How to do Competitor Analysis in SEO?

In the digital marketing world, staying ahead in search rankings is much more than simply optimizing your website; you must know what your competitors are doing right. Competitor analysis in SEO is a powerful strategy that will uncover valuable insights into your rival’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Analyzing your competitors’ keywords, content, backlinks, and overall strategies can help you refine your approach, create a data-driven plan, and outperform them.

This guide is a walk-through on the essentials of competitor analysis, from identifying competitors to using tools and techniques to gain actionable insights.

Whether you’re running a startup or an individual marketer, competitor analysis in SEO will help you discover several opportunities, not just to stay ahead of your competitors, but also to make your brand popular on SERPs.

Let’s begin.

What is Competitor Analysis in SEO?

In competitive analysis for SEO, one can research and evaluate his competitor’s online strategies to understand what’s driving their success in the search engines. It enables you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in your competition’s SEO efforts by analyzing their rankings, keywords, backlinks, content, and technical optimizations.

Competitor analysis isn’t copying what your competitors do. It’s understanding their approach and finding ways to differ from them while leveraging what works. Stay ahead of the curve in the SEO game by consistently monitoring and adapting based on changing data.

Why is Competitor Analysis Important?

Competitor analysis is a critical component of any successful SEO strategy. It helps you dig into your competitors’ online tactics, determine what works for them, and identify areas where you can outshine them.

Here’s a deeper look at why competitor analysis matters and the value it brings to your SEO efforts.

1. Understanding Competitor’s Strategies

To beat your competition, you need to understand their strategies in depth. Learning from the success of your competitors helps you understand their strengths.

Moreover, there are many places where one could find and differentiate their competitive approach through competitor weaknesses.

Suppose a competitor fails to excel technically in their SEO optimization: Your site might dominate in parameters of speed, mobile-friendliness, or schema markup.

2. Gain Actionable Insights

It’s not just the understanding of what others do but rather how to transfer that into a usable strategy. Some of the most useful insights include the following:

• Keyword opportunities: This will determine high-performing keywords, highlight keyword gaps, and capitalize on them to attract untapped traffic.

• Backlink sources: This will expose opportunities to build your links from the same domains or discover similar high-authority sources.

• Content gaps: Review the type of content your competitors publish and the topics they have missed. Make content that fills these gaps, giving more value to users and establishing your domain authority in your niche.

Use this insight to develop better and more comprehensive resources than your competitors, giving your audience a reason to choose your site over others.

3. Benchmarking Your SEO Performance

Use competitor analysis as a benchmarking tool that enables you to assess your site against industry competitors. This helps identify which spots you are losing in terms of performance. Key benchmarking insights include:

• Keyword rankings: Are your competitors outranking you for high-traffic keywords? Knowing this can influence your keyword optimization efforts.

• Backlink authority: The other is comparing your backlink authority against theirs. This metric is where the value or link quality as well as its amount needed to match or be bigger than them is seen.

• Traffic and engagement: Does the competitor site get more organic traffic? Take a peek at their content strategy, and their metrics for engagement with users so you might find some improvement tactics for your website.

Analyzing your SEO performance will help you set clear and achievable goals for your business while providing scopes for optimization.

Key Elements of SEO Competitive Analysis

SEO competitor analysis is the process of studying various aspects of your competitors’ strategies to come up with actionable insights. From their performance across the elements, you can establish a gap for improving your SEO efforts and edge over them in search rankings.

Here is an in-depth look at the key elements that need consideration.

1. Keyword Analysis

Understanding what drives traffic to your competitors’ websites is a very fundamental improvement step to better your rankings.

• Identify top-performing keywords of competitors: Find the keywords on which your competitors rank and look for high-traffic and high-value terms. Identify keywords on which they rank higher than you, and work out how to improve to beat them.

• Finding keyword gaps and opportunities: Make use of gap analysis tools to determine your competitors’ ranking for keywords that you haven’t. Target those keywords to expand your reach toward untapped audiences. Take advantage of long-tail, low-competition keywords with which you can get to rank fast.

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2. Content Analysis

Content is the backbone of SEO success. Analyzing competitors’ content strategies can be inspirational and point out improvement areas.

• Analyzing competitors’ content strategies: Look at the way competitors structure their content in terms of tone, length, and depth of coverage. Find the content gaps while analyzing their content posting frequency and the targeted platforms.

• Top-performing blog posts: Identify those blog posts receiving the most traffic, backlinks, or social shares. Analyze what makes such content effective it the added value to the audience through visual elements or engagement.

• Content formats: Determine which forms of content resonate best with your users—articles, videos, infographics, or podcasts. Use the insight to diversify your form of content offerings and consequently improve user engagement.

3. Backlink Analysis

Backlinks remain a part of the SEO game, serving as a vote of trust and authority for search engines. Analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles will help strengthen your link-building efforts.

High-quality backlinks enhance domain authority and improve rankings in search results. Knowing your competitor’s sources of backlinks will identify potential link-building opportunities.

4. On-page SEO Factors

On-page SEO is the optimization of individual pages for specific keywords. Studying competitors’ on-page techniques will help you refine your optimization strategy.

• Analyze meta tags and content structure: Look at how your competitors use interesting, keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions. Analyze the way they structure headers (H1, H2, H3) to improve readability and keyword highlighting.

• Analyzing competitor’s keyword usage: Evaluate how effectively competitors are using primary and secondary keywords in their content. Find opportunities to optimize your on-page elements for better keyword targeting.

• Checking site speed, mobile friendliness, and user experience: Check your competitors’ site speed, and mobile responsiveness using Google PageSpeed Insights, and their user experience- navigation, layout, and call to action.

5. Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures that search engines crawl and index your site with ease. A study of competitors’ technical SEO might identify opportunities that have not been explored.

• Crawlability and Indexability: Use Screaming Frog to analyze how well the sites of competitors are crawled and indexed by search engines.

• Use of structured data: Search for schema markup that is used to enrich results in the forms of FAQs, reviews, or product information.

• URL Structure: Tracking the content architecture down the web pages of your website is also a crucial part of competitor analysis. It will help you optimize the internal linking as well as reduce orphan pages.

• Security performance: Doing competitor analysis in SEO will help you find the missing places where security integrations are needed.

How to Conduct Competitive Analysis?

An overall SEO competitive analysis is the systematic checking of competitors’ strategies for insight to improve your SEO work. Here are the steps, followed below in detail, to help with the process.

1. Know Who Your Competitors Are

Your first step should be knowing who your competitors are. The group of companies includes:

• Direct Competitors: Businesses that offer very similar products or services targeting the same target audience.
• Indirect Competitors: Those websites that might not be selling the same thing, but they still take attention from your target audience.
• SERP Competitors: All sites ranking for your keywords regardless of what they’re about.

Identify your competitors by using Google to search for your primary keywords and noting the top-ranking sites. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to find your organic competitors. Analyze the competitors your audience engages with on social media or other platforms.

2. Know Your Niche Better

Understanding your niche involves researching the landscape in which your competitors operate. This includes:

• Identify the unique value propositions that competitors offer.
• Observing industry trends and audience preferences.
• The common pain points and questions audiences are seeking answers to.

It will help you refine your content strategy by getting it into alignment with industry demands. Moreover, you’ll be more confident about your SEO efforts in answering their needs.

3. Find Keywords Your Competitors Have Lost

Identifying keywords that competitors have lost rankings for can reveal opportunities for you to capture traffic. Lost keywords often indicate:

• Areas where competitors’ strategies are weak or outdated.
• The search intent has shifted or changes in an algorithm you can capitalize on.

SERP shifts you can also identify lost keywords and whether there is dominance from newer competitors or content types such as videos or FAQs.

By targeting lost keywords, you can fill in the gaps in the market and get the traffic your competition is no longer coming for.

4. In-depth Content Analysis

Analyzing your competitors’ content strategy provides a roadmap for improving your content.

You should look for:

• Types of content: Identify whether competitors focus on blogs, videos, infographics, or other formats.
• Content length and quality: Evaluate whether their content is comprehensive, authoritative, and user-friendly.
• Engagement metrics: Determine how well their content resonates with audiences by assessing shares, comments, and time on the page.

These can be used to craft content that is more detailed, interesting, or even more visually appealing than the competition.

Besides, you can fill gaps in their content by focusing on underserved topics or angles. Utilize successful formats of your competitors like long-form guides or how-to videos that have already proved effective in engaging the audience.

5. Identify and Analyze Top-performing Pages

Your competitors’ top-performing pages are goldmines of insight. These pages often generate significant traffic, backlinks, and conversions.

To identify these pages:

• Use RanksPro’s site analysis to pinpoint high-performing URLs.
• Review the type of content (e.g., product pages, guides, blogs) driving traffic to these pages.

Key Metrics to Analyze:

• Traffic volume and sources.
• Keywords driving traffic to these pages.
• Backlinks pointing to these pages and their authority.

From there, you can learn how to recreate their successful page with similar or more significant content. Additionally, you can start to optimize for the same keywords but provide more value.

6. Analyze their Backlink Profile

Backlinks are considered one of the most crucial SEO success factors. If you know what your competitors’ backlink strategy is, it will help you do yours better.

Identify domains that link to competitors by using authoritative sites; get a list of the backlink keywords and identify a targeting strategy. Get some high-quality domains linking to competitors but not to you.

Pattern identification in link building, like guest posts or partnerships, will help you reach domains linking to your competitors with valuable content of your own. Use broken link-building or resource link-building strategies for great backlinks.

7. Recognize Technical Issues and Scopes

Technical SEO makes sure that your website is crawlable, fast, and search engine-friendly. Analyzing competitors’ technical SEO can help you know what they are doing better or worse.

Here are the things you should analyze:

• Crawlability and indexability: Make sure competitors’ websites are easy to crawl and index by search engines.
• Site speed: Test competitors’ load times using Google PageSpeed Insights.
• Mobile-friendliness: Check if their websites are mobile-friendly.
• Structured data: Identify schema markup like FAQs and reviews that enhance SERP visibility.

Try to find technical problems on competitors’ websites, and check the sitemap structure, robots.txt file, and HTTPS implementation to gather more insight.

This way, you will be able to surpass the competition by optimizing those areas in which their technical SEO is weak. Utilize advanced techniques such as schema markup for an edge over your competition in rich results and SERP features.

How to do Competitor Analysis with RanksPro?

RanksPro provides a very helpful feature – competitive analysis. It will provide effective insights to have a detailed look at how your competitors are doing at SERPs.

Just go to the Site Overview feature from the dashboard of RanksPro to analyze your competitor:

Enter the domain address on the top and click on the ‘Search’ button to start the analysis.

You can analyze monthly traffic as a graphical representation on the right side.

When you scroll down a bit you can see top-performing keywords on which your competitor is ranking.

Clicking on ‘View All’ will help you discover all the top pages that are ranking on the specific keywords.

For the Backlink Analysis of your competitor, go to the Backlink feature and click on Backlink Analysis:

Follow the same steps:

1. Adding the domain address
2. Click on the ‘Search’ button to analyze the complete backlink profile

You will see an overview of your competitor’s backlink profile, including:

• Domain rank
• Referring domains
• Total backlinks

While at the center you can analyze growth backlinks over time while analyzing lost domains.

On the right side, you can dive deeper to know exactly what Anchor Texts are being utilized to create backlinks and where. Click on ‘View All’ will help you delve deeper:

Now if you want to know the sources from where your competitors got backlinks, you can simply click on the tab at the center ‘Backlinks’

Here you can get access to those URLs from where backlinks were created by your competitor along with certain metrics like Spam Score, Page Rank, Domain Rating, and Anchor Texts.

Key Takeaways

Competitor analysis in SEO brings several insights that can help you find the scopes of optimizations for your website and other SEO activities. From keywords and content optimization to link building, this process data-driven performance reports to take your business a step ahead.

Monitor it consistently so that you don’t lose ground in a highly competitive environment, as insights guide you in how to make improvements in the visibility and performance of your website. Keep on with actionable items and continue to be adaptive so you stay ahead of the competition.