Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms to keep things interesting (and to make sure that they’re making money). One of the best ways to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate Google’s next move is to keep a close eye on your competitors with competitor analysis.
After all, if they’re doing something that’s working, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to adjust your own SEO strategy to stay ahead of them.
Competitive intelligence is the ethical efforts to gain and analyze information about your competitors, best practices and their development.
In this article, we’ll take a look at competitor analysis: what it is, why it’s important, and how you can use it to improve your own SEO efforts.
Why Competitor Analysis Important for SEO?
One of the main reasons why competitor analysis is important for SEO is because it gives you an idea of how well other players in your market are doing with their SEO efforts.
If your competitors have high organic search rankings, it’s a sign that their SEO is in good shape and that you need to step up your game in order to compete.
On the other hand, if your competitors are lagging behind in terms of their rankings, that’s a sign that their SEO efforts aren’t as strong.
This is a great opportunity for you to overtake them and gain market share.
Competitor analysis also gives you an idea of the keywords and phrases that your competitors are targeting, so you can adjust your own targeting strategy accordingly.
How to Perform Competitor Analysis?
The first step in a competitor analysis is to identify your main competitors. You can do this by looking at who is ranking well for keywords that you’re targeting, or you can use competitive intelligence software to get deeper insights.
Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you’ll need to get an in-depth overview of their SEO performance. To do this, you can use a combination of tools, such as web analytics tools, keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, and link research tools to analyze their performance.
Additionally, you can use backlink data to see which websites are linking to your competitors and how they’re doing in terms of their own SEO efforts.
Find your competitors
Search through Google for a few keywords that your target audience are likely to search for. SERPs on that search query will give you the potential competitors.
You can take the first five websites that appear on organic results into account as competitors since those are probably getting 2/3 of all clicks.
These websites don't have to be in the same niche as you but you are trying to find the sites ranking better than your's for the keywords you want.
Doing a manual research like this may take longer than you expect so it would be better to use an SEO search tool like Ubersuggest to find the highest-value keywords and see who is ranking at the first of the SERPs.
Find keywords
If you found couple of competitor websites, you can search for their highes-value keywords or the keywords that their domains rank for.
It is important to find the keywords that your competitors outranking your's. Using this data, you can explore the keyword gaps that your competitors are ranking for but your's are not.
To fill the gaps, you can create content around these keywords and get ranked easier. In order to do this, we will soon give you competitor tracking with Uberseggest.
You can also determine when and where the flactuations on traffic data happened over years and see how Google search algorithm updates affected the site.
This data also give the information about the followings:
Domain Authority (DA)
It is the score that is measured from 0 to 100 to show how successful the website is in creating quality content. Google tends to feature content from the websites that have high-level domain authority score.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the hyperlinks that points to your site from other domains. The more the backlinks you get, the more the likelihood of your content is ranked better by Google.
You can use backlink checker on Ubersuggest to get detail data about the backlinks on your competitors' site.
Track competitors
It is not possible to track your competitors manually since the data about search results always keeps changing over time.
Using an SEO search tool is a must to track and analyze your competitors' top SEO keywords and keyword gaps as well as their keyword positions.
We use Ubersuggest to offer SEO services and track the competitors of our clients within a project.
Select one of the competitors from the list to see the keyword gap, the keywords your competitors are listed but you are not.
Click on the keywords and add them to the lists you create for keyword tracking.
Track competitor keywords
One of the best features of Ubersuggest is that it allows you to create keyword lists to track from the data listed on charts.
Create a keyword list first and then start adding keywords that your competitors rank for.
Track keywords that you are not tracking but your competitors are
Try keyword ideas for inspiration
Group keywords into different keyword lists
Research backlinks
Backlinks are great opportunity to rank your website pages at the top of SERPs. To guarantee the first position on the first page, your content should get four times more backlinks than the rest of the positions on page one.
Using backlink tool in Ubersuggest, you can find out where your competitors are getting their backlinks from.
Backlink analysis can help you in the following ways:
You can view what content is popular for your competitor
You can create a targeted list of websites to share your content with
Prioritize the audience you will reach with the relevancy and quality of the referring domain
Competitor Analysis Tips
In order to analyze your competitors, always keep these tips in mind.
Find your competitors' mistakes: Figure out what your competitors are doing wrong with a site audit report and check the health of their website.
Find the competitors' backlinks: Reach out to the websites that giving backlinks to your competitors to share your valuable content with them.
Find the pages with the most traffic: Check out the competitor's most performed webpages and create one for a similar topic if you don't have already or optimize the existing one.
Find unique keywords: Try long-tail keywords or lower search volume and lower search difficulty keywords if you are about missing opportunities due to the same keywords.
Competitor Analysis FAQ
What should you look for in a competitor’s website?
When doing competitor analysis, there are many things that you should look for in your competitor’s website. First, you’ll want to take a look at the quality of their content. Is it well-written and engaging? Does it contain keywords that your target market is searching for? If not, there’s a good chance that their SEO efforts are lagging behind.
Additionally, you’ll want to take a look at their metadata to see if they’re using relevant keywords and phrases in the title and description tags, as this can have a big impact on SEO rankings. Additionally, you’ll want to analyze their link profile to see which websites are linking to theirs and how many links they have pointing back to their website.
How can you use competitor analysis to improve your own website?
Once you’ve done a thorough competitor analysis and identified areas where you’re falling short, you can use that information to improve your own SEO efforts. For example, if you notice that your competitors are using certain keywords or phrases that you’re not using, you can adjust your content strategy to include those keywords or phrases.
Additionally, if you notice that your competitors are getting a lot of backlinks from certain websites, you can look into getting links from those websites as well. This can help you improve your link profile and potentially boost your organic search rankings.
What are some other benefits of competitor analysis?
Competitor analysis isn’t just useful for SEO purposes. You can use it to stay ahead of your competition in other areas as well. For example, you can use competitor analysis to identify areas where you’re falling short in terms of customer service, product features, price points, and more. Once you’ve identified areas where your competitors are doing better than you, you can make adjustments and improve your own offerings. This can help you stay one step ahead of the competition and ensure that you’re always offering the best product or service that you can.
What should you keep in mind when doing competitor analysis?
One of the most important things to keep in mind when doing competitor analysis is to stay objective. It’s easy to get caught up in your own competitive efforts and make decisions based on emotions rather than on data. Instead, you should use hard data to make decisions, such as web analytics data, keyword research data, and competitor performance data.
Additionally, you should keep an eye on emerging competitors. Just because a competitor isn’t ranking well today doesn’t mean they won’t be competing with you in the future. Pay attention to new entries in your market and adjust your SEO efforts accordingly.
Conclusion
Competitor analysis can be a valuable tool in your SEO toolkit. By monitoring your competitors’ SEO performance, you can stay one step ahead of the competition and ensure that your own SEO efforts are up to par. Additionally, you can use competitor analysis to identify areas where you’re lagging behind and make adjustments accordingly. However, it’s important to maintain an objective view and use data to make decisions, rather than relying on emotions.
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