SEO Competitor Analysis: Everything you need to know

In the highly competitive world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition is crucial. SEO competitor analysis is a vital component of any successful SEO strategy.

By understanding your rivals’ strategies, you can uncover valuable insights that will inform your own strategy, improve your rankings, and drive organic traffic to your website.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about SEO competitor analysis, from the tools you’ll need to the actionable insights you can gain.

What is SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis is the process of examining your competitors’ online strategies to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. It involves analyzing various aspects of their SEO efforts, including:

Keyword Strategy
Content Strategy
Backlink Profile
Technical SEO
On-Page SEO

By analyzing these factors, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies and identify areas where you can improve your own SEO efforts.

Why an SEO Competitor Analysis is Crucial?

SEO competitor analysis is crucial for several reasons:

Identify Opportunities: It helps you discover untapped keyword opportunities and content gaps.
Understand Your Competitive Landscape: It provides a clear picture of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Refine Your SEO Strategy: It allows you to adapt your strategy based on what’s working for your competitors.
Gain a Competitive Advantage: It helps you identify areas where you can outperform your competitors.
Stay Updated on Industry Trends: It keeps you informed about the latest SEO best practices and strategies.

How to Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis provides valuable insights into what’s working in your industry, allowing you to refine your approach and gain a competitive edge.

It’s recommended that you conduct an SEO competitor analysis regularly. You can run a competitive SEO analysis every three months, depending on your industry and level of competition.

This helps you quickly identify the evolving SEO best practices and then adapt your strategies accordingly.

Also, an SEO competitor analysis is usually done before launching new products or services as a part of market research as well as before launching a new website. It also helps you assess the reasons why you face a drop in keyword rankings.

Several tools can help you conduct an effective competitor analysis, including:

Here’s a step-by-step guide to conducting a thorough SEO competitor analysis:

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

Your SEO competitors are the websites ranking for the same keywords you’re targeting in organic search. These may be different from your direct business competitors.

Direct competitors are businesses offering similar products or services to the same target audience. While SEO competitors might not sell the same products or services as you, they could divert search traffic away from your website.

How to Find Your Competitors:

Google Searches: Start with the keywords you want to rank for. See who consistently appears in the top results. These are your SEO competitors.
SEO Tools: Utilize tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. These platforms can help you identify organic competitors based on keyword overlap, backlink profiles, and other SEO metrics.

Step 2: Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis is the process of identifying the words and phrases your competitors are targeting to prioritize search terms you want to rank for and understand your competitors’ strategies, which helps you identify opportunities for your own website.

Identify Competitor Keywords: Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to uncover the keywords for which your competitors are ranking. You can use the Position, Volume, Keyword difficulty, Intent and other advanced filters to filter for keywords that include one or more specific words.
Pay attention to their top-performing keywords and long-tail variations. It shows you what keywords your rivals are prioritizing, giving you insight into their target audience and content focus.
Keyword Gap Analysis: Identify keywords your competitors are ranking for that you’re not. This reveals potential opportunities to expand your keyword targeting.
You can then create new content targeting the newly found keywords and also optimize your existing content.
Analyze Keyword Difficulty: Determine the difficulty of ranking for your competitors’ keywords. This helps you focus on those with the best potential return.
Analyze Search Intent: What is the user trying to find when they search a keyword? Ensure your content matches the search intent of the keywords you are targeting.

Step 3: Content Analysis

Content is king in the world of SEO. But simply creating content isn’t enough, you need to create effective content. Content analysis, as part of your SEO competitor analysis, allows you to understand what content strategies are working for your rivals, enabling you to refine your own approach.

Here’s how you can conduct a Content Analysis:

Analyze Content Formats: Examine the types of content your competitors are creating in your industry (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.).
Analyze the effectiveness of each format. Which formats generate the most engagement (shares, comments, backlinks)?
Content Quality: Analyze the depth, accuracy, and engagement of your competitors’ content.
Evaluate the accuracy and credibility of the information presented. Are they citing reputable sources?
Assess the readability and flow of the content. Is it well-structured and easy to understand?
Assess if your competitors’ content is out-of-date. Is the main keyword overused in the copy and headings? Does the web page contain thin content?
Thin Content lacks depth and detail. All of these are signs of poor-quality content, which leads to a poor user experience.
As content creators, the idea is to create helpful, reliable, people-first content that will be more valuable to the readers and provide a better user experience.
Identify Top-Performing Content: Use tools like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to see what content resonates most with your competitors’ audience, providing insights into what works.
Determine what makes this content so popular. Is it the topic, the format, or the quality of the content?
Identify recurring themes and topics. This reveals what they believe is important to their audience.
Assess if your competitors incorporate images, videos and infographics in their popular content. Including images and videos can enrich content quality and enhance user experience, but it could have a negative impact on a site’s performance too.
Make sure the images are compressed and the videos are optimized, as PageSpeed is a critical element in improving user experience.
Content Gap Analysis: Identify content topics your competitors are covering that you’re not. This reveals opportunities to create valuable content for your audience. Look for opportunities to create unique and valuable content that fills these gaps.
Content Distribution and Promotion: How often do they publish content? Does the frequency correlate with their ranking success?
Analyze how your competitors are promoting their content. Are they using social media, email marketing, or paid advertising?
Identify the platforms and channels where they are most active.
Analyze their guest posting strategies.

Step 4: Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are a crucial ranking factor in SEO. Understanding your competitors’ backlink profiles can provide valuable insights into their link-building strategies and help you identify opportunities to improve your own. Backlink analysis, as part of your SEO competitor analysis, is essential for gaining a competitive edge.

Here’s why Backlink analysis is important:

Reveals Link-Building Strategies: It shows you where your competitors are getting their backlinks, giving you clues about their outreach and relationship-building efforts.
Use tools like Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, or SEMrush Backlink Analytics to examine your competitors’ backlink profiles. Pay attention to the number of backlinks, referring domains, and the overall authority of the linking websites.
Backlinks from authoritative websites are better for SEO. Also, look for authoritative websites in your niche. Backlinks from such topically relevant sites are better for SEO. Also, assess the context of the backlink for relevancy and quality.
Another thing to check is if the backlink is a nofollow backlink. A nofollow backlink is a hyperlink with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, instructing search engines not to follow the link or pass authority to the linked page.
Identifies High-Authority Backlinks: Focus on backlinks from websites with high domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR). These backlinks are more valuable and can significantly impact your rankings.
Analyze Anchor Text: Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. Examine the anchor text used in your competitors’ backlinks. This provides insights into their link-building strategies and the keywords they’re targeting.
Uncovers Potential Link Opportunities: By analyzing your competitor’s backlinks, you can find websites that might be willing to link to your content as well.
Look for websites that are linking to multiple competitors. These websites may be receptive to linking to your content as well. Analyze the type of content they are linking to, and see if you have similar or better content.
Assesses Link Quality: It allows you to distinguish between high-quality, authoritative backlinks and low-quality, spammy links.
Look for signs of low-quality or spammy backlinks, such as links from irrelevant websites or link farms. Disavow any spammy backlinks pointing to your own site.
Broken Link Building: Broken Link Building is a tactic used to find possible link-building opportunities, it’s finding broken (404) links on your competitors’ websites (or any site in your niche), recreating the linked content, and reaching out to the linking website to suggest they replace the broken link with yours.

Step 5: Technical SEO Analysis

Technical SEO forms the foundation of a strong online presence. Technical SEO analysis allows you to identify technical weaknesses in your competitors’ websites and ensure your site is optimized for search engines.

Here’s how you can conduct a Technical SEO Analysis:

Website Speed Analysis: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to compare your site’s performance and loading speed to your competitors’ sites. Identify slow-loading pages and potential performance bottlenecks.
PageSpeed, the measure of how quickly your web pages load, plays a crucial role in both user experience and search engine rankings.
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. Optimizing Core Web Vitals helps you enhance the User experience of your website.
Mobile-Friendliness Test: Chrome Lighthouse can help you identify a range of improvements to make related to page experience, including mobile usability.
URL Structure Analysis: Examine your competitors’ website URL structure. Check if:
1. They’re incorporating relevant keywords into their URLs.
2. URL structure reflects the hierarchy of the website.
3. They maintain a consistent URL structure throughout their website.
It’s recommended that you use short, descriptive URLs that are easy to read and understand.
Schema Markup Analysis: Use Google’s Rich Results Test to check if your competitors are using schema markup. Schema Markup helps search engines understand your content better.
Google defines Structured Data (Or Schema Markup) as a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.
Structured data helps search engines understand the context and meaning of your content, leading to richer search results and improved visibility.
Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml Analysis: Use robots.txt to instruct search engine crawlers on which pages or sections to crawl and which to avoid. A sitemap is an XML file that provides search engines with a list of all the pages on your website.
Check for well-formed robots.txt files and sitemap.xml files. Ensure they are not blocking important pages.
HTTPS and Security: Ensure you use HTTPS. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol used to send data between a web browser and a website. Check for security certificates.
Crawlability and Indexability: Check for broken links. Ensure that pages are not being blocked from crawling. Also, it’s vital to have a logical and hierarchical Site Structure in place.
A logical and well-structured website architecture ensures that all pages are interconnected and easily accessible. Use clear and consistent internal linking to guide crawlers through your website.
Also, we recommend that you implement Breadcrumbs Navigation. Breadcrumbs Navigation refers to a secondary navigation system that shows the user’s location on a website and indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy.
To improve the indexability of your site, use Meta robots tags and canonical tags.
Meta robots tags are snippets of HTML code placed within the <head> section of your web pages. They communicate with search engine crawlers, telling them whether to index a page, follow its links, or both.
A canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) is an HTML element that specifies the “canonical” or preferred version of a web page. It tells search engines which URL should be considered the primary version when multiple pages have similar or identical content.

Step 6: On-Page SEO Analysis

On-page SEO is optimizing various elements of blog posts and website pages to improve their search rankings. It’s about understanding how the search engines work and aligning all the On-Page SEO elements to match a user’s search intent.

By examining your competitors’ on-page optimization, you can identify their strategies and uncover opportunities to enhance your own website’s performance.

Here’s why On-Page SEO Analysis is essential:

Reveals Keyword Targeting: It shows you how your competitors are incorporating keywords into their content.
Identifies Optimization Best Practices: It highlights effective on-page optimization techniques used by your rivals.
Uncovers Potential Weaknesses: It helps you identify areas where your competitors’ on-page SEO is lacking.
Improves User Experience: Many on-page SEO factors also contribute to a better user experience, which is a ranking factor.

Key Elements of On-Page SEO Analysis:

Title Tags: Your title tag is your website’s first and often most crucial impression. Appearing as the clickable headline in search engine results pages (SERPs), it plays a pivotal role in attracting user attention and driving organic traffic.

Analyze the length, keyword usage, and clarity of your competitors’ title tags. Are they optimized for target keywords and click-through rates?
Title tags should be concise and to the point. Naturally incorporate your primary keyword within the title tag and ensure that the title tag accurately reflects the content of the page.
Meta Descriptions: Meta description is the descriptive snippet that appears in search engine results usually below your page’s title and provides a brief summary of the page.

Examine the content and length of their meta descriptions. Are they compelling and designed to attract clicks?
Meta Descriptions should be concise, naturally incorporate your primary keyword within the Meta Descriptions and ensure that the Meta Descriptions accurately reflect the content of the page.
Header Tags (H1-H6): Headings and subheadings provide a hierarchical structure to your content, making it easier for users and search engines to understand the flow and organization of your information.

Analyze the structure and keyword usage of their header tags. Are they used effectively to organize content and improve readability?
Use H1 Tag for the Main Title or Headline. Each page should have only one H1 tag. Use H2 for major topics, H3 for sub-topics, and so on, creating a clear hierarchy within your content.

Naturally incorporate relevant keywords into your headings and subheadings. Keep headings concise and avoid keyword stuffing.
Content Optimization: Assess the quality, length, and relevance of their content. Optimizing content is a key element of On-page SEO. Google recommends focusing on creating “people-first content”.
Google says “Answering yes to the questions below means you’re probably on the right track with a people-first approach:
– Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
– Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
– Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
– After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
– Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
– Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?”
Internal Linking: An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, on the same website or domain. Analyze how competitors are using internal links to connect pages. Are they using keyword-rich anchor text?
Internal links should support a logical and hierarchical structure for your website. Link to relevant, interesting and related pages aligned with your overall site structure. Instead of generic phrases like “click here,” use descriptive anchor text that reflects the content of the target page (e.g., “read our guide to On-page SEO”).

Step 7: Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are search result boxes that appear at the top of Google’s search results. Analyzing your competitors’ featured snippet strategies reveals opportunities to capture this valuable real estate for yourself.

Here’s why Featured Snippets are important:

Increased visibility, and higher Click-Through Rates (CTR): Featured snippets appear above the traditional search results. Users are more likely to click on featured snippets due to their prominent placement.
Brand Authority: Landing a featured snippet positions your website as a trusted source of information.
Voice Search Optimization: Featured snippets often provide answers to voice search queries.

Here’s how to analyze Competitor Featured Snippets:

Identify Target Keywords: Start by identifying the keywords your competitors are targeting. Focus on long-tail keywords and question-based queries.
Search for Featured Snippets: Enter your target keywords into Google search and observe the results. Identify which of your competitors are appearing in featured snippets.
Analyze Snippet Content: Examine the content of the featured snippet. What type of information is being provided? What format is being used (paragraph, list, table)?
Identify Snippet Triggers: Determine what triggers the featured snippet. Are they answering specific questions? Are they providing concise definitions?
Analyze Competitor Page Content: Examine the page from which the featured snippet is extracted. How is the content structured and formatted? How are they using header tags and lists?
Identify Snippet Gaps: Look for opportunities to provide better or more comprehensive answers. Identify areas where your competitors’ snippets are lacking. Are there other questions that could be answered?

Here are some tactics you can use to capture Featured Snippets:

Answer Questions Directly: Create content that provides clear and concise answers to common questions. Use the “People Also Ask” section in Google search as a guide.
Structure Content Effectively: Use header tags (H1-H6) to organize your content. Use lists (ordered and unordered) to present information clearly. Create tables to display data effectively.
Optimize for Long-Tail Keywords: Target long-tail keywords and question-based queries. Use natural language and conversational tones.
Provide Concise Definitions: Offer clear and concise definitions of key terms.
Improve Page Speed: Ensure your website loads quickly. Page speed is a ranking factor for featured snippets.
Use Schema Markup: Implement schema markup to help search engines understand your content.

Conclusion

I want to conclude by thanking you for reading the post. SEO competitor analysis isn’t a one-time task, it’s an ongoing process that demands consistent attention and adaptation.

The insights gained from competitor analysis should be used to inform your long-term strategy, allowing you to adapt to changing search engine algorithms and industry trends.

This knowledge empowers you to refine your own SEO efforts, identify untapped opportunities, and ultimately, outrank your rivals. By consistently applying these principles, you’ll unlock your website’s full potential and achieve sustainable SEO success.

We’re here to support you on your SEO journey – feel free to reach out with any questions!