Are you planning an SEO strategy for a new website? Do you have an older website that isn’t performing as well in rankings as it used to? You need to perform a competitor analysis.
Analyzing how your competitors approach SEO can really help you improve your own SEO strategies. You’ll get new keyword ideas and give you a better understanding of how SEO looks for your industry and community. Follow these steps to analyze the SEO on your competitors’ websites.
Find Your Competitors
The first step to analyzing how your competitors use SEO is to figure out who your competitors are. Remember that your competitors for SEO traffic might not necessarily be the same as your business competitors.
You might have competitors outside your niche who are using the same keywords as you, but they have a different meaning in that industry. You might also have competitors who are ranking for multiple keyword categories, among them some that overlap with yours.
To find your competitors, perform a Google search of the keywords you want to target. The top returns are your competitors. Write down the domains, and pay attention to the kind of content others are putting out that’s getting them to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). If all of the top-ranking sites are putting out video content, for example, you need to consider putting out video content, too.
Analyze Their Website Structure, URL, Keywords, and More
Once you have found your competitors, visit their websites and analyze them for structure, keywords, content, and design. This is really the heavy lifting of the analysis, and you might want to get the help of a Phoenix SEO company for this part.
You will need to note site speed, mobile optimization, and the keywords they use and how they use them. You will need to assess the quality and quantity of backlinks on their site. You should consider the type of content they publish. There are plenty of tools you can use to assist with SEO competitor analysis – they can help you find this information and make sense of it.
Evaluate Their Presence on Social Media
Social media presence can have a huge impact on SEO, so you need to evaluate your competitors’ presence on social media. How are they managing their social media accounts to bring in more traffic? What social media platforms are they using and how are they using them? You need to assess how your competitors interact with users on social media platforms, what hashtags they use, what content they post, and so on.
Assess Their Content
Content plays a huge role in SEO – it’s what makes websites available for crawling and indexing by search engines, as well as being what attracts and keeps users on a site. Assess the frequency, variety, relevance, and quality of the content your competitors are creating and sharing. Do they post a mix of blog posts, infographics, images, and videos? How often do they update? Is the content shareable?
Compile the SWOTs
Once you’ve accumulated all the data you need about your competitor’s SEO, you can compile the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTs). The SWOTs should form a clear picture of where your competitors are surpassing you and where there is room for you to catch up. You can use this analysis as the foundation of your SEO strategy.
Update Your SEO Strategy
Now you can take what you’ve learned from analyzing your SEO competitors and develop an effective SEO strategy or update an existing strategy to be more effective. With the information you gained in your competitor analysis, you can develop new keywords to target, focus on building backlinks from the right websites, and improve your site’s technical SEO.
You should also have a good idea by now of what kind of content your competitors are putting out there. You’ll need to create high-quality content and it should be diverse in nature – that means you should be creating written, video, and graphic content to share on your website and on your social media profiles.
Of course, your competitors will change their SEO strategies as the SEO algorithms change, and you, too, should stay abreast of these changes. Reanalyzing your competitors regularly can help you stay in the loop, as can following SEO industry blogs to stay up-to-date on your knowledge.
Analyzing your SEO competitors is an essential part of developing an effective SEO strategy. Make sure you learn what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are, so you can have a better chance of outranking them.
