Guide for a SEO Competitor Analysis

Having no business competitors would make your life noticeably easier, although you would certainly be more prone to succumbing to winds of stagnation. Fortunately, the reality is different. If you want to win the minds and hearts of your customers, you must ensure that the product you are offering is better than that of your competitors.

There are similar mechanisms when we are talking about SEO. Contrary to popular belief, the best SEO practises go hand in hand with what is best for the audience. The fact that you have to put effort into making your website as easy to navigate as possible is beneficial for people who are looking for answers to their questions. Therefore, high rankings correspond with the satisfaction of the visitors. This article will show you what you should focus on when trying to conduct a SEO competitor analysis. Let’s go!

What are SEO competitors?

Your business competitors don’t have to be your SEO competitors. The burger place that’s 200 metres from you may not have a digital presence at all. Likewise, it is possible that the articles from your blog about how to make the best burgers are competing for the top spot with articles from sites about a wider array of topics, like superfood.com or deadlyfood.org.

Okay, so what now?

To conduct a comprehensive research about your SEO competitors, you’ll need a tool that will help you collect and analyze data that would be otherwise too extensive for mere mortals. Thankfully, we have robots to assist us.

SpyFu

You can use this tool to check what are the keywords that your competitors use most often and which ones of them are most profitable. You’ll also see where exactly they are – whether in meta descriptions, content, or titles. You can learn from their mistakes and successes and then implement and use this knowledge to choose the most suitable keywords.

Alexa

It’s a great tool for competitive analysis. You’ll learn more about your audience, and the kind of content that might captivate their attention. You can use this information to generate new ideas for the articles.

Siteliner

With this tool, you scan websites for broken links and then create appropriate content. Replacing a dead link is also in the interest of a website owner, which means that they’ll be eager to accept your proposal.

Pro Rank Tracker app

Pro Rank Tracker app allows you to check live statistics of the rankings and generate comprehensive reports. What’s most important, though, is that you can download this app on your phone, which will allow you to be more flexible and track the data anywhere you are.

Okay, so now that you have a tool with which you can generate crucial data, let’s see which bits of it are the most important.

What are the top results?

You can use a competitor analysis tool to check and compare what the top results for the relevant keywords are. Are those articles, videos, how-to guides? If you can discern a clear pattern there, it might be a good idea to mimic the form of the top content.

Relevancy or top hits

Although it would be excellent to rank as the top article for the keywords that are most relevant to your industry, it can also be highly challenging. If your resources are limited, it might be a better option to focus on less popular keywords, with which the chance to outrank your competitors is higher.

With a tool, you can check which words your competitors are not targeting and then react appropriately. Most people look only at several top results, so you should consider this strategy.

User experience

Contrary to popular belief, SEO is not all about pleasing the robots. Although their wrath knows no bounds, making it easier for humans to navigate a website will also improve your website’s rankings. You can check how well constructed are websites of your competitors and see if their performance is lacking.

If you are trying to improve your own website, try to pretend that you are a pilgrim looking for the answers. It’s best to make the duration of this quest for answers as short as possible.

Backlinks

With the use of a tool, you can check the source of your competitors’ backlinks. You can then use this knowledge to diversify the sources of your own backlinks and increase the rankings of your website. Nowadays, backlinks are one of the most crucial parts of SEO. Without any external signs that your website is trustworthy, the ranking algorithm will be reluctant to rank your website at the top.

A necessary step

Without knowing how well your SEO competitors are faring, you won’t be able to react adequately. With the help of SEO competitor analysis tools, your ability to collect and analyze data will significantly improve. Remember, though, that creating a proper strategy is just the beginning. Once you have all the necessary data, it’s time to react.

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