When it comes to SEO, channelling your competitive spirit is very important as you can use it to analyze your market. It will also allow you to create an effective digital marketing strategy. The high-quality competitor research for SEO makes it easier to drive organic traffic from Google searches. If you want to find fresh opportunities, you should analyze the SEO strategies of your competitors.
What is Competitive SEO analysis?
A competitive SEO analysis is a detailed examination of your competitor’s backlinks, traffic, keywords and SEO metrics. A glimpse of the competitive landscape highlights your strengths and weaknesses and gives you the information to identify opportunities for improving your strategy. It will save you time and energy. You should also spot the content gaps, which will show your specific areas to focus your optimization efforts. Hence, you can target your audience with even greater precision.
When it comes to doing the SEO competitor analysis, having accurate tools makes a huge difference.
When doing keyword research, you should know which keywords to rank for. You should also be able to build your editorial calendar. You should list backlink opportunities in your editorial calendar and improve the user experience.
Following are some steps to run a competitive analysis for SEO-
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All eyes are on the competition.
One of the most common mistakes one can make when doing a competitive SEO analysis is not listing all of your competitors. Sometimes, some of the minor competitors could have the best content strategies. Hence, after analyzing your first five competitors, you will notice that they often target different keywords. They even get links from different websites. They also focus on other promotion channels.
There are different strategies for finding suitable sites. You should start by searching for companies related to your top competitors. You should also be able to categorize the new competitors depending on the number of similarities their products or services have with your brand.
You should also zero in on your high-level organic competitors with the organic competitor’s page. It is also essential to focus on the keywords your competitors use the most.
This is the phase where you can discover that the ranking pages on the search engine results pages, called SERP, are not always populated by your business competitors. The websites that spend their pages for the keywords and rank higher on the organic search are your competitors.
This research also alerts you to new brands and engaging in online communities, and keeping up with new trends helps you monitor campaigns.
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Deep dive keyword research.
After you have defined your main search competitors, the next step of the competitive SEO analysis is to dive deep into the keyword research, and you should start by listing the keywords which define your product and brand as the long-tail keywords you want to rank for.
The keywords should be relevant to your audience and help you reach your general marketing goals. Suppose you are trying to sell email marketing software. A keyword such as ‘email marketing job’ will not be a good fit if your main goal is more leads and sales. However, this keyword can be added to your list when you create the topic clusters and help the search engine’s algorithm associate your brand with more relevant keywords.
You should check the keywords and see which competitors are ranking for that you aren’t. You can see the big picture and the breakdown of specific terms to tackle using several analysis tools.
The real-time volume and click rates data also help you set your priorities based on the SEO strategy. You should have a look at the medium-volume keywords. One should also check the declining search rankings. Many people need to remember to omit a low-volume keyword. However, keywords competitors have not used can still be added to your editorial calendar.
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Content analysis- a peek behind the performance.
After you have an initial list of keywords, it is time to see which posts perform the best and what formats your audience prefers.
Make people simply have a look at the overall traffic. However, it is not enough when analyzing the content. Following are the key points one should look at when you want to get an accurate representation of the content analysis-
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Keyword analysis.
You should investigate what keywords your competitors are ranking for and focus on their top three keywords.
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Traffic analysis.
It is essential to conduct competitive research to find the top pages your competitors are receiving traffic to and where they are receiving that traffic from.
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Content analysis.
You should analyze the competitor’s sites to spot their weaknesses and check what types of content competing websites are used to target keywords.
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Backlink analysis.
Conducting a thorough analysis and looking at the backlink profile of your competitors, checking their analysis profile and how natural their links give you an insight regarding their work.
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Backlink breakdown.
Link building is often left behind when maintaining an SEO strategy. When you come across a full link of backlink opportunities, you compare these to your backlinks and find the ones which are located in highly relevant and authoritative sites.
You can also get the referral website from the incoming traffic features, and once you identify the top referring sites, you can click on the sites to get a more in-depth picture of the domains sending traffic.
You can look at the competing posts to compare the number of backlinks they have received. It is important to pay very close attention to the domain authority of the websites by giving a backlink as well as a backlink presence.
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SERP feature analysis.
Landing a place in one of the SERP features helps you bring more traffic and these features are taking up more space on Google. Thus, competitive SEO analysis is more effective when it is performed regularly and this way you will be able to get more traffic to your site.