“What is your competitor doing right?”
Before you begin any kind of SEO campaign, it is important to make a list of all the things that your competitors are doing correctly in their SEO strategy and then emulate what they are doing right so that you can improve on your own.
In this blog post, we being a best New York SEO Consultant will cover how to conduct an effective competitor SEO analysis and the benefits it provides.
What is a Competitor Analysis?
A competitor SEO analysis is a deep research into the data and digital footprint of your competitors. It is a comprehensive examination of your competition. Of course, it can be done on an individual basis or for an entire market segment, and it’s typically performed by firms that specialize in competitive intelligence. The goal is to identify what strategies are working best for your competitors and where they’re making mistakes so you can reverse engineer their success.
By conducting a thorough competitor analysis of your top-ranking competitors, you can easily discover new on-page SEO factors that are currently performing well in the search results, and then use them for your own benefit.
The 5 Benefits of Doing a Competitive Analysis
- It saves time- doing a competitive analysis allows you to learn more about your competition and how they’re structuring their SEO strategy.
- Understands weaknesses- one of the benefits of competitor analysis is the ability to see where they are struggling or lacking in certain areas like product visibility, convincing websites, etc.
- Provides direction-researching your current competition will ultimately provide you with information on what niche markets you could expand into as well as new angles for your content that will result in higher traffic.
- Useful for continual refinement-utilizing ongoing data from competitor analysis can help identify recurring problems in your customer base so you know what needs to be addressed continuously before it’s too late.
- Helps you anticipate trends- competitor analysis helps you see where your competition is going in the future so that it allows for a better understanding of how to be prepared for upcoming changes to SEO and digital marketing.
If taken seriously, competitor research can help you stay relevant for years to come.
How to Conduct an Effective Competitor Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analysis
- Identify 3-5 of your main competitors
According to the SEO company in Gurgaon It’s important to remember that doing a competitor SEO analysis is not just about keeping tabs on the business in the top spot, or even all the businesses within a specific industry. It’s about working out where you’re going to invest for the best return and how you can beat your competitors, not just how well they’re doing.
- Competitor Keywords Research
The important step of all is to carry out extensive competitor keyword research by analyzing all the relevant data such as their content, where they place it, and what backlinks they have acquired. This will help you figure out which keywords your competitors are targeting and how you can improve on your SEO strategy to beat them.
- Evaluate the competitors’ backlinks
The third step is to analyze all of the backlinks that point towards your competitor’s site. You need to know where all their backlinks are coming from, so you can figure out how to get the same type of backlinks that they have.
This will give you a good idea of how your competitors are acquiring their links as well as where they are pointing to. Once you identify each of the competitor’s linking sources, you can then look into the websites they are linking to and see if you can connect with them in some way for a link exchange. The more sites that link back to your site, the higher your SEO ranking will be. With our SEO services in fort Lauderdale we focus on high quality backlinks.
- Content Research
The fourth step is to analyze the content that your competitors publish, because this will tell you about their target keywords and whether or not they are making use of some additional SEO factors that are not working for you. If they are, then try to do the same thing on your own site to see how you can get an advantage over them.
If your competitors are doing something different than you, then you should try to figure out what their secret is by analyzing their content creation. Do they make use of white papers, videos, or images in their content?
After the content analysis, try to create or modify new content and post it online with the aim of ensuring that you perform better than your competitors in organic search rankings as well as social media.
- Research Their on-Page Factors
On-page optimization refers to all of the elements within a website’s HTML code that search engines look at to rank their page listings. To analyze your competitors’ on-page SEO, you simply need to do a search for the keyword they are targeting and see how their listing appears in the search results. What can you learn from this?
First, make note of all the keywords that each competitor is ranking for which terms are they targeting, and what volume of search traffic can they tap into with those terms? How are they structuring their content to target the specific keywords that correspond with the highest number of searches per month (Check this using Google Keyword Planner).
Second, check out how long each competitor’s description page is. Is it too long or too short? How many of the keywords are they targeting in this description page and is it relevant to what their site is about?
By analyzing the on-page SEO factors such as keyword density, title tags, meta descriptions, etc., helps to construct your sites better.
- Site Structure and Navigation Research
Analyze how well structured their site is, where they place their content and how easy it is to navigate through their site.
If you don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain, then you can never truly compete with them. Take a look at their external links and how they’re managing them. Are the links pointing to centralized pages, or are they spread out throughout the site? How about internal linking- is it structured well, or just a bunch of haphazardly linked words and phrases; are the links pointing to their best content, or are they sprinkled around the site?
This type of research is also crucial because it will help you check out how good their anchor text and keyword density is. Look at the most important pages on your competitor’s site and see what keywords are being used in the URLs and titles for these pages, and how frequently they are being used.
Conclusion
When it comes to competitive analysis for SEO, you absolutely must be looking at the sites of your competitors and asking yourself “What’s working well here? What can I adopt on my own site?” Take note of what elements your competitor is using and adapt them for use on your own site. When you start to see a pattern in what your competitors are doing, you’ll be on the right track to compete with them.
Since all of these factors are so important for your rankings and traffic volume, it only makes sense to focus some attention on improving them- by both reviewing your own site’s elements as well as keeping an eye out on those of your competitors. Then you’ll be able to pull off an easy win simply by mimicking what your competitors are doing- and just making sure that your content is better quality than theirs.