Do you want to rank higher than your competitors Background
Do you want to rank higher than your competitors

Do you want to rank higher than your competitors?

Do you want to rank higher than your competitors

Do you want to rank higher than your competitors?

A valuable tool in the SEO (search engine optimisation) toolbox, an SEO competitor analysis can help you do just that.

An SEO competitor analysis is the process of researching and evaluating the backlink profile, content and target keywords of your rivals’ websites.

With this information to hand, you can easily identify what your competitors are doing well, and more importantly, what they’re not doing. Identifying these gaps will help you springboard to the top of the SERPS (search engine results page).

In this handy guide, we’ll provide you with some helpful tips on how to conduct an SEO competitor analysis.

Identify your competitors

To conduct an SEO competitor analysis, firstly, you must identify your competitors. This is easier than it sounds, and it might just surprise you. Your online competitors may not be who you think they are.

The easiest way to identify your competitors is to do a manual search of your target keyword/s on Google. These are the terms that you want your website to rank for.

Your direct competitors are the websites that rank towards the top of page one of the SERPS, as they’re targeting the same keywords that you are.

Alternatively, you can use online SEO tools such as Semrush or SEranking to help identify your competitors.

These tools will display the domains that are ranking for similar keywords as yours, and provide you with valuable insights on how many keywords you share in common, and the levels of traffic your competitors can expect to receive.

Keyword gap analysis

Instead of identifying the keywords you share with your competitors, a keyword gap analysis can provide you with the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you’re not.

You can use the above mentioned online SEO tools to conduct keyword gap analysis. It’s as simple as taking the URL of your site, along with the URLS of your competitors, and pressing go.

These comprehensive tools will provide you with a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for, usually titled “missing”, as they’re missing from your site.

It’s important to note that not all these keywords will be pertinent, as your competitors may provide services or products that aren’t relevant to your site.

You can export the list of keywords for further analysis, where you can manually identify the keywords that are relevant to your site, helping to discover new content ideas.

Backlink analysis

A backlink refers to an incoming link from an external website that links to your website.

Backlinks are an important, and often overlooked, part of SEO, as they’re essentially votes of support from one website to another.

Backlinks can pass ‘link juice’, which is believed to give strength and value to the receiving site. Google’s crawl bots interpret these backlinks as little votes of confidence. If a website is worth promoting, then it must be worth ranking.

The higher the domain authority and reputation of the linking site, the more “link juice” and, in turn, the more ranking power your site will gain.

Conducting a backlink analysis of your competing sites is important, as this helps determine the level of backlink profile you need to compete.

There are plenty of online SEO tools that you can use to complete backlink analysis, both paid and free, including Semrush’s ‘Backlink Analytics’ and Ahref’s ‘Free Backlink Checker’.

The only information you’ll need to hand is the URLs of your website and those of your competitors. You’ll be presented with the total number of backlinks pointing to each of the sites, along with the title, URL and authority score of each external page linking to the site.

This information is valuable in finding links that are relevant to your website and are worth trying to acquire. If they’re linking to your competitors, why not link to you?

Need help with conducting an SEO competitor analysis? Contact the friendly team at Engage Web today.

Lizi MacGregor

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