From an SEO perspective, your rivals are pretty well covered. They have backlinks, the essential on-page elements, structured data, and even a few reliable backlinks from reliable sites. You can probably see where their website is ranking every day. A thorough audit of your rivals’ websites and an SEO competitor analysis checklist is crucial to identify gaps and opportunities to outrank them.
Finding the advantages and disadvantages of your SEO and your competitors is accomplished using SEO competitive analysis.
You are attempting to identify any disparities between you and your rival, much like you would in a regular competitive analysis. But you’ll concentrate on SEO strategy using professional SEO Services rather than a marketing strategy.
By conducting a competitive analysis, you can examine your market as a whole, your competitors, and the state of the search market for keywords.
You must keep track of your SEO performance even if you are already at the peak of the search engine results for your most crucial keywords to prevent losing your position to a rival.
SEO Competitor Checklist
Although there are no strict guidelines for conducting an SEO competitor analysis in 2022, you may use the following checklist as a guide:
Define your competitors
You can establish your strategy and employ competitive tactics when you know your rivals. Additionally, you can determine whether existing competitors and new companies joining your market pose any threats.
Learning this will give you a realistic outlook on your company’s performance.
You should concentrate on the two primary competition categories. Direct competitors make up the first category. They are companies in your industry that market goods and services that are comparable to yours.
Those who provide a different solution to the same client pain points that you do are considered indirect competitors.
The same demographics will be your target market as it is for your rivals. Thus, you are also conducting consumer research.
Check Competitor Content
In addition to increasing conversions and client connections, a well-thought-out content marketing strategy could also increase website traffic.
Examining your competitors’ content is the first step in creating an effective content strategy.
You can learn what is working for the leading members in your niche by looking at the content types, posting frequency, and branding used by your competitors. Since you have a comparable niche and market, if it’s working for them, this should also work for you.
Make sure to review the following aspects when you visit the websites of your competitors:
- The themes and keywords are used in the headline. Many marketers employ the approach of SEO to boost content.
- The level of branding in the content.
- A call to action on the website.
- Product pages, reference tools, case studies, and other types of content.
- Internal linking structure and anchor text link.
You can develop a new content strategy that can outshine even your competition by researching these.
Analyze On-Page SEO
Since on-page SEO is one of Google’s key ranking elements, optimizing it is essential to perform better on popular search engines.
You should concentrate on improving on-page SEO components like content, header, title tag, pictures, URLs, and snippets.
The following are the on-page SEO components you need to look at:
- Headings
- Important Keywords
- Easy-to-read content
- Correct spelling and punctuation
- Links for further reading
- Bullet points
- Unique Content
To understand the information the pages provide and how to classify them, Google will look at these SEO elements.
Traffic Insights
You must identify the keywords driving organic traffic to your competitor’s websites to learn more about their traffic patterns.
It may be accomplished using free and paid SEO tools, enabling you to gather insightful data.
All the information gathered will enable you to analyze your competitors’ digital marketing tactics and roughly estimate potential competitors’ capabilities. By combining these two statistics, you may create persuasive pre-sales presentations.
For instance, by observing audience behavior, you can determine the effectiveness of your competitors’ efforts and obtain a glance into the traffic quality of your competitors. Visits, unique users, average visit time, and bounce rate can all be analyzed.
Backlinks
One of the most effective approaches to launching a link-building strategy is to examine the backlink profile of your competitors. Since link building is complex, starting by following your competitors is a good idea.
Obtaining a duplicate of your competitors’ link profiles is the first step in determining the success of their backlink strategies. Start with your two biggest rivals since the majority of the websites will typically have thousands of backlinks.
Tools for backlink analysis will be helpful in this case.
While examining backlink profiles, pay particular attention to these areas:
- To determine how near or distant you are from your competitors regarding backlinks and authority, compare your domain rating to theirs.
- To learn more about the link-building approach, look at which sites link to them.
- See which anchor texts are frequently utilized.
- In addition to being a vital ranking variable, it discloses the keywords competitors are attempting to rank for.
- Find out which pages are linked to most frequently. These are also going to be their best-performing pages.
Additionally, look at their link density and the number of monthly backlinks they receive. If they are doing better, you will indeed be able to raise the bar.
List of Tools used for Competitive Research
Any tool in your arsenal with features such as keyword research, backlink audit, content gap, etc., may be used. However, we strongly recommend using the below tools for competitor analysis if you don’t already have them:
SEMRush
The most challenging aspect of performing an SEO competitive analysis is converting data into insights you can utilize to build or enhance your content strategy.
To be successful with your online marketing, you must have a written content strategy.
SEMrush enables you to conduct competitive analysis on any web domain and utilize the information to improve your campaigns. This tool aids you in achieving four crucial goals:
- Keyword Research
- Competitor Research
- Backlink analysis
- Site Audit
Screaming Frog
One of the most reliable and sophisticated SEO competitor tools, Screaming Frog, offers comprehensive and valuable information on modifying and enhancing a website.
The desktop application Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool examines a website’s performance, technical issues, content, and many other elements, just like search engine crawlers do for every web page on the internet.
The Screaming Frog SEO Tool allows you to examine the most critical factors. It is a superb tool for website optimization and improving its ranking in search engine results. Additionally, it needs to be a tool that every web developer and SEO expert uses.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is renowned for having an exceptional backlink database and for being one of the top SEO tools available.
Ahrefs recently introduced a series of competitor analysis reports that display a range of rivals based on the number of relevant keywords. The content explorer features come in handy while doing the analysis.
Conclusion
Every six months to a year, based on the scope of your website and the number of active rivals, you should always follow the SEO competitor analysis checklist. You should execute some of it each month to stay competitive.
Maintain a close eye on your rivals’ adjustments so you can rapidly respond to their tactics.
Technically, an SEO competitor analysis can never be finished, whether by keeping an eye out for fresh pages, keywords, or increasing search features like highlighted snippets.
By keeping a beady eye on your competition, you may perhaps remain one step forward as websites and search results change.
Do SEO with Tetra Consultants
If you need help for competitor analysis for your business , contact Tetra Consultants today! Our SEO team can carry out analysis and suggest the best SEO strategies and best practices to improve organic marketing.