How To Do Quality Competitor Analysis for SEO

It is a fact that SEO is one of the pillars of success for your business. A crucial step for starting to develop an SEO strategy is competitor analysis. 

Competitor analysis provides you with the data that you need in order to know what industry trends are currently booming and how you can improve your keyword rankings. 

What you learn from it can help you realize the tasks that you need to focus on, and is the main factor for the development of your campaigns. 

You will get to learn your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths and be able to find a way to outperform them.

Who are your competitors?

For starters, you are going to have to find out who are the top four competitors that you are going to use for your analysis. 

It might be a good idea to use a mix of direct business and online search competitors. The reason for this is that you’ve got competition that is local, as well as the one that is investing in online search ads. 

So, while you may be worrying about a business nearby, your actual competition may be in another town or state.

A good tool for searching competitors is SEMrush. Input your own domain name, go to “organic competitors” and look at the full report. 

Then focus on metrics such as common keywords and total traffic in order to determine who your biggest competitors are.

How technically optimized are they?

When it comes to technical optimization, you will be checking for a number of things. For example, you will check whether their title tags are technically optimized (one title tag per page, correct placement within head tags, few to no extraneous tags in the title). 

You will also check whether their internal linking allows indexation of content, and if there is an error-free schema markup present. The quality of the schema is also important (whether there is customized markup such as BlogPosting, for example). 

You should also check whether there is a “home” for new content (is there a content hub, and is it easily noticeable). 

While you can’t run a complete technical audit for your every competitor, you need to keep in mind your own website’s technical SEO performance and the issues that you need to focus on.

How good is their content?

When it comes to content, you will be checking title tags again, but from an editorial point of view. 

Check whether they accurately represent the content on the page, if there are any duplicates, and are the titles shorter than 80 characters. There also has to be a unique H1 for every page, and represent its content. 

Next thing that you should check out is whether internal linking supports organic content. This is based on the quality of the links. 

Basically, it means that they should lead to informative pages, such as tutorials or research, be a natural continuation of the user’s journey through the website, and vary the resources that they link to.

The quality of content, while subjective, is important for comparing brands. You need to check in how many words are informative pages dealing with complex topics. 

You should also evaluate whether you really want to read the content, does it look well-written, and whether it contains valuable information. Originality is also important, so, from the experience of a web design agency, competitor analysis is the best way to find the best trends to follow. 

The quality of images and video is also important. They have to be unique, be in proper resolution, and not be repeated on multiple pages.

In summation

By analyzing these factors, you will be able to locate opportunities where you can excel with your own website. Through competitor analysis, you will be able to find the trends that exist among the competition. This way you will be able to make the best out of them in order to stand out amongst the competition.