What is SEO competitor analysis?
SEO competitor analysis involves investigating the competitive online environment in your industry by assessing your rivals’ SEO strategies. Competitive analysis is crucial for search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. The information on what works for your competition should be understood because you can gain valuable insights about your SEO competitors. The aim is to see which keywords and what content works for the other guys. This information lets you make informed decisions shaping your strategy and improving results.
Why Is SEO Competitor Analysis Important?
SEO competitor analysis is crucial because it can help to explain what your competition is doing online. Furthermore, the research helps you evaluate the success of their methods. The advantage of this is that it uncovers keywords, content concepts, and link-building opportunities that you can use.
Don’t doubt that if your local competition is doing well online, they have already analysed your website and methods. The metrics we review as part of this analysis usually show when the company has invested in digital marketing. Concerted efforts with SEO and digital marketing leave telltale signs that we spot quickly. The evidence becomes clear when we check the website traffic, keywords, backlink details and blogs. This information increased social media activity, and increased reviews show they are serious about their SEO efforts.
At Unity SEO, we often work with companies that have come late to the party regarding SEO. Our new clients often must catch up to their competitors regarding their digital presence and web traffic. Understanding what to do to beat your competition starts with competitor analysis, which forms part of how we write the SEO strategy to beat them.
SEO Competition
SEO competition is a metric that can gauge the strength of your competitors’ SEO strategy, and it is a fundamental part of SEO competitor analysis. It’s essential to understand what your competitors are doing so that you can use this information to improve your own site’s ranking and organic traffic. There are many different ways to measure the strength of a competitor’s online presence; we’ll discuss how these metrics work together below.
How to do an SEO Competitor Analysis
Below is the process Unity SEO follows for SEO competitor analysis; you can do this if you can access the relevant SEO tools. You can use SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest to conduct keyword research. All of which have free versions of software available online. Although the free versions are pretty basic, they are worth trying if you have enough time and a tight budget.
Examine The On-Page Optimisation
When conducting SEO competitive analysis, it’s crucial to assess on-page optimisation. This entails examining how rivals have optimised their website’s content to boost their search visibility. We identify the main keywords and the competitor’s rank using our specialist SEO tools. We are interested in elements like meta tags, headings and rankings for products and services.
Unity SEO aims to assess how competitors utilise local schema markup, optimise their title tags and meta descriptions, and implement location-specific keywords throughout their content. This analysis helps businesses identify areas to enhance their on-page optimisation strategies, ensuring that their website is well-structured, keyword-rich, and highly relevant to search queries.
We also look for patterns in their content structure, identify the keywords they target, and analyse the content’s quality, relevance, and internal linking. This work can provide you with valuable insights into how to improve your on-page optimisation efforts.
By evaluating competitors’ on-page optimisation strategies, businesses can gain valuable insights into effective practices, including keyword usage, content structure, internal linking, and technical optimisation. Furthermore, examining the on-page optimisation of competitors can provide insights into the structure and organisation of their websites.
Keyword Analysis
The information gained from Keyword analysis helps us identify their keyword competitiveness. Determining the search volume and competition level for each keyword helps us prioritise which keywords to focus on in your SEO strategy.
We also explore related keywords and semantic variations, look for keywords related to your competitors’ primary keywords, and include them in your analysis. These related keywords can provide additional opportunities to expand your keyword targeting to capture more organic traffic.
If we can understand your competitors’ keyword targeting, you can refine your keyword strategy and optimise your content to better compete in the search engine results pages. Regularly monitor your competitors’ keyword rankings and adapt your strategy to stay ahead in SEO terms.
Check The Backlink Profile
The study of backlink profiles is crucial because it can tell us so much about the credibility of a website. Backlinks are external links from other websites pointing to a particular site. When reputable and authoritative websites link to another site, it signals to search engines that the linked website is valuable and trustworthy. Backlinks indicate that other websites recognise the content, products, or services the linked site offers as reliable and valuable enough to reference.
Backlinks are key to off-page SEO, and analysing link profiles can help us identify potential linking opportunities for your website. We will find high-quality websites linking to your competitors and assess their authority and relevance. This information can help our efforts towards building a solid backlink profile.
Examine The Website's User Experience (UX)
Evaluate their website’s loading speed, mobile responsiveness, and overall design. Identify technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, or poor site structure. Understanding and improving these areas can enhance your website’s user experience, positively impacting SEO.
Remember, the goal of analysing your competitors’ websites for SEO is not to copy their strategies but to gain insights and identify opportunities to strengthen your website. By regularly monitoring and adapting to the competition, you can refine your SEO efforts and stay ahead in the search engine rankings.
Competitor Analysis SEO Reports
Understanding what makes your competitors successful is vital to SEO competitor analysis. This is where SEO reports become invaluable tools, providing insights into a website’s performance and allowing competitor comparisons to track progress against them.
Our SEO reports summarise a website’s organic search traffic, keyword rankings, and other vital metrics. In addition, we go a step further by offering competitor analysis, giving a complete picture of a business’s position in the market. By including comparisons with competitors in our SEO reports, we help clients better understand how they stack up against others in their industry.
These comparative insights can encompass various aspects of digital presence, such as market share, keyword performance, backlink profiles, and overall SEO health. By examining how competitors fare in these areas, businesses can identify opportunities, gauge their performance against industry benchmarks, and fine-tune their strategies accordingly.
Local SEO
Competitive analysis is a crucial component of local SEO strategy, helping businesses understand their position within the local market and gain a competitive edge. Assessing competitors’ performance in the same geographic area becomes essential when focusing on local SEO. Conducting a comprehensive competitive analysis for local SEO involves evaluating local search rankings, online reviews, business listings, and localised content.
When analysing competitors’ local search rankings, businesses can identify which competitors rank higher for relevant local keywords and understand their strategies to achieve those rankings. This analysis allows businesses to identify gaps in their local SEO efforts and develop strategies to improve their rankings and visibility in local search results. Also, examining competitors’ online reviews and ratings provide valuable insights into customer sentiment, enabling businesses to refine their reputation management strategies and address shortcomings.
Summary
We hope this page has given you sound insight into SEO competitor analysis and how Unity SEO can use this tool to improve your search engine optimisation rankings. The main takeaway is that understanding what works for your competition must be understood so that you can exploit that knowledge to gain information to improve your online conversions.
SEO competitor analysis is a service we carry out as part of our SEO packages; we work with you to identify and beat your competitors. This is an area of our business where we excel, so if you want to beat your competition, contact us today!