If you don’t know where you stand in the market, it will be difficult to outrank your competitors. An SEO competitive research helps you to examine your overall market, competitors, and the current search landscape for key terms.
Maybe they sell courses online, or change their layout design drastically to stand out. Either way, the competitive analysis will show why your competitors are outranking you and what you can do to improve your ranking. Even if you’re currently at the top of the search results for your most essential keywords, you’ll need to keep an eye on your SEO performance to avoid losing your position to a competitor.
In this article, we gathered all the best practices for identifying your competition, determining how they rank and determining what you can do about it.
How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis
1. Analyze The Top Content Pages
If you want to get to know your competition, you have to keep an eye on their best-performing content. SEO performance is heavily influenced by good quality content so it’s important to know what ranks higher for your competitors.
If you want to be more productive, start your task with asking these questions: What type of content do your competitors prefer? Do they stick to one or experiment with it? What is their posting frequency? What topics do they cover? Can you provide better content about those topics? Is their website well optimized? What titles and metadata do they use? Answering all these questions will give you opportunities to come up with better content and rank higher.
2. Perform a Keyword Difficulty Research
Well-chosen keywords are your best friends. But they’re also friends of your competitors. In theory, you can beat out any competitor for any keyword. But the amount of time and resources it would take for some keywords are not worth it.
Some keywords have a very high difficulty, and you can find those if you perform a keyword difficulty research of your competitors. Competitors with a higher keyword difficulty have a stronger SEO, so it’ll be harder to beat them. Search for competitors with lower-ranking scores, and find their weaknesses that you can turn to your advantage.
3. Use Keyword Gaps to Your Advantage
Another way of using competitors’ keywords is by finding keyword gaps. Keep an eye on the keywords you already rank for but rank lower than your competitors. The ones that are only a couple of positions behind are the most important – these are the ones you need to improve.
When you know what those gaps are, you can work on closing them and outranking your competitors.
4. Look for Competitor Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are the back spine of every well-optimized website. But finding reputable websites that can give you backlinks is quite the task. But don’t worry, chances are, your competitors have already found those websites. This is why competitive analysis is crucial – you can find where your rivals are earning all their backlinks and use that information in your favor.
Examining your opponents’ backlink profile is a great way for new opportunities.
Conclusion
You may want to conduct a competitor analysis once in a while, depending on the size of your site and the number of active competitors. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing so you can respond properly to their strategies. Continue to grow and improve, always make small adjustments to outrank your competitors.
