How is SEO Competitor Analysis Important for Business Growth?

We all have heard of search engine optimization (SEO). It is a science and technique of improving the ranking of your website on search engines. But do you have any idea regarding SEO competitor analysis? Well, it is pretty obvious from the name that SEO competitor analysis is needed when you want your website to rank higher than your competitor’s websites. With proper analysis, you will be able to work on your strong and weak areas and stay ahead in the competition easily. Ask any Los Angeles SEO Agency and they will opine that this tactic has become extremely crucial for the success of your website online.

But for that, it is important that you know about SEO competitor analysis in detail and understands its importance. In this article, we will try and cover this point in detail.

What Do You Mean by SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis is also known as SEO competitive analysis in many places. In SEO competitor analysis, you need to look carefully into the SEO strategy that your competitor is adopting. It is recommended to look for competitor websites which are doing better than yours. In the analysis, you can find a detailed evaluation of all the backlinks, keywords, and various other kinds of optimization factors that are used successfully for your competitors in their websites. Once the complete SEO competitor analysis report is prepared, you can easily use the insights and work on the SEO strategy of your website accordingly.

It is quite surprising to know that you can learn huge volumes regarding SEO tactics and strategies for SEO competitor analysis. In fact, some of the strategies are unique but tried and tested. You should try them on your website and see the results. Along with understanding the SEO strategies of competitors, the analysis also helps in understanding the traffic potential in your website’s niche.

The Importance of Competitor Analysis in SEO

While carrying out an SEO for your website, you have to keep in mind that you are not alone in this niche in the market. There are thousands of other competitors in the same arena looking for a good place and success. You have to understand that the success of your SEO strategy is greatly dependent on the tactics and performance of your competitor’s websites. This is the reason that SEO experts have to carry out competitive analyses from time to time.

If your SEO strategy works perfectly, your website might rank in the first position of search results with a particular set of keywords. But there is no assurance that you can maintain the numero uno position at all times, for days and weeks and months. The ranking can change within a very short span of time. Therefore, you must keep a close watch on your SEO competitors so that you can identify the threats and work on them before it becomes too late.

How To Perform SEO Competitor Analysis?

Now that you have a fair idea about SEO competitor analysis, it is time to talk about the different ways in which you can perform this analysis successfully. Here are some of the few basic steps, which are quite common. You can learn and implement these steps quite quickly.

• Step 1 – Locating And Identifying The True Competitors

The first step of performing competitor analysis is recognizing the actual competition. Ask experts from the best digital marketing agency in NYC and they will tell you that in the first place, you have to learn about your true competitors in regard to keywords. This is because not all websites which have a higher ranking than yours for a keyword become your competitors. You have to be very thorough in finding your true SEO competitor during an analysis. For that, you have to do SEO comparison and research on various keywords. Make a note of the 10 or 20 websites which appear consistently  for almost all the listed keywords. There are many SEO tools for this and you can try any one of them for finding the most competitive keywords.

• Step 2 – Conducting Page Analysis

The next step of a competitive analysis is looking at the competing website and its top-performing pages. You have to follow minutely the keywords that are used in the pages and how they are used in the content. This tactic is known as keyword gap analysis. It is a part of the analysis that you find keywords on your competitor’s website, which they are ranking for. And sadly, your website does not have those keywords. 

Another aspect that you can try is checking the statistics for the website’s backlinks. From a competitors’ backlinks, you can decipher the domain authority of linked sites, the number of backlinks that they have, and the relevance of the linked content to the website. Once you know what your competitors are doing to get backlinks, you can implement those strategies to your website.

• Step 3 – Check Out for Keywords With High ROI

A high-end renowned business can have innumerable top competitive keywords for which it ranks high on search results with different keywords. As a small business, you might not be able to afford such an amount for your keyword-based SEO. You have to concentrate on the analysis efforts of your competitors on keywords, which promise of bringing in more leads, revenue, or profit. You can create unique content with the keyword, which is also relevant to your customers. You never know your competitors might not have thought about this yet. You have to find the gap between the audience and competition and fill up the gap successfully. The keyword can be simple or low-competitive, but if it brings the desired impact, the job is done.

• Step 4 – Creating and Executing a Content Plan

At this point, you have abundant data with you. With the help of this data, you will have to create an SEO competitor analysis report. Based on this report, you can start building your SEO content strategy. Right at the beginning of making your content plan, you have to create a list of keywords or a list of content ideas. It is recommended that you save this list properly in an Excel spreadsheet. Many SEO tools are also available for this job. Working with the tools is easy as keywords and content ideas are added to a list and they can be exported in a spreadsheet for creating analysis reports.

• Step 5 – Tracking Your Progress

Whatever changes you make on your website whether you have added new content, re-optimized old content, etc.  Make sure that you track the performance of the website. Keep a note that you make regular keyword audits. Not only this, you must generate SEO competitor analysis reports to understand and check if the strategies that you have implemented are working well or not. This work is best handled by various SEO tools available online.

There is no doubt about the fact that a thorough SEO competitor analysis takes lots of time and resources. But with proper analysis, significant results are obtained, which can be used for the betterment of your own business.

What Does Your Business Need To Beat the Competition?

Once you are done with identifying the biggest and strongest competitors of your website, it is time to think about what should be done so that you can soar ahead of them. If you ask a local SEO company in Phoenix, the SEO experts will opine in getting a good SEO competitor analysis done. This analysis will act as a roadmap and you can build your SEO strategy according to that. When you have a detailed evaluation report handy, you will be able to understand the various topics on which you need to focus, which keywords you must target, and from where to build the most effective backlinks for your website.

Identifying the Weaknesses and Strengths and Working on Them

We have already discussed the various steps that are done for SEO competitor analysis. Along with the analysis, this tactic helps in identifying the weaknesses and strengths in your website as well as in the competitor’s website. There are many important areas of SEO in which the strengths and weaknesses can be identified. Some of them are as follows:

•   Links – Are best practices followed for SEO when it comes to linking depth, structure, and depth? It is a very important thing to consider.

•   Keywords – It might be possible that the website has lost important and prominent keywords or has just begun ranking for new keywords.

•   Content–Website content is a very important part of SEO. You have to ensure that the content which is used for the website should be of high quality. There should be no lack of supporting pages or useless content on the website as these can become weaknesses in no time. Always ensure that your content is updated and valuable.

•   Technical Issues–Sometimes major technical issues prove to be detrimental to the health of a website. Do you experience slow page speed or have problems with mobile usability? Handle such issues at the earliest so that they don’t turn grave and become a problem area of the website.

•   Backlinks–You must have a clear idea about the total number of backlinks and the linking domains. Not all backlinks are useful. Backlinks from high-ranking and good websites will matter in improving website ranking in search engines. Sometimes backlinks are from spam sites as well. Be very careful of such sites.

•   Authority–Try and understand how authoritative the domain and the pages in your website are. Also, find out if the website has many authoritative backlinks.

Different kinds of tools for SEO competitor analysis

If you think that SEO competitor analysis is quite a simple thing, you are highly mistaken. It takes huge effort and work to generate proper analysis reports, which can be used by SEO experts. And to make the process a little simple and streamlined, various kinds of SEO tools are available in the market, which helps in simplifying the job to a good extent. Even with the best tools in hand, it is important to make competitor analysis, SEO an indispensable and integral part of your online marketing strategy.