To beat a giant, it takes time and patience. You have to be willing to fight your way up the ranks, no matter how long it takes. You have to improve your site, establish quality connections, and be patient.
It’s important to do research to strengthen any marketing project, but it’s especially important for search engine optimization. The search engines will give a higher ranking to the sites they consider most relevant, trustworthy and high quality for a given user’s search query. To find out what thesearch engines will reward, look at the sites that are currently ranking high.
Once you identify your main competitors, you can use a tool to save time on research and see what the search engines are rewarding for that keyword. Our SEOToolSet can show you a lot of details about a website and how it’s doing over time. If you want a quick analysis, try free options like these. For a quick analysis, try free options such as these for starters:
- Google Ads keyword tools
- Browser extensions such as SEOquake, or
- Our free version of the Single Page Analyzer tool.
Now that you are more knowledgeable about the competition, we will look at how to beat them through strategic research on competitors.
5 Steps to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis
We can analyze our competition by breaking it down into simple steps.
1. Revise Your Current Strategy
It’s a good idea to assess your own strengths and weaknesses before analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies. If you don’t know your own strengths and weaknesses, you won’t be able to make accurate comparisons to your competitors later. If you aren’t aware of the opportunities you have, you won’t be able to grow in the right direction. You can’t build a strategy without a basis for future judgments.
To start, answer the following questions:
- Backlinks: how many do you have right now? Are they all beneficial to your site, or maybe there are a few bad apples among them? If you have doubts, be sure to scan your site for toxic backlinks with WebCEO.
- Keywords: are they niche, long-tail keywords, or are they too general and competitive for your site to take the lead anytime soon (if ever)? Check them with WebCEO’s Get Suggestions tool just to be safe.
- Social media activity: have you created a page for your site on each prominent social network (e.g. Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn)? Do you post there regularly? Is the content on those pages diverse? Refer to WebCEO’s Social Engagement tool for a quick rundown on your social activity.
You may also want to use WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool to check your site for any technical issues, in order to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
2. Choose Your Competitors Carefully
A competitor is someone who is going after the same customers as you and has the same business goals. Don’t start a fight with a company that isn’t even trying to take away your business. That would be a waste of your time and energy.
Instead of just Googling a keyword and choosing whoever appears on the first page, you could use WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool for more accurate results.
You can find helpful and relevant information about the best websites competing for your set of keywords by entering them into a search engine. You can also optionally punch in a few competitor URLs that you are sure about to save time.
You shouldn’t just stop at talking to your prospective customers. You should also talk to your current customers. They are the ones who decide which business is the best. They can be a great source of information if you ask them to answer a few questions in a survey.
What are some things that you have always wanted to do? Start by brainstorming a list of activities that you have always wanted to do. This can be anything from skydiving to learning a new language. Once you have your list, start thinking about how you can make these things happen. Are there any steps you need to take in order to make these activities a reality? If so, what are they? By taking the time to figure out the steps you need to take to accomplish your goals, you will be one step closer to making them a reality. Some of them may include:
- What kind of keywords do you use in your online research?
- What companies’ services in this niche do you use? What are their websites?
- What do you like about the service they provide online?
- What do you like about their websites?
When the general public speaks on a topic, they carry more weight and authority than a search engine can.
3. Visually Analyze Their Sites
Now that you have a list of your competitors, it is time to analyze their websites. Start with a visual analysis and look for what they are doing wrong, just like you looked for what you were doing wrong before. Try not to become discouraged when your competitors have much better websites than yours; more often than not, it is just a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence.
Keep your eyes peeled for things like:
- Design
- Titles
- Headers
- Content
- Calls-to-action
Consider what makes your competitor’s site good or bad from the perspective of user experience and engagement. Make changes to your own site accordingly to improve upon your competitor’s weaknesses.
4. Analyze Their Ranking Keywords
Your competitors are possibly using the same keywords as you, and it is likely they are ranking higher than you too. How can you make sure your keywords don’t overlap with theirs and put you at a disadvantage?
You can find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for and how well they are doing with WebCEO’s Keyword Research tools. You don’t need all of their keywords, just the ones that are doing much better for them than they would for you. If you can, find keywords in that list that are relevant to your site, but aren’t placing your competitors too high in Google search results. However, this task is better suited for a different tool: Competitor Rankings by Keyword.
5. Monitor the Competitors’ Backlinks
If you want your website to rank well in search engines, backlinks are one of the most important factors to consider. To keep track of your website’s progress, it can be helpful to monitor your competitors’ backlink profiles in addition to your own. WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool lets you see everyone who links to you and your competitors in a single table.
Tracking the domains that link to your competitor’s website could give you an insight as to which ones could be persuaded to link to you as well. Additionally, it would be beneficial to check if there are any domains linking to your competitor’s website that you could potentially secure a link from. Moving quickly to be the first to get a backlink from them could give you an advantage.
Sizing Up the Giants
The top 10 results of an organic search are the ones which will be of most importance for your competitive research. Although you may only want to consider businesses which offer the same services, products or information as you do to be true competitors, in reality all of the businesses on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) are competing for your attention. So far, some of them may be doing a better job than you are!
#1: Wikipedia
This text is talking about how a site that is often in the second or third search engine result position may be a competitor, even if it doesn’t offer the same services.
According to Bruce Clay, Wikipedia may not always be the best source depending on what the searcher is looking for. Wikipedia generally answers who, what, and when, but not always how. This could be an opportunity for you to provide better coverage of the subject. However, in order to satisfy the search engines, your content must still be just as good as what Wikipedia has to offer.
You should visit the page that is ranking for your keyword to get an in-person look. Once you have done that, plug the URL into a research tool and answer the following questions:
- How much text does Wikipedia have on the topic compared to your site? You should be able to see total words on the page in your research tool; also notice how many pages support this topic.
- How targeted is the article on the specific keyword? Looking at the Single Page Analyzer’s (or other tool’s) analysis, you can see what words and phrases are repeated and included in the important page elements like the title, Meta Description, and headings down the page. Seeing these on-page keywords should give you a good picture of how focused the page is on your targeted keyword phrase.
- What information/research terms does the Wiki page include? Phrases like “history of,” “for further information,” and others help make a page relevant for research queries. Include these naturally in your text.
#2: Ehow, EzineArticles, Yahoo! Answers, Wikihow, etc.
These websites offer step-by-step guides that are often ranked highly by search engines for informational queries. Like Wikipedia, the results from these websites may not seem like real competition. However, if Google thinks an article from one of these websites is more relevant than your website for a targeted keyword, you should investigate why that is.
- What how-to information might be missing on your website that would be useful for visitors?
- Analyze the page using a tool like our free Single Page Analyzer to see the on-page elements. How often is the keyword phrase used, and is it in the important places? If the keyword is not strongly supported, you may have a chance to knock it down.
- What additional pages or engagement objects do you need to support your web page targeted to this keyword? Examine the Ehow.com page’s links, subpages, diagrams, videos, charts, pictures, and so forth for ideas of ways to make your coverage of the same topic more robust.
#3: Authority .gov and .edu sites
Even though official authority sites like government and university websites may have high E-A-T value, they may not be the best option in terms of content and relevance. This is because ranking comes down to quality content, trustworthiness, and relevance to a particular user’s query and perceived intent. Here’s what to look for:
- How targeted is the ranking page on the desired keyword? If it’s only a weak association, there may be room for your site to squeeze past if you can produce high quality, substantial content that’s squarely centered on the theme.
- What if the web page seems well optimized for the keyword? In that case, you could change your battle plan. The authority site might be unbeatable because the keyword is too broad and overly competitive. Pick up your slingshot and load it with a longer-tail keyword variation instead.
It’s important to be aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, but your competitive strategy will only be successful if you can find ways to consistently do better than them.
Watch your website competitors’ every move, to see what search engine optimization (SEO) strategies they are using, what’s working well for them, and where there are opportunities for you to improve your own website ranking. Try to learn from their tactics, so that you can use them against your competitors in the future!
You will develop a strategy for improving your ranking on search engines to outperform your competitors.
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