Why Competitive Analysis Is Crucial in SEO
If you’re in the business world, you understand the significance of comprehending your competition to achieve success. In the realm of search engine optimization (SEO), this understanding is doubly important.
Your SEO endeavors are not isolated. Securing the number 1 position in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) entails displacing the current occupant of that spot. “When collaborating with a new client, one of my initial steps is to perform an SEO competitive analysis. This process aids us in comprehending our position in Google, our competitors’ positions, and precisely what actions are necessary to bridge that gap.” says Pavel Buev, SEO expert at Ocean Power Agency.
Why Competitive Analysis Is Essential for SEO Success?
Competitive analysis is a fundamental aspect of any SEO strategy. SEO competitor analysis involves gathering information about your competitors’ websites and utilizing that data to enhance your website’s performance. The objective is to understand what your competitors’ websites are doing so that you can leverage it to your advantage — whether it’s analyzing their high-quality content or identifying the specific keywords they use to attract more organic search traffic than you.
As mentioned earlier, SEO is inherently competitive. Achieving a certain ranking on Google means displacing someone else. Therefore, comprehending your competitors’ keywords, backlinks, and content strategies is crucial for devising a plan to surpass them.
Conducting a competitive analysis is crucial for your SEO success because it enables you to set realistic goals for your website. Through this analysis, you uncover details about your competitors and gain insights into your own website’s position in Google. Are you significantly trailing behind the competition for your target keywords? Do you need to reassess the keywords you are targeting until you’ve gained enough momentum to compete with the major players? Will you need to implement a link building strategy to fortify your backlink profile? Understanding precisely where you stand among your competitors will empower you to make informed decisions and ultimately achieve greater SEO success.
Identifying Your SEO Competitors
When I start working with a new client, I usually request a list of their competitors. These competitors could be businesses they aspire to emulate, or better yet, ones they aim to surpass. However, just because a particular business is a direct competitor doesn’t necessarily make them an SEO competitor. This is because your competition might not rely on Google for their marketing efforts. They might be allocating their entire budget to paid ads, social media, or another form of digital marketing. Therefore, while they may be a leader in your industry, attempting to outrank them on Google might present a straightforward path to success.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to identify who you need to surpass for your target keyword — just Google it. For example, if you want to rank for “electronic supplies,” search that keyword, and the businesses that appear on the first page of Google are your direct competitors.
You can utilize an SEO tool like Ahref’s Keyword Explorer to conduct a quick competitive analysis for this keyword. This tool often provides statistics for the top-ranking websites for a given term. You can easily view the number of backlinks they have, their domain ratings, and their estimated organic traffic.
Things to Monitor in Your SEO Competitive Analysis
To conduct a more detailed SEO competitive analysis, you can create a spreadsheet to keep track of their SEO performance from different perspectives.
I prefer to examine the following:
1. Number of Indexed URLs
2. Estimated Organic Traffic
3. Number of Keywords
4. Number of Blog Posts (including the type of content they publish)
5. Number of Keywords from Blog
6. Estimated Blog Search Traffic
7. Target Keyword
8. Mobile Pagespeed
9. Desktop Pagespeed
10. Backlinks
11. Referring Domains
12. Domain Authority
For added visual clarity, you can use color-coding.
These metrics provide a straightforward comparison of your standing against your competitors. You can base many decisions solely on this data. For example, if all your competitors have a domain rating of 35 or higher, and yours is 20, it’s evident that you need to bridge that gap.
Once you’ve established some high-level SEO objectives, you can delve deeper into the competitive analysis by conducting a backlink analysis and keyword research to identify their rankings and the sources of their links. You can also identify which blog posts generate the most relevant traffic to their websites and use this information to shape your content strategy. By identifying their top-performing pages and the authoritative sites linking to your competition, you can challenge your main competitors by creating specific pages to surpass them in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
You can even perform a competitive analysis on a single blog post to determine how you can outrank it when targeting the same keyword. Where are the high-quality backlinks coming from? Are they pursuing new keywords that you haven’t targeted before? What are their long-tail keywords? This detailed analysis of individual blog posts can reveal crucial insights about your competitors’ content.
Remember to also record your website’s statistics when conducting your competitive analysis. This allows for easy comparison with your competition.
How to Establish Goals Based on Your Competitive Analysis Findings
Regardless of the depth of your competitive research, asking yourself the following questions can guide you in setting goals:
1. What are we excelling at?
2. What deficiencies do we need to address?
3. Which areas require the most enhancement?
Upon completing your competitive analysis, you might discover that your domain authority matches that of your competitors; however, your optimization for the target keyword is not as effective as theirs. A few straightforward adjustments could propel your ranking above theirs within weeks.
Alternatively, you might realize that your website’s page speed is significantly slower than that of your competitors, holding you back. In this case, your goal for the next quarter could be to prioritize page speed and witness a surge in organic traffic.
In a more realistic scenario, you may recognize that while you are optimized for the right keywords, your competition’s Domain Rating (DR) surpasses yours by a large margin, their blog contains thousands more entries than yours, and they boast 20,000 more backlinks than yours. In such cases, it’s prudent to establish a long-term goal to surpass your competitors. Meanwhile, conducting a keyword gap analysis and targeting a few less competitive keywords can help you gain momentum and drive organic traffic while you work on improving your keyword rankings and backlinks.
In conclusion, conducting a competitive analysis before commencing any SEO campaign is crucial. It enables you to comprehend your competition’s digital marketing strategy and how they effectively (or ineffectively) create engaging content for your target audience. Armed with this knowledge, you can set goals to ensure that your website outperforms theirs!
