SEO Analysis: The Ultimate Competitive Guide
Healthy and constant competition is part and parcel of any pursuit and industry. It ups your game, polishes your skills, and takes both you and your competition to higher levels of accomplishment. For any industry, the presence of competition can nurture innovative practices, check complacency, and simply makes you better at all aspects of your business.
When it comes to SEO, competition is fierce and unforgiving. Every brand out there wants to reach out to the target audience as well as expand their demography. When your target audiences overlap, the competition is even more prominent in every sales strategy.
In this definitive and comprehensive guide, our Liverpool SEO professionals will show you how to recognize tough competitors, identify how they’re doing better, and find solutions to beating the odds.
Identify Your Competition
It’s not very difficult to identify the major players in your field. They’re usually big players who appear where it matters. But can you spot the competitors who are specific to your SEO? This can be harder to do because it requires a more nuanced understanding of marketing strategies.
An excellent way to identify the competition is to use SERPs for your keywords and phrases. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) can reveal competitors who may even be outside your niche.
You can do a search for your targeted keywords and note the domain and brands of those who appear on top. Take special note of those competitors who are located in your local sphere. Alternatively, you can use a competitive analysis tool to give you the results with minimum time and effort on your part.
Assess The Keyword Difficulty
Although you can manually scour the web for this information, using a competitive analysis tool can be easier. Check out your competitor’s domain strength and observe specific parameters.
These indices can include domain country & age, domain authority, catalog listings, Alexa rank, search engine indices, social signals, backlink data, etc.
Once you’re carefully analyzed these metrics, you’ll be able to spot weaknesses and shortcomings. Trying to overtake every major player in your niche simultaneously will be a resource-consuming and an uphill task. Identify if there are local competitors who may be struggling with niche keywords but still competing with you. Starting with these will allow you to climb up the competition ladder slowly.
Identify Low-Competition Keywords
Find the frequency of a keyword on a page and measure it against how often it is expected to appear. It sounds a little complicated at first, but this data exists and is available. The easiest way to retrieve this information may be to use a TF-IDF analysis tool.
TF-IDF analysis can reveal overlapping terms and phrases used by your top-ranking competitors. You’ll also find the relevant keywords that coincide with the appearance of these phrases. For example, the best content for the keywords, ‘salad-making tips’, will include terms such as ‘dressing,’ ‘’leafy-greens,’ ‘restaurant-quality,’ etc.
If these keywords are relevant to your business, you need to incorporate the related terms and phrases to your content. Having these key phrases in your web pages and blogs will boost your visibility and relevance from search engine semantics.
Study Your Competition’s On-Page Efforts
Examining the top competitors’ on-site SEO will reveal a lot of valuable and workable information for your business. These include general and specific information on the content they publish, the frequency with which they appear, and the keywords they most often use.
Carefully analyze the Meta-data in your resulting information. Also, check out the strategies they use for headlines. These include the number of words, title tags, phrases, and keywords, etc.). IF you see that they have strong internal links, you can emulate their practices for better results.
Try to go for an even more detailed study by checking the length of their playable media (Videos, audio, etc.), topic relevance, detail coverage, etc. There will be many reasons why search engines favor their pages over others. It would be best if you emulated the strategy that works for your niche and business.
Analyse Competitor Backlink Profiles
Backlinks form a crucial part of your SEO strategy and overall legitimacy of your content (at least as far as search engines are concerned). They’re almost like a ‘vote-of-confidence’ that websites give to one another. From the search engine’s perspective, it’s like one website vouching for another reliable and dependable site.
A careful study of your competition’s backlink profiles will reveal the sources and strategy that’s helping them. You’ll also find linking opportunities for your own website and business that will significantly enhance your SEO and traffic engagement.
Examine And Enhance Your User Experience
Search engines are constantly evolving and being updated to accommodate the convenience of users everywhere. This aspect of SEO makes it very important for websites to configure their user experience in ways that beat the competition.
Every major update on Google’s algorithm has revolved around a UX element in the recent past. From device responsiveness and accurate search results to faster loading times, the user experience counts for a lot when SEO steps in.
If you have a website that loads slowly or isn’t as responsive as your competitor’s, then you know where you need to step up. Pay attention to every detail of competitors whose websites are doing well. You can find clues to enhance your input controls, navigation structure, informational content, etc.
Study Competitor’s Social Media Handles
It’s not easy to track every social media post made by every brand in your niche. Here, we mean those competitors who are managing their social media handles well. Although some agencies may disagree that social media has a direct impact on your SEO, there’s no doubt that it’s an essential element in your strategy.
You can track link-less mentions on Twitter handles, notice brand tags and mentions, and even examine the users’ reactions and sentiments. Check out how the top players communicate and interact with their followers. Also, check out what platforms the top players in your niche are using (and not using), how often they post, which posts get the most response, etc.
