be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website as well as your competitors' sites for everything from SEO to search feature wins.
Utilizing this information, you can also discover the areas in which you are weak that you can improve upon them.
As well as identifying the areas where your competitors are weak, and then capitalizing on their weaknesses for your own website and search performance.
With SEO competitive analysis, you will be taking a step back and looking at the entire market area, where you stand, who your competitors are, and what your search landscape looks like for critical keywords.
Even if you are already ranking at the top of Google’s search results for all your most important keywords.
There will always be another site that is trying to take over your rankings and capitalizing on your own website’s weaknesses.
- In existing terms, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you:
- Learn what works and what doesn’t for your own industry.
- Find your competitors’ weaknesses, and capitalize on them.
- Find your competitors’ strengths, and get inspired by them.
- Understand what SEO tasks to take up while going forward.
- Understand the severity of outperforming competitors in the SERPs.
How to steal your competitors' traffic
SEO competitor analysis (aka competitive analysis) works as a powerful research strategy in helping you to rank higher, get more traffic, and earn more conversions. Its magic happens by uncovering SEO opportunities you may not have seen otherwise.
Competitor analysis helps successfully answer questions like:
- Who are my actual SEO competitors?
- What keywords should I target?
- What topics should I cover?
- Where can I find links?
- What do I need to beat the competition?
There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO, but the basic principle works like this: analyze what's working for your competition (keywords, content, links, etc.) and leverage this intelligence to improve your own SEO efforts.
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What exactly is SEO competitive analysis?
SEO competitive analysis involves researching the links, keywords, content, and more of your SEO competitors in order to reverse-engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.
Instead of guessing which keywords to target, content to create, or links to build, you can instead see what's already working for others, and build upon that success.
Consider a real-world example: Imagine you operate a grocery store — one of three competing stores in town. Your customers are happy, but you know they also visit other stores because they can't buy everything in one place. So you go on a road trip to gather competitive intelligence. You visit the other stores to understand the popular items they offer. By offering these items yourself — or even superior ones — you help your customers make fewer trips, and in turn, you gain more business.
There are many ways to do a competitor analysis for SEO. Consider this your starter guide. Here's what we'll cover:
- Finding Your True SEO Competitors
- Keyword Gap Analysis
- Top Content Analysis
- Link Gap Analysis
- Google SERP Analysis