If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. And this is so true when it comes to competitor analysis for SEO. It is key to creating a proper content marketing and SEO strategy for your business.

Without knowing how to position yourself and what the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors are, you will have a tough time reaching the first pages of search engines. And without high search engine rankings, you can only dream of getting solid organic traffic.

Now, let’s see what competitor analysis means for SEO, why it is important, and how we do it at Elevatepoint!

What is competitor analysis for SEO?

Competitor analysis for SEO means researching and evaluating your competitors’ online presence and strategies to get a clear view of their strengths and weaknesses. It also helps us to uncover opportunities to improve our own SEO strategy, find content gaps, and offer a good overview of which keywords we should aim for.

Imagine it like a map, which gives you a picture of where you are and where you want to go. But from a practical standpoint, why is it important for every business?

Why competitor analysis is important for SEO?

Competitor analysis is crucial for SEO because it provides valuable insights that help us create your content and SEO strategy. Here are some key reasons why it matters:

• It helps to discover content gaps in competitors’ content strategies that we can aim for.
• Competitor analysis gives the context and the background for creating your keyword strategy.
• When reviewing your competitor’s content, we have a chance to see what formula works in that specific niche.
• By examining your competitors’ backlink profiles, you can identify where they are getting their backlinks from and see if you can gain similar links.
• If we did our SEO competitor research well, we could use these data to benchmark our performance.
• Lastly, it helps us to identify and track industry trends.

What are the steps of competitor analysis at ElevatePoint?

Here, I want to share the key steps on how we conduct competitor analysis for our clients. Let’s take a closer look!

Step 1: Finding your competitors

First of all, we need to find our competitors’ websites and evaluate whether we should involve them in our analysis. There are niches where it is not sufficient to include only the direct business competitors, but we also need to check some other indirect competitors. Why are we doing this?

Well, there are keywords that not only the direct competitors want to take, but others as well, like review sites or another business. In such cases, we compete not only against our direct business competitors but also against these websites. So, it is crucial to identify your SEO competitors correctly because such websites can change the competition.

If that is the situation, we might need to include indirect competitors in the analysis as well.

Step 2: Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles

At the next step in our SEO competitor analysis process, we need to check each competitor’s backlink profile. This step of our competitor analysis is critical to see how your competition stands in terms of off-page SEO factors.