Competitor Analysis for SEO
Finding out your competitor's SEO secrets could dramatically improve your website's organic traffic.
Find your industry SEO secrets & implement them
Prioritise & maximise your SEO tasks
Understand the difficulty of your niche
It is far easier to use an idea that already works well for your competitor than to come up with a new idea and just hope it will work.
By analysing your competitor’s SEO strategy you can assess their strengths (replicate them) and weaknesses (take advantage of them.)
What questions can competitor analysis answer for you?
- Firstly, who are my competitors?
- How are my competitors building links? If so, is it successful?
- Are my competitors ranking higher for the same keywords?
- Which content does my competitor have that we don't?
An overview of competitor analysis:
Identify Competitors
Of course, we need to find out who your actual competitors are. Are your physical competitors the same as your virtual?
Analysis the general metrics
Lets get some basic stats for your competitors such as Domain rating, referring domains, organic keyword rankings, estimated organic search traffic etc
Analysis their backlinks
We can find out where their backlinks are coming from, how quickly they are building them, what types of backlinks are they earning?
Find our competitors organic keywords
Lets see what keywords are driving organic traffic to your competitors site and see if we can target the same ones.
Build a strategy
With all of this data, we can analysis the results together to create a successful SEO strategy that is going to help generate more organic traffic to your website.
Do you really know who your competitions are?
I always get a strange look from new clients when I ask them this question, often as part of my SEO services. Of course in some industries this is very clear, though often there is a difference between your offline and online competitions.
For example, if you sell a specific type of insurance (classic cars) you may have one or two offline competitors but a dozen more on the internet. However, you may of fallen into the trap of following the offline competitors when in fact your online competition is much different.
The internet has enabled us to become less reliant on competitors in our own industry and more reliant on the people we are trying to overtake for that coveted top spot - Google's first page of results.
Keyword Analysis
This is where competitor analysis gets exciting. First, we need to identify the terms that our competitors are targeting and check if they are ranking highly for these keywords. This will help us identify the keywords that are driving traffic to their site.
We can then examine these keywords with a variety of metrics such as search volume, cost per click and conversion rate. We will then start to form a targeted list of keywords that we need to rank for in order to beat our competitors.
Targeting the right keywords is a challenge. It's often difficult to know which ones will lead you into profitable traffic streams, and it can be costly if your strategy fails. That’s why I help by strategically guiding my SEO clients through this process every step of the way with an initial keyword analysis that helps you identify your target audience so that they become more receptive to what you have for them down the line via content marketing or advertising campaigns. A thorough competitor keyword analysis enables us to determine how competitive any given market may be - both in terms of its over-all volume as well as within particular niche areas – allowing us then formulate strategies accordingly before diving headlong into competition mode!
Backlinks
Your search engine optimisation (SEO) is important and we all know it’s not only about keywords. It's also important to learn about our competitors backlink profile as referring domains still form an important part of Google's algorithm.
Many people want to rank high in Google, but a backlink strategy is required. The first step for acquiring links would be researching the best link sources and identifying websites that are likely interested in linking to your brand or company website.
The next thing you need to do after research comes outreach: ask them if they're interested enough about what you have on offer so as not only become linked with their site but also provide an incoming source of valuable content which will bring more visitors (and potential customers) over time
For example, if we notice that one competitor has a tonne more links than us and all those are coming from the same website, it might be worth looking at their content on that site in order to see how they're getting so many referrals!
