Essential Steps to Conduct an Effective SEO Competitive Analysis

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and nothing can be more relevant than this in the world of Search Engine Optimization!

The best way to take your brand ahead is to know who you’re up against and what your competitors are doing to draw visitors to their websites.

This is one of the best ways to grow your business, says a renowned digital marketing agency in Dallas. Noticing your competitors’ activities will tell you how they are marketing their products and services, which, in turn, will help you come up with a solid strategy the next time you feature your offerings. And the only way to do that is through competitor analysis.

Moving forward, this guide will tell you the best practices to identify your competitors and how they are ranking. And to thrive in your business, make sure you utilize these tips with competitor research tools.

What is Competitive Analysis?

Dallas digital marketing agency explains, researching noteworthy competitors and gaining insight into their product’s marketing tactics is what Competitive Analysis is about.

Executing better business strategies and capturing market share are benefits you can take from conducting a competitive analysis.

Once you use competitive analysis tools regularly, you can meet and sometimes even exceed industry standards.

Let’s look at some more benefits of competitive analysis:

• You understand what your competitor is doing right.
• Learn from the reviews what is missing in a competitor’s offerings.
• You can comprehend where your competitors are falling short.
• It’s a benchmark against which you can estimate your growth.

SEO competitive analysis gives you the bigger picture of SEO in your industry. It gives you a chance to learn the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. No matter where you rank, you should complete a competitive analysis to deliver the best experiences to your customers.

Dallas SEO company explains that having a strong SEO presence isn’t optional. Once you understand and keep tabs on your competitor, there’s a likelihood that you can fill in the voids your competitors have left.

Why is Competitive Analysis Crucial for SEO Campaigns?

Competitive analysis is super crucial for plenty of reasons. Below, we have highlighted some:

• Determine what’s performing well: Figure out those things you do better than your competitors so you can continue to work on them and gradually outperform them.

• Identifies faults in your campaign: With competitive analysis, you can start analyzing your competitor’s SEO strategies. Once you get a hang of it, you can notice what they’re doing and how they are implementing it. You’ll also get an understanding of the gap existing between you two.

• Help connect with customers: As mentioned above, your competitors can help you discover strategies, which can further be used to improve your customer retention.

5 Steps to Complete SEO Competitive Analysis

Let’s walk you through the process of completing a successful SEO competitive analysis.

1. Identify Your Competitors

Say you’ve been in the market for long enough to identify who the big players are, but do you know who is that main SEO rival of yours? They might not be the same!

One common mistake you can make while conducting a competitive analysis is not listing ‘all’ your competitors. Sometimes the smallest competitors can have the best strategies or content.

Experts at a Dallas digital marketing agency add that by analyzing the first five competitors carefully, you’ll notice how they try to target different keywords, focus on various promotion platforms, and get links from various websites. So, begin researching businesses related to your top competitors. Try to categorize them based on the similarities that you have with them. Doing this will help you discover that Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is not always full of your business competitors. You’ll notice websites optimizing their pages for these keywords rank on organic search, and these are your true search competitors.

Keep in mind that your competitors are also following this method and are likely to target these as well. Make sure to track beyond the top 10 pages. By doing this, you’ll also be aware of the new brands, which later you can monitor closely.

So, now you know how to start conducting a competitive analysis. Discover the keywords and your competitor’s organic traffic. Make the best use of their weak spot to outstrip them.

2. Keyword Gaps

Keywords have a crucial role to play in SEO. So, to make your website stand out and rank, you need to perform a keyword gap analysis, where you’ll be looking for keywords that are commonly used in your competitor’s websites.

You can identify areas where you can fill the gaps by understanding the keywords being targeted by your direct competitors. You can either use these keywords yourself or direct people toward them with link-building techniques or useful resource pages.

3. Content Analysis

Once you get hold of the list of keywords, you can start checking what performs best and what your audience would prefer.

When analyzing the content, looking just at the overall traffic won’t help, rather your competitors could publish three to five articles and be responsible for the bulk of the traffic, while other articles can underperform.

Below are some significant points to consider when analyzing content.

• Keyword analysis: As said earlier, search the keywords for which your competitors are ranking.
• Traffic analysis: Find out the top pages your competitors are receiving traffic from and, which pages are getting the most traffic and which aren’t.
• Content analysis: Performing competitors’ content analysis can help in spotting weaknesses. Look at what type of content they’re using, like infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks, blog posts, etc.
• Backlink analysis: Check the backlink profile of your competitors. Inspect the anchor profile, the number, and the quality of links.

Going through your competitor’s content will only help you create and structure your content for the better. Professionals at an SEO company in Dallas say that this is highly important because Google promotes quality content. By creating informative and engaging content, you can help your site rank higher than your competitors.

4. Analyze Website Design

Your website’s design and features create a huge impact on the minds of your audience. It also is highly crucial for SEO because a boring website design can drive people away, increasing the bounce rate of your site. A higher bounce rate negatively affects your ranking.

Look at the website structure of your competitor when conducting an SEO competitor analysis. Your main motto should be to create a user-friendly website that is appealing too.

Another important thing to check is whether your website has a responsive design. This is crucial for the success of your website, allowing visitors to experience the smooth functioning of the site no matter what device they are using.

5. Dig Into Their Backlinks

Dallas SEO company explains how important backlinks are for SEO.

Backlinks are links to your website on another site. Google considers websites that have lots of backlinks trustworthy. And that’s why backlink analysis is crucial. Analyzing these links allows you to gain insights into your competitors’ SEO strategies – the kind of content they are creating, their link-building tactics, and how effective their backlink profiles are.

Competitive SEO Analysis – Putting It All Together

Now that you understand competitive analysis and how to go about it, the only thing left to do is to keep working on it. Gradual improvements, monitoring rankings, and tracking others will surely pay off in the long. Eventually, you’ll also start improving your position.

A competitive analysis will not help you learn about your competitors but grow your business. It’ll help you develop advanced SEO strategies, which can improve your campaign and drive better results than your competitors.

Remember, competitor analysis is not a one-time project. You should conduct them every day to stay ahead.