Types of SEO Content: Maximising Your Website’s Potential
October 2, 2024
Competitor analysis is integral to any search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. By understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can optimise your website to better compete in the search engines and show up in search results.
Although competitive SEO is an important segment of SEO in the early stages, many companies still ignore it. They erroneously believe they can achieve better rankings without knowing what their competitors are doing.
Knowing how to find competitors will help you conduct a thorough competitor analysis that will help your SEO efforts.
There are several benefits to performing an SEO competitive analysis:
An essential step in performing an SEO competitive analysis is identifying your actual competitors. When you know what websites and pages are ranking for the keywords and phrases you want to rank for, you can focus on improving their rankings rather than on irrelevant results.
While it may seem simple enough to find competitors in your organic search results, it can be a much more difficult task than you think.
To find competitors, you need to know first the different types of competitors you will encounter digitally:
When you think of competition, it’s only natural that the first thing that comes to mind is a direct competitor. A direct competitor is a business that offers the same or similar products or services as you and has the same customer base.
Indirect competitors are the ones in the same category that sell different products or services to solve a problem.
These are competitors that offer an alternative to a product or service that your business offers. However, both of you seek to solve the same pain points but addressing them is different.
Compared to the other types of competitors, replacement competitors are potentially dangerous because they present more than one way to solve the same problem you want to address. They are also the most challenging competitors to identify.
These competitors are not necessarily targeting the exact keywords as you, but they may rank for keywords and phrases related to your money keywords. For example, if you are a plumber, your niche competitors could be companies that sell plumbing supplies or home improvement stores that list plumbing services on their websites.
It’s essential to know what kind of information you need to gather from your competitors to ensure that you’re getting the correct data. Here are some of the things you need to look for in a competitive analysis:
Hold on, how do you find all of this SEO competitor information? Where should you look?
Based on their ads, you can tell a lot about a brand when it comes to their products and/or service, the price, and even the entire promotional program and budget.
You can check out government sources like their quarterly financial reports, annual surveys, and economic censuses.
Here you can access industry directors and statistics on local industry.
You can gain a lot of information when you talk to your competitors directly. You just need to have a simple and friendly conversation with them; and you’ll be surprised at how they like to talk about themselves and share their success stories and concerns.
When you have this information, you can compare your brand to theirs. To help you out:
Doing a competitive analysis starts with knowing where to look. Let these tips guide you in making an accurate competitive analysis that you can use to propel your marketing strategies.
Once you identify your website’s biggest competitors, you need to know what it will take to get ahead and achieve better keyword rankings. Find out their tactics, their strengths, and weaknesses. What are they doing that you’re not?
There is no “right” time to conduct an SEO competitor analysis. In fact, it’s always a good idea to conduct a competitive analysis. It’s not only for startups but can be done for every stage of your business.
We recommend that you revisit and update your competitive analysis periodically. Doing so will help you identify new trends in the market and maintain your competitive advantage over the other organisations in your industry.
Other businesses do an SEO competitor analysis on a large scale once a year. While others do it every quarter on a smaller scale.
You must always remember that even if you reach a point where your business is well-established, you should never neglect to do a competitive analysis. This is because industries are constantly changing, and every time a new business enters your industry, they do competitor analysis on you.
This also means that important details, such as the search volume of your keywords, search traffic, and search queries are always changing and its essential that you are able to keep up.
By conducting competitive analysis will help businesses identify opportunities to improve their products or services, provide better service to target customers, and increase profitability.
An SEO competitor analysis will also help distinguish your brand from the competition and focus more on underserved market opportunities, identify the best practices, and eliminate the worst ones.
Now that you have identified your competitors, here is a checklist to ensure you conduct a thorough SEO competitor analysis.
Take a quick look at the websites of the two to three competitors you have listed. Doing so will give you an impression of what they’re doing.
Just simply get a feel for their branding and website design. It is also a good idea to look at their landing pages, their blog post, and other content they need to publish.
Getting a high-level view of the competitive landscape is important. You can do this by getting some SEO metrics that will give you an idea of the competition. Some of the metrics you will want to look into organic and specific keywords, referring domains, and domain rating.
The domain rating indicates a solid backlink profile, and while referring domains may also indicate a strong site. As for organic keywords, the higher the number of organic keywords your competitors are ranking for, the better the site is performing.
Now, it’s time to get a bit technical. You can use any of the tools that we have listed in this post to crawl their websites. This will give you a big picture view of your competitors’ key technical SEO elements and technical SEO gaps, such as their title tags, headings and subheadings, meta descriptions, site structure, redirects, and more.
Take note of the important pages and find out how your competitors are optimising these. The tool will also reveal areas your clients are not optimising their pages.
As mentioned, some of the tools we added in this post can be used to check your competitors’ backlinks. Checking their backlinks is one of the most important steps in your SEO competitive analysis, and this is because the backlinks are one of the ranking factors.
Check their domain rating and yours to give you an idea of how close or far you are from the competitors when it comes to links and authority. Also, check the websites where they get their links from. Why?
Doing so will give you a clearer picture of their link building strategy. Here you will see if they’re building on directories or getting their links from guest posts. Additionally, you will also see if they are getting mentioned on news and media websites.
It’s also an excellent idea to check their frequently used anchor texts. Anchor texts are important ranking factors and will give you an idea of the keywords they are trying to rank for.
When you check your competitors’ backlinks, you will also be able to identify pages on their website that are most linked to, which are also the top-performing pages.
As part of this process, also analyse their link velocity and the number of backlinks they gain every month. Should you find that they are gaining more than you are, then it’s time to step up your link building.
As you do your SEO competitor analysis, opportunities will also open up for you to build links. After the process of identifying your competitor backlinks, you can use Link Intersect tools to find websites linking to your competitors but not linking to you.
When doing this, avoid replicating black hat SEO strategies, especially when you come across paid reviews.
Finding your competitors’ ads and social media strategies will also be useful for your SEO competitive analysis. Chances are, you have the same target audience, and if you find content that they share on social media that appeal to your target audience, then you can use this to your advantage.
On the other hand, ads can help you with your copywriting, and you can use their ads as a reference to write something better that will steal clicks away from them.
Featured snippets are one of the main goals that you should be aiming for. Optimising your content for featured snippet status is important, and you can do this by analysing your competitors’ featured snippets.
To find your competitors’ featured snippets, you can use the tools that we listed below to uncover information, such as Semrush.
Again, you can use tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs for this step. Identify the keywords your competitors are ranking for and the pages that they are ranking for those keywords. When you do this, you can get an idea of their content strategy.
With the data you gathered, find keywords you’re not yet targeting and start working on them. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you have to replicate their content. What you should do instead is to do something better.
There are a few aspects you need to consider to ensure you’re doing keyword competition analysis right to ensure you increase your search rankings. Some of them are:
To get the most insights from your competitors’ keyword usage begins with your audience. Developing a few buyer personas will allow you to learn more about how your audience interacts with your website. You can start building a list of relevant keywords you can use for your keyword research. You also need to update your buyer personas.
With your keyword competitor analysis, you now have an idea of your top competitors, which will help you perform accurate and meaningful research.
Doing so will help you uncover competitor keywords. This will help you improve specific keywords that you want to rank for. You can discover a few keywords that may benefit your marketing significantly, or it could also be just a particular keyword that you never thought of using until you search competitors’ websites.
Additionally, you will be able to find organic keywords, low competition keywords, and even branded keywords based on keyword data through a keyword competitor analysis.
Keyword competitive analysis will also be helpful when you’re trying to rank some paid keywords. From here, you will be able to know the exact keyword difficulty and search volume through a keyword gap analysis.
By doing so, all your efforts will be more worthwhile, and you know that your money is being put to good use by using only the top keywords as part of your SEO content strategy.
Here are the top competitor analysis tools that you can use as one of your SEO strategies:
Google Adwords Keyword Planner is a great tool for checking your competitors’ keywords. This will give you an idea of what keywords they are targeting and how much traffic they are getting.
It is a free online keyword research tool that allows you to find new keywords and estimate running ads on Google.
The Keyword Planner also has the following features:
Semrush is a great tool to check your competitors’ strategies and learn from them. You can use it to see what keywords they are ranking for, what backlinks they have, and what content is working well.
You can also use it to spy on their paid search campaigns and see how much they are spending on each keyword.
Some SEMrush features include:
Semrush is a great tool to check your competitors’ strategies and learn from them. You can use it to see what keywords they are ranking for, what backlinks they have, and what content is working well.
You can also use it to spy on their paid search campaigns and see how much they are spending on each keyword.
Some SEMrush features include:
MozPro is great when spying on your competitors’ activities. You can see what keywords they’re targeting and how their website ranks for those keywords. This information can give you insights into what’s working well for them and where there might be opportunities for you to improve your own SEO strategy.
Moz Pro is popular among SEO professionals for the following reasons:
One tool that can help with competitor analysis is Spyfu. Spyfu lets you see what keywords your competitors are targeting and the ads they’re running. This information can help you determine strategies to emulate and which ones to avoid.
Spyfu provides business owners with the following key features:
Majestic SEO is a competitor analysis tool that allows you to research your competitor’s websites and find detailed information about their backlink profile. This information can be used to improve your own website’s SEO and link building strategy.
Serpstat is an SEO and web analytics company that provides unique insights into the world of online marketing. You can use the tool for competitor analysis to see how your website is performing compared to your competitors. This is useful for understanding what aspects of your website need improvement and where you are doing well compared to others.
SERanking is an effective tool for competitor analysis. It provides in-depth information on your competitors, strategies, and performances. This allows you to identify their strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan to beat them at their own game.
Alexa is a web traffic analysis tool that can be used for competitor analysis. By looking at the Alexa Traffic Rank and site metrics, you can get an idea of a site’s popularity and how much traffic it receives. You can also use Alexa to research a site’s backlink profile and find out which other sites are linking to it.
Quantcast is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily analyse your competition. It provides detailed information about their online presence, marketing strategies, and audience engagement. This enables you to understand better how they are reaching their target market and what you can do to improve your own marketing efforts.
Yandex Metrica can get detailed insights into your competitor’s website traffic, including information on their top pages, sources of traffic, and more. This data can be instrumental in helping you adjust your marketing strategy and ensure that you are staying ahead of the competition.
The Searchmetrics Suite is a must-have tool when it comes to competitor analysis. With its extensive features, you can track your competitors’ SEO strategies and get insights into their strengths and weaknesses. This tool measures your website’s visibility on the web, gives you an overview of your SEO performance, and tracks your incoming and outgoing links.
CognitiveSEO can help you identify the keywords your competition is targeting, as well as the estimated monthly search volume and difficulty of ranking for that keyword and see which backlinks your competitors are attracting
There’s no better tool than AuthorityLabs when it comes to competitor analysis. With its intuitive and easy-to-use platform, you can track your website’s rankings for any keyword in any location against any of your competitors. This allows you to quickly see where you stand in the search engine results pages (SERPs), identify opportunities for improvement, and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
Technical SEO analysis is a vital element of your competitor SEO analysis. Doing a technical SEO audit of your direct competitors is crucial, which will involve checking the technical details of your website, comparing the results with the competition, and plugging any technical SEO gaps that may adversely affect your rankings. Here are some of the important technical SEO elements you need to analyse:
Internal links play a crucial role in a website’s user-friendliness. It helps search engines map, index, and find site pages. Distinguishable and descriptive anchor texts are used for internal links. A comprehensive internal link structure is important for search engines and users to navigate the whole site. To add to that, internal linking can also help improve your link authority.
Keeping the site structure simple and clean is the goal to ensure the best user experience and crawler rating. You should also consider the page depth, meaning there should be no page over four clicks away from the home page.
A site’s page speed is critical these days—no one will wait more than a minute for a website to load. Therefore, you need to look at this element when you’re running your analysis.
All websites should have a high level of security and are HTTPS protected. Search engines favour websites with SSL certification, which makes it important for search engine rankings.
Check your competitors’ websites for their mobile friendliness. Google has already introduced mobile-first indexing, which means that if you want a solid online presence, you need to ensure you have a mobile-friendly website to increase your search engine rankings.
Competitor analysis is a long process that requires consistent effort. Knowing your SEO competitors is critical to developing a successful SEO strategy.
Analysing your SEO competitors is critical in any successful SEO strategy. By understanding your competitors and what they are doing, you can adapt your approach to compete better. Be diligent in your research and stay up on the latest changes. Implementing these changes will help you stay ahead of your competitors.
Evolving Digital can help you rise above your competitors. Contact us today!
SEO should be consistent; therefore, regular SEO and competitive analysis can help you match search engine algorithm updates and competitors’ behaviours. Search engine algorithm changes have a significant impact on SEO strategies.
SEO should be consistent; therefore, regular SEO and competitive analysis can help you match search engine algorithm updates and competitors’ behaviours. Search engine algorithm changes have a significant impact on SEO strategies.
Discovering competitive keywords is an important part of an SEO competitive analysis. These keywords will help you compete and gain an advantage over other businesses in your industry.
To analyse your SEO competitors, you need first to identify your direct competitors, evaluate keyword difficulty and search volumes, analyse on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and other technical SEO elements, and examine site structure and user experience.
In SEO, competition means any websites that can be found by using the same search terms that you use. This can be a few or multiple competitors that show up on Google search results.
If you’re using PPC to market your products or services online, you know that it is one of the most competitive forms of marketing today. Therefore, competitors PPC keywords are the ones your competitors are using to rank on paid search.
Google Search Console is one of the best tools you can use for free today. It’s a platform that will allow you to assess your overall SEO performance and keep track of fundamental metrics. You can use this information by comparing it with competitors’ data, which will further improve your marketing strategies.
Discover How Analyzing Your Competitors’ SEO Strategies Can Propel Your Success and Boost Your Rankings.
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