Whether you are willing to start an online business or have already been in the field for a long time, the ultimate goal is to rank top in the SERPs, increase traffic to your website, drive sales, etc. All your SEO marketing strategies would yield better results when you add competitor analysis to it. Competitor analysis would help you analyze the strength and weaknesses of your competitors so that you can work on marketing tactics to achieve your target goals. With competitive intelligence, you can work on strategies to reach your target audience and be ahead of your competitors.
Analyzing competitors’ skills and weak points makes your portfolio stronger that can help you grow your business website plus, it’s a great proposal to run the SEO campaign effectively. You can hire a group of SEO specialists that can conduct SEO competition analysis for your website.
What is competitor analysis?
In the introduction, I gave you a hint as why competitor analysis is required. So, before going further, let’s understand what it is.
It is basically an SEO strategy that is performed to target competitors and to know their techniques. Here, you need to identify your major competitors and conduct a little bit of research on their tactics. By doing so, you would be able to develop a perfect strategy that will build a sustainable image of your brand.
It can help you learn the pros and cons of an action. You can definitely apply the pros on your website and can avoid the cons. With this strategy, you can stay updated on the trends and can follow them to build a strong personality for your website.
SEO competitor analysis you should conduct
1. Competitor keyword analysis
A competitor keyword analysis is an important basis of any SEO research. Here you need to focus on the keyword for which their website is ranking. It is the best way to find out the basic keywords that you can use while writing content, title, or meta for your website. Competitor keyword analysis also gives you high traffic keywords as a result that you can add to your website to bring more traffic to it.
2. Competitor backlink analysis
Links are generated to increase your webpage visibility as much as possible. Competitor backlink analysis helps you to dig out those websites that are providing backlinks to your competitors' websites. To rank your website it is very important to get backlinks from authoritative websites. While conducting Competitor backlink analysis, you need to note down the name of the websites your target competitors are getting links from so that you too can get links from those websites.
3. Competitor website analysis
Here you perform SEO research that helps you to analyze the website of your competitor, like what techniques they are using, on what platform it is, and what kind of tools they are using to run the website. Website analysis helps you to understand the whole frame of your competitors’ business. By conducting this, you can analyze the goals of their business and work on your website accordingly.
Some more benefits of conducting SEO competitor analysis
Do you remember the last time you conducted a competitor analysis? Well, if the idea doesn’t hit your head up till now, then we can have a longer discussion about it. Here are some benefits that will surely interest you and let you know why it is an important part of your SEO campaign.
• It helps you in identifying your brand’s value and what makes it different from the others. It is necessary to provide a good meta description and meta tags to increase the CTR (click through rate), engaging content to hold your viewers and to reduce bounce rate, and links to authoritative websites.
• Enable you to understand your competitors and what are they doing to rank their website on top. You can take an idea and tips for the same and once your website appears on top, you can follow some tips to maintain top rank SEO.
• It not only tells you the strong point of your competitors but also notifies you where they are lacking. You can learn lessons from them so that you can prevent yourself from applying the tactics that can harm your website.
• You can grasp some information through customer reviews and can use those reviews to add features to your own products to meet customers’ needs.
• It provides you the facility of competitor benchmarking, here you can compare your growth to your competitors and can get the motivation to work on your website so that you can rank at a better position.
How to conduct competitors SEO analysis
1. Competitor research
The first step of SEO competitor analysis is competitor research. To be in the game for the long run, you should know who you are competing with. Suppose that you are a company that provides digital marketing services like video SEO services, E-commerce SEO services , guest posting, SEO auditing, etc. So, would you analyze those companies that sell dairy products or groceries?
No, right! There is no point in analyzing those competitors whose idea of products or services is totally different from yours. To get the best results, you should first determine your competitors and then go for further visualization and analysis.
So, what you can do is, divide your competitors into two groups: direct and indirect.
Direct competitors are those who sell products and service same as yours. You can target them, have SEO research on their campaign, and attain fruitful information to turn the users into your path. The second one is indirect competitors, they don’t provide exact services as you do but you can look up to their customers’ reviews. The main motive would be here to satisfy the customers’ needs. If you are solving problems in a better way than your competitive companies then customers will definitely choose you over any other brand. The white label SEO professionals have expertise in performing competitor research and help you to target the relevant audience after analyzing the results from competitor research.
2. Determine the products and services your competitors offer
You should know what you are fighting for. The core of any business is the services and products they are offering. Here, you need to analyze your competitors’ complete product line. You need to determine the quality of the products and services they are offering to the customers.
You should also note down the offers and discounts they are providing to the customers. You can compare your pricing to them and can offer a better price so that the customers will lean towards your website rather than choosing others.
You can hire a digital marketing company that conducts SEO research, and the experts there can develop a pricing strategy that can stand out your company from the rest. The white label SEO services help you contact the SEO marketers that conduct SEO keyword research to choose the best keywords for your business.
3. Research your competitors’ outcome
Running a sales analysis could be delicate, but to polish your website you need to track down the answers to few questions like:
• Are they selling from different locations? If so, then what are the advantages they are getting?
• Are they scaling up or down?
• Why customers are ending their relationships with them?
• What are their revenues?
• Are they willing to provide discounts very often?
These little pieces of information give you an idea of competitors’ sales and with the help of that, you can strategize yours. You can go through their reports and generate one for your website too that will show all prospective deals and compare your sales to your competitors. By this, you can get an idea of whether the customers are switching to your product or not. If not then where are you lacking? Why the outcome of your competitor is greater than yours. Once you get the answer to these questions you can go for an SEO plan and strategy to build your website’s image.
4. Have a glance at competitors’ offers and pricing
Conducting SEO research for pricing is a great way to encourage yourself to provide better quality products at cheap prices. Well, by cheap it doesn’t mean that you will offer the products or services bearing a loss for the company.
There are two aspects when we talk about the pricing of any product or service. One is when you compare your products to others. There is no harm in charging more than the competitors’ price for the same product until and unless you are providing a better quality and more features. You can easily bring their customers to you if they think the charge is worth of.
The second one is when you are offering lesser prices for the same product and services. In that case, you should be very careful that your pricing is not making a loss to the company.
Well, keep an eye on competitors’ offers too. I mean that you can check what offers your competitor is offering on their products and services. You should also notice that how often they are doing so. You can provide the offers and discounts on the products and services you are providing to turn their customers into yours and to bring genuine buyers.
5. Analyze your competitors’ content strategy
When we talk about content strategy, I suggest you analyze every step from content writing to publishing and sharing. First of all, notice the quantity of the blog or content they own. You should also keep yourself updated on how often they are posting the content. Keyword research is the main step for content. You can adopt different tools like Google Ads keyword planner tool or Google trends for the same. You can also conduct competitor keyword analysis to find out what keywords they are using to raise their website on top. Once you get an idea of the keywords, you can look for the quality of their blogs. Watch for the topics that your target competitors are considering for targeting the audiences. There are few things that you can keep in mind while analyzing your competitors’ content. Below given are a few of them:
• Accuracy of their content
• Tone of their content
• Grammatical issues
• To which websites they are providing the outer links
• In depth of the content, i.e., is the content is simple or relate advance topics
• The structure of their content
• Is the content freely available for the readers?
• What platform they are using for marketing their content?
By analyzing so much, now you will be able to write amazing content with high-traffic keywords. You can use different genres like “how to…”, “a guide to ….”, and much more.
After the writing part is done, have a look at the images and infographics they are using. Is the size and quality of the image is ideal or not. The optimization of the image is very important as well because that affects the loading speed that can affect the Google ranking. After all this now, you have a solid understanding of competitors’ content marketing, now you can find out if it’s truly working for them or not. You can outsource content marketing services so that the content specialists write engaging content that helps to increase conversion rate.
6. Find out what technology your competitors are using
Understanding the technology used by your competitors can actually accelerate your website. It keeps you updated with the latest tools and technologies that are being used by your competitors.
For example, let’s suppose that they are using the latest software to develop their website that you are unaware of, so what would happen here is that they will develop their website with a better view. You can check the software used by your competitors with the help of Built With. It is an amazing tool to know what technology your competitors’ sites run on.
You can then compare it to the technologies you are using for developing the website and if you find something new, interesting, or effective you can grab that. You can hire an SEO company that can provide you web-development service where they will go for competitor website analysis and can develop a suitable platform to run your website effectively.
7. Analyze how engaging your competitors’ content is
Check the engagement of customers on the website of your target competitors. You can check the ratings and read the comments on their website. Here, you need to observe the response of audiences to their posts. Check the average number of likes, comments, and share they are getting on a post. Check whether they are getting positive or negative comment for the post.
There are few things that you need to find out if you are analyzing this part of your competitors’ website.
• Which topics are getting more hits
• The comments are positive, negative, or mix
• On what topics people are tweeting more
• Response of readers on the content
All these things will clear your head and you can develop strategies and choose different topics efficiently that would bring quality traffic to your content. If the content is engaging then it will also reduce the bounce rate of your website.
8. Keep an eye on their social media presence
The last area where you need to evaluate your competitors’ website analysis is social media platforms. The main question here is how your competitors are able to engage the users through social media platforms or how they are conducting social media marketing? Do they use link-building techniques or they are certainly using the call to action buttons to bring more traffic to their website? Social media marketing is one of the best ways to enhance your brand awareness.
If you are lacking your presence on those social media platforms that your target competitors are using to increase their brand visibility then it could be a problem. So, my suggestion would be, first of all, to visit these social sites to see whether your target competitors are using them or not. Some of the sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest.
Then note down the number of fan following, likes they are getting on a post, etc. Along with that take a clear eye to analyze their strategy. What content they are posting? Are they trying to bring more traffic or posting visual content to encourage brand awareness? How frequently do their followers interact with their content and much more.
After the completion of gathering data generate a grading system and grade all your competitors on it. You can easily compare your target competitors through this that will make your SEO competitor analysis successful. The white label social media marketing services help you build brand awareness on social media platforms and help you be ahead of your competitors.
Wrap up!
SEO competitor analysis plays an important role in gaining customers and building the online presence of a brand. In the blog, I have explained to you different ways that you can apply to analyze the moves of your competitors. Basically, you need to perform competitor research in order to know your competitors. After that, you can conduct competitor website analysis, competitor keyword analysis, competitor backlink analysis, etc., to gain more information about competitors.
On the one hand, where competitor research helps you to target those website owners you are competing for, on the second hand, the analysis part helps you to analyze their move that can help you to run your business efficiently. Hope you find the blog helpful.