Your competitors can indeed be a fountain of information that you can use to turbocharge your SEO strategy. You will know how and what their strengths and weaknesses are, enabling you to outperform them in search rankings. This article will walk you through the steps to conduct a deep SEO competitor analysis so you can fine-tune your strategy and improve your results.
What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
SEO competitor analysis is about breaking down your competitors, understanding what works and what doesn’t, and where the opportunities lie. It is an approach in more structured identification of strengths and weaknesses in their strategy to help you inform your strategy.
Why Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis?
Through conducting an SEO competitor analysis, you are able to:
- Know the Industry Trends: Learn from successful tactics, avoid those that are common pitfalls.
- Identify Weaknesses to capitalize on their competitor strategy gaps.
- Replicate Successes: Identify successful approaches to replicate on your website.
- Prioritize Tasks: Jot down the areas generating the highest ROI first.
- Gauge Difficulty: Assess how hard it is going to be to outrank them.
When Should You Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis?
Run an SEO competitor analysis when
- When a new website is launched.
- When anyone plans to begin a comprehensive SEO strategy.
- When one notices a drop in ranking for keywords.
- When competitors outrank for target keywords.
How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis
Here’s a step-by-step approach to analyzing your competitors:
Identify Your SEO Competitors
YYour SEO competitors are the websites vying for the same keywords in the search results, even if they aren’t direct business competitors. For instance, a local coffee shop and an e-commerce coffee brand may both compete for keywords like “best coffee beans.”
Steps to Identify Competitors
- Use Tools for Insights: I recommend using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to identify competing domains based on your targeted keywords. It provides a clear picture of which websites dominate the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for those terms.
- For New Websites: If your website is new, use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find domains that rank for your chosen keywords. This approach is particularly helpful because it filters out irrelevant competitors and helps you focus on those directly impacting your visibility.
Example: Let’s say you are launching a platform for infographic design. Using these tools, you may identify competitors like Canva, Venngage, and Visme. While these are direct competitors in content, it’s often unwise to compare yourself to giant brands like Adobe, as they dominate primarily due to their exceptionally high domain authority.
Pro Tip: SEMrush and Moz are also excellent tools for spotting keyword overlaps and ranking competitors. If budget permits, I recommend using multiple tools to validate your findings.
Analyze Traffic Sources
Understanding where your competitors’ traffic comes from is vital for crafting a strategy to compete effectively. This insight can highlight pages or content types driving significant traffic.
How to Check Traffic Sources
- Open Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and navigate to the Site Structure Report. This feature reveals how their website is organized and which pages attract the most organic traffic.
- Identify high-performing sections of their site and analyze the type of content these pages feature.
Example: Imagine analyzing Venngage’s site structure and discovering that the templates section contributes significantly to their organic traffic. You could use this insight to prioritize creating content like “custom infographic templates” or “free brochure designs,” tailored to your audience.
Additional Resource: SimilarWeb can complement this analysis by showing an overview of traffic sources, including organic, referral, direct, and social traffic.
Find Content Gaps
Content gaps are opportunities where your competitors rank for specific keywords, but you don’t. Filling these gaps can help you expand your content library and target keywords that you might have overlooked.
How to Find Content Gaps
- Use Ahrefs’ Content Gap Tool under their Competitive Analysis section. This tool identifies keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t.
- Filter results by search volume, keyword difficulty, and relevance to ensure you prioritize the best opportunities.
Example: Suppose your competitors rank for “infographic examples” and “creative infographic ideas,” but you haven’t targeted these terms. Creating high-quality content focused on these keywords can help you bridge that gap and attract new visitors.
Pro Tip: For more comprehensive results, cross-check your findings using Ubersuggest or Google Search Console.
Target Featured Snippets
Featured snippets give quick answers in search results and drive more visibility.
How to Identify Snippet Opportunities:
- Use Ahrefs’ tools to find keywords at which your competitors own the featured snippet, but you rank in the top 10.
- Optimize existing content to fit the format of the snippets: lists, step-by-step guides, etc.
Example: If Venngage owns a snippet for “how to make posters,” then refactor your content with clear, stepped actions via headers that could take over.
Analyze Geographic Traffic
Understanding what country their competitors’ traffic is coming from can help inform one’s own localization strategy.
How to Check Traffic by Country:
- Go to the Traffic by Country report in Ahrefs and note the regions that contribute most to the traffic.
- If your competitor gets substantial traffic from non-English speaking countries, it could unlock new opportunities should you then translate your content into Spanish, Portuguese, or Hindi, for example.
Analyze Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are a major ranking factor, and understanding your competitors’ link building will help you duplicate effective tactics.
How to Identify Opportunities for Links:
- To find sites linking to your competitors but not to you, use the Ahrefs Link Intersect Tool.
- For example, if your competitors were featured in high-authority lists, you can reach out to those sites for inclusion for your brand too.
Employ Link Bait
But an added way of building quality backlinks is via the creation of “link bait” in the form of original research or tools that are useful to others, which they would then link back to.
How to Identify Link Bait Opportunities:
- Use Ahrefs’ Best by Links report to identify the type of content that generates the most links for competitors.
- For instance, if a competitor’s article on marketing statistics attracts several thousand links, publishing an updated or better version may be the best idea.
Broken Links Removal
Competitors having pages with links that aren’t working-you can gain from this by providing alternative content.
How to Find Broken Links:
- Via Ahrefs’ Best by Links report, you’ll have to filter for 404 errors to find the opportunities.
- For instance, if one of your competitors has a dead page related to design principles with live backlinks, make a new version of it and reach out to the linking sites.
Analyze Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals, Google’s metrics of user experience, are a ranking factor.
How to Compare Core Web Vitals:
- Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for individual competitor pages or run a complete crawl with Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool.
- By analyzing this data, you will get the opportunity to outpace all your competitors in terms of page load speed and interactivity.
Analyze Competitors’ Paid Search Strategy
Competitors’ PPC campaigns can give away profitable keywords and ad strategies.
How to Analyze PPC Keywords:
- Check out the Paid Keywords Report in Ahrefs and see what terms competitors are bidding on.
- Use this intel to help you craft your ad copy and optimize meta descriptions for better click-through rates.
Final Thoughts
Competitor analysis is among the most important building blocks of any SEO strategy. This looks at what works for others in your industry and gives you an avenue to improve your tactics, capitalize on underutilized opportunities, and rise through the search engine rankings.
Remember, this process is not a one-time thing; it will require revisiting and updating the competitor analysis regularly to keep you ahead in this ever-changing landscape of SEO.