SEO is becoming an increasingly crowded space with little room for mobility. With both large corporations and small local businesses competing for spots on the search engine result page, competitor analysis for SEO purposes has become more important than ever. However, small businesses can’t stand to forego SEO. The impact on online visibility and brand awareness that SEO brings is why businesses need SEO, but you don’t have to remain behind the big guys.
You’ll understand why competitor analysis is important in SEO once you incorporate the right competitor analysis tools and techniques into your SEO strategy, you stand to gain precious actionable insights that can push you ahead of your competitors and make you the local leader in SEO.
Identifying Opportunities
To understand why competitor analysis is important in SEO, let’s first take a look at its main purpose. The key purpose of competitor analysis is to give you insights into what your SEO competitors are focusing on, thus identifying gaps and opportunities that you can take advantage of. To accomplish this, you will have to conduct some thorough analyses of the competitors’ current position.
Analysis of Competitors’ Keywords and Rankings
Keywords are the northern light that guides your competitors’ SEO campaign, so they should be the focus of your competitor analysis. When you are conducting an analysis of your competitor’s keywords and rankings, you will find their targeted keywords, which would receive the bulk of their marketing efforts. These keywords will be extremely competitive, and the return on investment for them might not be worth it at all. Thus, it would be a better idea not to focus on these keywords altogether.
Identification of Gaps and Untapped Opportunities
Keyword analysis also provides insights into the keywords your competitors are not currently targeting, and these are the gaps that you can fill in. These keywords might not be the gold mines, but they do have specific advantages over your competitors’. For example, your competitors might be casting a wide net by targeting a general keyword. You could take this opportunity to target local keywords or long-tailed keywords in order to fill in their gaps and take their market share.
Leveraging Competitors’ Strategies for Improvement
If something is working, don’t break it. Improve it! With a thorough analysis of your competitors’ keywords, you will be able to identify their current SEO strategies. Take this opportunity to learn their SEO techniques and tactics, then add your own spin to them. This will not only enrich your SEO strategies but also provide proven results in similar niches, so your chances of success are really high.
Tools and Techniques for Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis in SEO is quite difficult due to the lack of data. Thus, you will have to rely on tools and services specifically made for competitor analysis, as these businesses get reliable data from third-party data providers.
Overview of Various Tools Available for Competitor Analysis
Early SEO specialists have seen the value of competitor analysis for years, and that is why there are so many tools that you can use to conduct competitor analysis. From comprehensive all-in-one tools to simpler ones, SEO tools are an indispensable part of your competitor analysis process.
- SEMrush: Arguably among the most popular tools for SEO analysis, SEMrush prides itself on its comprehensive toolset, which can help conduct in-depth analyses quite easily. The major downside of this tool is its expensive price tag.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an excellent all-in-one SEO tool that lets you do more than just competitor analysis. It offers deep linking tactics and rank tracking, but it does lose to SEMrush when it comes to competitor analysis. It also does not provide a free trial for you to gauge its effectiveness.
- Moz: In terms of scale, Moz loses out to both of the giants above. However, it still has decent competitor analysis capability and a lower price point.
You can also consider using a range of free link building tools for competitor analysis. Especially if you are going to conduct competitors’ backlink analysis.
Techniques for Analyzing Competitors’ Backlinks, Content, and On-page SEO
Once you have selected the tool to use, the first thing you will have to do is give the tool to your competitors. These can be your direct competitors or indirect competitors. The tool will then provide information relating to your competitors, including their current rankings on the SERP as well as how to find SEO keywords of a website. You could now take a few content pieces on their website and do a side-by-side comparison to see why they rank highly with that keyword and yours couldn’t.
Pay attention to the on-page SEO elements such as readability and headings’ length as well, as they can get you closer to the sweet spot in SEO.
Finally, if your tool allows it, do a backlink analysis to understand your ranking. Great backlink analysis will help you find backlink opportunities to leverage against your competitors.
Best Practices for Conducting Competitor Analysis Effectively
Follow these best practices to ensure that you get the most accurate data and the best actionable insights from your competitor analysis.
Incorporate Different Tools and Data
Why use SEO tools? Because they have access to huge databases that you otherwise can’t reach. However, each tool will have its own set of data as well as its own analysis methodology. If you wish to have the best data with as few deviations as possible, you will have to incorporate different tools in your analysis, which is why you should consider using an SEO service Vietnam instead of subscribing to different tools.
Benchmarking Against Competitors’ SEO Performance
You could use SEO tools to benchmark how your own website is doing compared to your competitors in terms of SEO performance. This will help you see your own gaps as well.
Explore Market Research Tools and Industry Reports for Broader Insights
SEO tools aren’t the only tools for competitor analysis. Market research tools as well as industry reports provide comprehensive overviews of your industry as well as future predictions. You can leverage them to become an early adopter of a new technology or an emerging niche, putting yourself ahead of your competitors.
Study Competitors’ Page Speed, User Experience, Content, Backlink Profiles for Opportunities
Aside from keywords and rankings, pay attention to other on-page SEO elements such as page speed, user experience, and content. If you could provide a better user experience as well as helpful content, you stand a chance to gain more trust from your customers.
Continuously Refine Your SEO Strategy Based on New Insights and Emerging Trends
SEO is an ever-changing field, and every update from the search engines brings in new changes. Monitor your competitors as well as any industry updates closely, and the moment you find any changes in their SEO strategy, take the opportunity to study the change and see if you need to follow them.
Understanding your competitors’ strategy is key to overtaking them, and that is why competitor analysis is important in SEO. However, because competitor analysis involves different specialized SEO tools and data analysis skills, it can be quite hard for small business owners. Which is why small businesses need SEO, and why Tech-One is here to help. With our team of trained professionals, we are capable of conducting in-depth SEO research that produces actionable insights and useful information for your SEO operations. Contact us now for more details!
Read more: https://tech-one.io/learn/why-do-i-need-to-hire-a-seo-company/