Search Engine Optimization or (SEO) is growing in importance for any business operating online. The reason? SEO is one of the main ways people find your brand online – using SEO writing amongst other tactics – so where you rank is crucial.
After all, the number one spot on Google gets a 27 percent click-through rate compared to only a 0.63 percent CTR for Google’s second page according to Backlinko.
An SEO competitive analysis (as an add-on to a full digital marketing competitive analysis) will allow you to see what your competitors are doing with SEO and how you compare to them.
It will highlight the strengths and weaknesses so you can create a strategy that helps you stay ahead of them in the rankings (Google and otherwise). There are five key steps you carry out in a competitive analysis:
- Identify your competitors
- Analyze their SEO strategy
- Analyze their keywords
- Analyze their on-page optimization
- Analyze their backlinks
So let’s dive in and see how to do competitive analysis in SEO.
Step 1: Identify Your Competitors
Whether you’re a start-up or an established company you should know who your competitors are. This not only applies to the products or services you sell but also to where you rank on search engines – your SEO competitors!
The first thing to do in identifying your competitors is to make a list. Look at your keywords and website searches that you want to rank first for and see what websites or companies come up.
For example, on searching for ‘SEO trends 2023’ in the example below you can see that Wordstream has landed the featured snippet while positions two and three are taken by Search Engine Journal. So, if you are trying to rank for this term, these are your key competitors.
Step 2: Analyze their SEO Strategy
Look at your competitors’ websites to get a sense of their SEO strategy. This includes the website structure, types of content created, and the targeted keywords (both short and long-tail).
You should also check your competitors’ website speed and mobile responsiveness. This can be done using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Knowing these things will help you understand how your website compares to your competitors in terms of technical SEO.
Analyze your competitors’ content
It’s important to not only know the types of content your competitors produce but what content gets the most traffic. To help your SEO strategy, find out:
- What are their top-ranking pages?
- Which pages rank for keywords?
- Which pages drive the highest percentage of traffic?
Look at your competitors’ social media presence
Social media holds a lot of sway when it comes to driving brand awareness and directing traffic.
So check out your competitors’ social media channels. Look at the number of followers they have, the type of content they share, and their engagement levels. This will help you understand how your competitors leverage social media to drive traffic to their websites.
Step 3: Analyze their Keywords
You may be doing well when it comes to your primary keywords, but what about the ones you rank for but place you at the bottom of page one of the SERP?
Pay attention to those keywords as putting some effort into including them in your content could help you overtake your competitor to land a position ahead of them.
You should also look for keyword gaps and keyword opportunities. This will help you to identify terms or phrases you could and should be ranking for using tools like SEMRush or AHREFS.
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