If you want to be successful as an online publication, store, or service provider, you need to run an SEO competitor analysis. The secret to capturing your audience’s attention lies in impeccable search engine optimization (SEO). How do you achieve a higher SEO score on primary search platforms, though?
SEO is essentially producing online content that will rate highly on a search engine platform, like Google. For example, an article on how to get a job at Uber will need you to optimize the content correctly using SEO practices to appear prominently online. If your optimization is effective, the blog will show as a top search result.
A successful SEO strategy means understanding who your SEO competitors are and why they present such a powerful rivalry. Before you can do that, you must first explore SEO’s influence on your content, online visibility, and digital marketing strategy.
What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
Now that you know the definition of Search Engine Optimization, why not apply it to your business as you move toward a stronger online presence? Have you produced high-quality content and added the right keywords? If you still see no improvement in your SEO rating, it might be time to reconsider your strategy through an SEO competitor analysis.
Thorough SEO competitor analysis is all about understanding your rivals in the industry, but not your business competitors as much as the Top Ten placeholders for your chosen niche. Implement the best SEO strategies for your target market by finding which keywords, links, images, and content work for your competition and integrating these aspects into your platform.
Did you know that around 67% of all clicks on Google search go to the first five general results? Most users don’t bother clicking through to the next search result pages, even though there are thousands of results available. You could be in those top five search results if you produce optimized and captivating content by learning from your SEO competitors.
Nine Steps: How to Analyze Your SEO Competitor
It’s a fantastic strategy to commit to a concrete plan to analyze and understand your SEO competition. Start with these nine easy steps:
Understand Your Business
SEO success lies in understanding your business, keeping in mind that this is how you will understand your target market online. For example, if you are a small news website, you will not easily compare your statistics or audience with that of major channels, and you will need to adapt your approach.
As a more local publication, you will need to allocate different ideas to industry titans, including your target audience, success measurement, and overall standards. Make a list of your business goals, mission, and vision. Compare that to the size and market of your business.
If your SEO expectations match a bigger company, you may need to set more realistic goals for success. The change will include choosing keywords and backlinks to optimize your unique position.
Identify your SEO Competitors
Once you understand how your business fits into the bigger picture, the next area of focus is your SEO competition. A quick Google search can help you with that—plugin the keyword search you hope to find yourself in, and look at the results. Your SEO competitors are those sites whose content appears under the top organic search results for your keywords.
For instance, Switch Up (a tech boot camp guide) might write an article on the best Java courses, and Course Report (another boot camp publication) may choose the same topic. If these articles consistently challenge each other’s SEO rating, then they are SEO competitors. They may not be competitors in the field or even in the same country.
This method is called a search engine results pages (SERP) analysis, and it is one of the best ways to identify your SEO competition.
Get FREE Digital Marketing Courses and Tutorials Here!
Analyze Your Competitor SEO Metrics
Tracking SEO Metrics is critical to data analysis and SEO improvement. Along with tracking your SEO metrics, you must be aware of your competitor’s metrics, too.
Some essential SEO metrics include your competitor’s:
- total clicks,
- website traffic,
- organic keyword usage,
- content-type, and
- quality.
For example, an online publication might want to use competitor analysis to find the metadata and the title characteristics like length, keywords rankings, and tags. Look at the content and writing style, introduction, and size of the articles, comparing it to your presentation. You can use an SEO competitor analysis tool like UberSuggest to analyze these metrics easily.
Study Your SEO Competitor Backlinks
If there’s anything you need to know about SEO, it is the importance of active backlinks. A webpage usually performs better when it has many backlinks to draw in the audience. Figure out what backlinks your competitors are using and how many times these appear in each part of the website.
It’s also necessary to understand where the backlinks appear on your competition’s websites so that you can analyze backlink growth. The analysis includes monitoring the number of new website backlinks on the page. You can do this by clicking on the inbound links and downloading the backlink data to help you understand which ones generate the most traffic.
Find Your Competitor’s SEM Strategies
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is essentially a digital marketing strategy that increases your SEO rating. Figuring out a competing business’ marketing strategies will go a long way, and the best place to start is by looking through their social media pages and official website.
Read the Facebook posts, Instagram giveaways, and other digital marketing campaigns relating to your industry. Analyze the audience participation via comments, likes, and shares. Compare these metrics to your SEM strategies, and adopt your competitors’ successful marketing strategies.
Analyze Your Rivals’ Front-End Web Page
The success of online content and SEO is heavily dependent on optimal front-end development, whether HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. It would help if you had proper coding for optimal user experience and user interaction (UX/UI) design.
User experience and interaction dictate the traffic on your webpage. You will need to analyze your rival’s front-end page to understand their UX/UI structures, including their landing page content, webpage loading time, and HTML page info.
It also involves noticing aspects like font, color, and the template of the page.
Find Your Competitors’ Traffic
A great way to find an untapped target audience is to find the traffic data for your SEO competition. Search for the demographic and location where your competitor is most popular. For example, if your target keyword is receiving traffic from India, you might want to customize your SEO strategies to a primarily Indian market.
Remember, you don’t want to necessarily copy competitive keywords as a new business. A similar business finding success with these keywords doesn’t mean you will replicate this momentum, but it does expand your horizons through an SEO competitor analysis.
Examine the PPC Data
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is beneficial for SEO boosters. By using PPC, your website connects with a large audience base. If you have access to a similar business’ PPC data, it will better understand the market.
Find out your competitors’ PPC sponsors and PPC keyword placements. However, we don’t recommend trying to replicate their PPC structures. Instead, develop an idea of how they leverage PPC to get a higher SEO ranking.
Several marketing agencies can lend assistance in more effective PPC campaigns, so don’t struggle with it alone.
Learn from Positive SEO Strategies and Avoid Negative Ones
The final step is to make a list of all the SEO attributes and strategies of your SEO competitors. Learn from their positive growth strategies and their mistakes. Your business needs to remain unique to hold on to the market, but you can use SEO competitor analysis to improve your position.
Key Takeaways
Learn from your SEO competition if your business feels stuck:
- Understand your market and needs
- Explore your competitor’s SEO metrics and growth
- Adopt positive strategies and avoid your SEO competitors’ failures
Your company has individual goals—stick to them. Use SEO competitor analysis to update your strategy occasionally, but only as a guide.
Celebrate 2021 With the Best SEO Strategies
The global pandemic has pushed life further onto the digital platform. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce sales increased by 30% over the first few months of 2020, a testament to burgeoning online activity.
If you want a successful business in 2021, you must employ a successful SEO campaign that keeps you visible and active in the growing online marketplace. Whether you are a business owner or a freelance writer, everything you need to know about SEO analysis and metrics is at your fingertips. Today’s audience values user experience, and having your content featured in a Top Five search results adds to this convenience.
Stop putting all your eggs in one basket—expand your SEO strategies and rates. Regular SEO competitor analysis will quickly improve your strategy and help you gain traction over your SEO competition. You can even improve your content rating by taking free online SEO courses on Udemy, ClickMinded, and SEMRUSH.
