Competitor SEO analysis is an essential part of website analytics. The main objective is to figure out which SEO strategy the competition is using so that you can stay one step ahead of them. In light of this, one of the essential steps in formulating a plan to enhance SEO on a website is to investigate the SEO strategies used by rival websites and identify those that are successful and those that are not.
What does competitor SEO analysis include?
- Keywords – their types (commercial or informational) and, if they were omitted, which you can use in the future.
- Backlinks – types of links, daily and monthly growth, and which links can be duplicated on the website. In addition, you will track what anchors a competitor uses and what percentage of nofollow and dofollow comes from donor sites.
- Traffic research, namely the landing pages of a competitor.
- Content – how big are the competitors; what are the metrics, word size, LSI, and keywords?
Why is SEO competitor analysis a necessary process? According to statistics provided on Siteimprove, only 10% of Google search engine sites receive clicks, likely due to poor SEO. If a website is not included in this percentage, then you can be certain that competitors have already established a presence. To change this, optimization is key. It is important to remember that website SEO does not work in isolation – optimization is always based on competitor performance. Keep in mind that you cannot expect to achieve success in your field if you continue to disregard your competitors. After all, you are in a position to get insight into their successful and unsuccessful SEO tactics and then use that information in your SEO approach.
SEO Competitor Analysis Template
How do you conduct competitor SEO Analysis? What should you look for? First, let’s take a quick look at all the processes to determine an SEO strategy.
Identify Competitors
Determination of competing sites is carried out by SEO issuance – based on the keys, categories of the store, or the list of services.
If you need to find your competitors within the e-commerce space, you should shift your focus away from keywords and more toward the domains of your rivals. Not all competing online stores will have the same structure, products, and the same number of categories. As a result, in most circumstances, every category will have at least one competitor. If the site already has traffic, you can find a competitor using Ahrefs by entering the desired domain into the search.
Analyze the Competitive Landscape
After reaching this point, you will now know how tough the competition is in terms of SEO. You can establish how far ahead or behind your competition you are by gathering certain fundamental SEO metrics. Analyze, for instance, your domain rank, the number of inbound links to your website, and the projected amount of traffic from organic search. This can be done using the Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool.
The following steps will help deepen your understanding of how competing websites work.
Study Backlink Growth
Google uses the number of referring domains to determine whether or not a website is trustworthy and relevant. In addition, they are a critical aspect of building business relationships and partnerships. The first step is to identify the most valuable link sources that your competitors use; these are the links that competitors rely on. Next, see what type of mentions for links: comments, spam, blogger reviews, or a few words in articles. Then, create a mutually beneficial collaboration offer for your sources similar to or better than your competitors. This way, you can hijack an effective linking site.
Study Traffic Breakdown by Country
Pick the top countries where your competitors get the most organic traffic. Next, determine the regions – which audience to target your attention to. Work not only the first three positions but also the next several. Perhaps it is in these areas that the potential for the growth and prosperity of a company can be found. Then why not adapt your website by translating it into the languages of those countries?
Spy on Competitors’ Organic Keywords
Run an analysis tool that finds each domain’s organic keywords and saves the results so you can use them in your SEO strategy. To begin, you will discover that some of the most important connections leading to organic traffic are maintained by your competitors. This can be done by sorting keywords by country of interest in most tools. Next, the selected words should be “run” through the Keyword Difficulty (KD) check, indicating difficulty. If your analysis finds that it’s high, it will take a lot of links to rank.
Find Competitors’ Most Popular Content
Determine the trends – which content of websites is the most popular among users? What topics are the audience interested in? It can be:
- Informational articles.
- Reviews.
- Infographics.
- Video.
- News.
- Product pages, etc.
If you find in your analysis that any specific types of content are driving organic traffic and converting, it’s essential to incorporate them into the content plan and SEO strategy.
Learn From Competitors’ PPC Ads
Headlines and tags for PPC ads bring profit to companies. Therefore, keyword research is worth including to enhance your SEO strategy. However, sometimes marketers overlook these words in the regular analysis of competitors’ keywords.
11 SEO Competitor Analysis Tools
We have compiled a list of 14 of the most powerful and user-friendly SEO analysis tools available today, specifically to make your life easier. In addition, some of them allow competitor web traffic analysis.
Analyze usability and improve conversions on your site; Try it for free.
SE Ranking
During a regular or paid campaign, the new analytical tool that is part of the SEO platform analyzes the traffic that competitors receive and determines the worth of that traffic. In addition, it will help you learn about the domain and website trust score to enhance your website’s SEO.
The company’s offices are worldwide – in London, Palo Alto, Minsk, Kyiv, and Moscow. Wargaming.net, Zapier, Hunter, Trustpilot, and Cars.com use the platform’s services.
SEMrush
The company offers five tools for analyzing competitive websites. Conduct traffic analytics, organic research, and ad crawling at your service – brand monitoring and social media tracker.
The founder of the company is Oleg Shchegolev. Branches are located in cities: Dallas, Boston, Trevos, Prague, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Limassol. SEMRush’s clients include P&G, Vodafone, Forbes, Walmart, and Quora.
Ahrefs
Site Explorer combines organic traffic research, backlink checking, and paid traffic research. It is a great SEO competition analyzer, and you should try it.
Dmitry Gerasimenko founded the company, and the office is registered in Singapore. Such companies use the services of the tool as CloudApp, Evolution Communications, Omnisend, Veneta, and Interflora.
SERPstat
Learn about the benefits of your competitors’ top pages, track growth dynamics, and compare data across five search databases simultaneously.
The company’s founder is Oleg Salamaha, who belongs to the Internet marketing agency Netpeak Group. Rakuten Viber, Work.ua, Prom, Citrus, and Privat Bank are among their top clients.
SimilarWeb
In addition to analysis tools, the platform provides data on the best websites worldwide in different categories on effective strategies and advertising. In addition, the Digital Marketing Intelligence tool can help research competitor data.
Clients include Booking.com, Dentsu, Adidas, Google, and The Economist. The company’s offices are on all continents – New York, Tel Aviv, San Francisco, London, Burlington, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Paris, Sydney, Reston, Munich, and Kyiv. It would help if you carried out either an SEO competition analysis or an SEO competitor study, and you will want SimilarWeb for this.
SpyFu
Receive complete data in CSV, PDF, and Google Sheets on the ranks of your competitors as well as the techniques they employ. First, the program analyzes the most productive and significant competitors in the market, after which it locates smaller competitive organizations. When analyzing the success of a competitor’s campaign, the application also analyzes the competitor’s unsuccessful techniques, which enables you to avoid making the same errors.
The platform’s loyal customers include Adobe, Microsoft, SalesForse, and Twilio.
Moat
The Moat Pro tool provides data to track dynamics and changes on a rival site over the past three years. You’ll always be one step ahead of the competition with instant alerts and customizable search tools.
The company is part of Oracle Advertising. Voxmedia uses these tools, Vice, Twitter, AOL., and iSpot.tv.
iSpionage
Investigate any blind spots in your marketing strategy by utilizing a competition intelligence tool. This analysis uses a database of PPC and SEO terms from the previous seven years.
Since 2009, the company has been under the control of TapClicks Inc. Research findings from these powerful tools are used by companies such as Autodesk, Adknowledge, Marin Software, and GroupM.
Simply Measured
With a social media listening tool, you can understand your audience’s thoughts about competing sites, track brand voice, benchmark, and identify gaps in your campaign. In addition, the platform provides advanced capabilities to understand your audience better.
Chicago Bulls, UNICEF, Subaru, Columbia, and Shopify have used these analytics tools since 2018.
Ontolo
Among other marketing tools, the platform provides tools for ultra-fast analysis – competitors’ websites, content, links, and reviews. In addition, a complete list of digital assistants for research work and prices for services are on the website.
Ben Wills created the platform in 2015.
BrightEdge
With the assistance of the Share of Voice tool, you will be able to recognize the most significant competitors, arrange them in descending order of significance, and acquire knowledge regarding their behavior, such as how aggressive they are, how their content is displayed on various devices, and so on. The platform assists in identifying potential points of competition within your specialized field.
Jim Yu and Lemuel Park founded the company. The company has offices in Foster, New York, London, Seattle, Chicago, Cleveland, Tokyo, and Sydney.
Conclusion
Make your SEO competitor analysis the foundation of marketing strategy decisions, and you will see your rankings go up. Now you know how to do competitor analysis in SEO. Remember, sSuccessfuls, are a gol mine and a source of invaluable information for running your business and enhancing your SEO.
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