Importance of SEO Competitor Analysis
When was the last time you did a competitor analysis for your brand?
Competitor analysis is required in every field and in every business to survive a highly competitive environment and stay relevant today. Competitor analysis in the field of marketing is extremely crucial to build a strong business strategy by looking upon your competitor. This helps in learning the inside out of what your competitor is doing and identify opportunities on how to optimize and tailor your marketing strategy. This enables you to stay updated on the latest trends in the industry and ensures that the needs and wants of consumers are constantly being met.
The benefits of an effective competitor analysis are to analyze your products or services’ unique selling proposition i.e USP and how different you are from your competitor. This also helps identify the gaps in your competitor’s marketing strategy and find an opportunity to outperform them. One can customize and optimize their marketing strategy accordingly.
Just as you do competitor analysis for overall marketing strategy, it has found its place in the arena of online marketing that is SEO. We have known SEO just a mere tool to drive traffic to websites by optimizing them. But a lot goes into SEO, it’s not just to rank high on the search engine result page. In fact, SEO competitor analysis is also a part of SEO.
Your website might be ranking high today but will it last forever? Your competitor will eventually outperform you and replace the ranking position. Many brands and businesses forget to update and do thorough research in the market. Being consistent is the key to survival. There is always something that needs improvement to stay ahead of all and yield better results.
If you are confused and wondering how to do SEO competitor analysis and its various tools, we will guide you throughout the article.
Let’s get started.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing means designing your digital marketing strategy or campaign using the data collected through extensive, in-depth research. The data is usually acquired from either a third party or from customer interaction. It helps in giving an overview of consumer’s interests, preferences, behaviors.
Data-driven marketing helps in optimizing your marketing performance and enhance better customer experience which leads to better ROI results and profits.
SEO also falls under data-driven marketing. Few SEO practices like keyword research is an example of data-driven marketing.
With the advancement of technology, the collection of data has become much simpler and handling data has become hassle-free. With millions of customers being online, acquiring in-depth data about their buying behavior or daily activities, marketers can easily tailor their content and send across more personalized messages in selective targeted media channels.
What is SEO competitor analysis?
SEO competitor analysis involves researching and analyzing the keywords, links, content, and more SEO elements of competitors and incorporate all the tactics used in your SEO strategy to gain success and drive excellent results. It is basically comparing two competing websites in similar industries.
It will help in answering questions like:
- Who my SEO competitors are?
- What keywords do they use?
- Where can I find links?
- How you can beat your competitors?
SEO competitor analysis includes Keyword gap analysis, competitor backlink analysis, top content analysis, SEO keyword competition analysis. This requires less time and is cost-effective as you don’t have to carry out research from scratch. Just look through your competitor and apply it to your SEO strategy.
Well, a lot of factors go into google’s ranking of web pages, conducting research on high-ranking competitors will help in gaining insights and acquire knowledge about what successful UX and content look like. The bottom line is that SEO competitor analysis will bring in better ROI results and if you have not started yet, then this is the best time to do so. Invest a good amount of time in the competitor analysis and watch for the results.
How to do competitor analysis SEO
Now after knowing what is SEO competitor analysis, it’s time to look at how to do competitor analysis in few steps. Follow these common steps and implement them right away.
- Identify your competitors
The first and pivotal step for SEO competitor analysis is to identify your true competitors. One cannot randomly choose their competitors, it should belong to the same industry. Do thorough and accurate research in identifying competitors. This entails comparing and researching SEO for a variety of keywords and noting the top 10 or 20 websites that appear consistently for all of them.
One method to do this is to type a keyword into a free SEO analytics tool like Ubersuggest. You’ll find a list of links and domains that ranked for the term in the Content Ideas section.
- Conduct page analysis
Examining a competitor’s website and its top-performing pages is the next stage in competitive analysis. What keywords are being utilized on these pages, and how are they being used in their content? This is termed keyword gap analysis. This is the step where you will look for keywords that your competitors are using for getting ranked and your website isn’t. You can then develop a page dedicated to ranking these keywords once you’ve discovered relevant keywords that also pertain to your business. When this occurs, you have the chance to direct customers to your site rather than the competition.
- Focus on keywords
Consider your high-profile product or service, and concentrate your efforts on ranking for keywords that will help you generate more leads for that product or product line. Alternatively, develop content that is particularly distinctive and relevant to your customer base that none of your competitors have thought of.
- Create and execute a content plan
After you’ve gathered data, you’ll need to use it to generate an SEO competitor analysis report. You can plan your SEO content strategy based on the findings of the report. Create a keyword list or a list of content ideas to get started with your content strategy, and save it in a simple spreadsheet.
- Track progress
After successfully executing a content plan, track your performance consistently. Regular keyword audits and competitor analysis SEO reports should be prepared to see if your competitive analysis plan was successful.
What is an SEO competitor analysis tool?
This article is for you if you’ve ever wondered why your competitors are outranking you or getting more social media attention. You may learn a lot about your competitors, their marketing approach, and your own content marketing modifications using the tools listed below.
- Ubersuggest
- SpyFu
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- SimilarWeb
- Alexa
- Buzzsumo
- Keyword competitor