Do you want your website to rank higher, get more traffic and earn more sales conversions? The magic happens by uncovering Search Engine Optimisation opportunities that you may not have uncovered.
By analysing your competitors, it will help you answer questions like:
- Who are my actual SEO competitors?
- What keywords should I target?
- What topics should I cover?
- Where can I find back links?
- What do I need to beat the competition?
A basic principle way to analyse your competitors is analyse what is working for your competition (keywords, content, links, etc.) and leverage this intelligence to improve your own SEO efforts.
What exactly is Search Engine Optimisation (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 retail bottle shop — 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. The idea is not to copy your competition, but to leverage data to improve upon them, and use this knowledge to create better experiences for your visitors.
Analyse your competitors domains, analyse keywords gaps, look at the top content of your competitor’s, uncover link gaps and deep-dive into SERP Analysis.
This may sound obvious, but before you can do any SEO competitive analysis, you need to know who your search competitors actually are. You may think you know, but until you dive into the data, it’s not always obvious.
The “novice” way of identifying your competitors is to simply enter your top keyword in Google, then see which domains are ranking.
For increased accuracy, you could do this for 10–20 of your most popular keywords, track everything in a spreadsheet, and calculate which domains appear the most frequently and in what position.
Have this prepared for when we step through competitive keyword analysis!
