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.

There are several SEO tools available to help you analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Some of the most popular tools include:

• Ahrefs: Allows you to see a comprehensive backlink profile of any website, including details like referring domains, anchor texts, and backlink history.
• SEMrush: Offers backlink analysis features, helping you identify competitor backlinks, referring domains, and backlink types.
• Moz Link Explorer: Provides insights into a competitor’s link profile, domain authority, and top linking pages.
• Majestic: This tool specializes in backlink analysis and can help you discover the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your competitor’s site.

Personally, I prefer Ahrefs, but all these tools are excellent for getting an overview of your competitor’s backlinks. But you might ask yourself: Why is off-page SEO so important for competitor analysis?

Here is the thing: Off-page SEO helps to increase your site’s credibility and signal to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant. It will work like a passive bonus for all your content when it comes to how your pages rank.

The bigger the gap is between your off-page score and your competitors, the harder it is to get ahead of them in rankings. But it’s true for vice-versa. That said, if you have a higher off-page score than your competitors, it will be easier to capture the first positions in Google.

The next step of our competitor analysis is analyzing their keyword rankings and their overall strategy.

Step 3: Analyzing their keyword rankings and strategy

At this stage of the competitor analysis, it is time to see how competitors rank and what keywords they targeting. Similarly to the previous step, I recommend to do this with tools:

• Ahrefs: It is also a helpful SEO competitor analysis tool for identifying your competitors’ top-ranking pages and keyword gaps.
• Keywords Everywhere: It is a simple tool to analyze your competitors’ search engine rankings.
• Moz: It offers a solution to check how your competitors’ pages rank and what keywords they want to capture.

After analyzing your competitors’ keyword rankings, you will have enough information to create your own keyword strategy. Here are some options you can choose from when creating your keyword strategy depending on how competitive you are from an SEO perspective compared to your competitors:

• Target high-performing keywords: Focus on keywords your competitors rank for that you are not currently targeting but have the potential to rank for.
• Aim at content gaps: If your competitors are missing certain keywords or providing insufficient content, you can create more comprehensive content that focuses on those gaps.
• Focus on long-tail keywords: If your competitors are focusing heavily on short, competitive keywords, consider targeting long-tail keywords with less competition and higher conversion potential.
• Transactional vs non-transactional keywords: After our competitor analysis, we have a clear overview of which type of keywords we should target. Transactional content is an article targeting a keyword that people searching for with purchase intent. Sometimes, it’s even easier to go for these keywords, and it also offers higher conversion rates. Alternatively, you can go after non-transactional keywords like how-to guides. People searching for these terms are looking for information without a purchase intent yet.

Essentially, there are more options, like targeting branded or non-branded keywords, and we love to target different types of keywords depending on the overall SEO and content marketing strategy we choose.

Step 4: Check competitors’ on-page SEO and content marketing strategies

After we analyzed our competitors’ keyword gaps and strategies, we needed to take a deep dive into their content. It is not enough to see which keywords they target; we need to know how effectively they can target them.

When assessing competitor’s on-page SEO and content marketing strategies, we always check the followings at ElevatePoint:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Header tags
• Keyword usage
• Internal links
• Image optimization
• URL structure
• Number of pictures
• Content length
• Number of headings
• Content quality

I know, it sounds a lot. However, all these factors are important when assessing how effectively you can target keywords. And these are only the main factors that we need to take into consideration.

Based on these factors, we create a score for each competitor so you will not get lost in the details. This way, we can compare your business and competitors to competitors.

Let’s talk a little about technical SEO!

Step 5: Analyzing competitors from technical SEO aspects

Most of the time, technical SEO is not relevant for our clients since they and their competitors have a professional site and pass all the minimum barriers we need for technical SEO.

In short, technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your website efficiently. It covers these points :

• Page speed
• Website crawlability and indexability
• Mobile optimization and responsiveness
• URL structure and canonicalization
• Schema markup
• Broken links, redirects, duplicated content
• Security and HTTPS Implementation

Ultimately, these factors all impact your SEO rankings. We particularly take a closer look at page speed and the link structure.

Step 6: Identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Finally, we have reached the point where we have all the information needed to effectively identify your SEO competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

We do it by summarizing all the strengths and weaknesses in an Excel sheet, and based on the previous steps, we add a score to each competitor based on their on-page and off-page SEO and content marketing strategies.

The score overall helps to simplify how your competitors stand in terms of SEO and content marketing compared to your business. By incorporating their strengths and weaknesses into this table, we can create our SEO and content strategies using this information.

Wrap-Up: Competitor analysis for SEO

As you can see, the competitor analysis gives the ground for the SEO strategy we want to implement. If you analyze your competitors in the right way, whether it’s their keyword rankings, on-page SEO, content strategies, or technical SEO aspects, you can identify both opportunities and content gaps that can help you position yourself on the market.

Understanding what your competitors are doing well and where they might be lacking is key to creating an SEO and content marketing strategy that ensures we capture the most critical keywords for your brand.

Frequently asked questions

How do you do competitor analysis in SEO?

First, you need to identify your SEO competitors. Second, it is time to do a competitor backlink analysis to see how competitive they are when it comes to off-page SEO.

After, we need to check their keyword strategy and ensure we do a keyword gap analysis. Once we are ready with the keyword analysis, we need to take a look at their on-page and content marketing strategies. This way, we can see how effectively they can target relevant keywords.

Furthermore, we need to do a quick technical SEO check. After our technical SEO analysis, we can see the whole picture of our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Using this knowledge, we can craft a personalized SEO and content plan for you to ensure high rankings and conversions.

What is the best tool for SEO competitor analysis?

There are several SEO tools for competitive analysis:

• Ahrefs: Allows you to see a comprehensive backlink profile of any website, including details like referring domains, anchor texts, and backlink history.
• SEMrush: Offers backlink analysis features, helping you identify competitor backlinks, referring domains, and backlink types.
• Moz Link Explorer: Provides insights into a competitor’s link profile, domain authority, and top linking pages.
• Majestic: This tool specializes in backlink analysis and can help you discover the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your competitor’s site.
• Keywords everywhere: It is a simple tool to analyze your competitors’ search engine rankings.

What is competitor analysis in technical SEO?

In short, technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your website efficiently. It covers these points :

• Page speed
• Website crawlability and indexability
• Mobile optimization and responsiveness
• URL structure and canonicalization
• Schema markup
• Broken links, redirects, duplicated content
• Security and HTTPS Implementation

Ultimately, these factors all impact your SEO rankings. We particularly take a closer look at page speed and the link structure.