Learn how to do an SEO competitor analysis for your business
As a small-business owner or marketing executive, you have a very good awareness of the competition your company faces across both your industry and your geography. But when it comes to search engine optimization and improving the rankings of your site and web pages, knowing your business competition won’t tell you the whole story. Your competitors and your SEO competitors may be different (with some overlap, of course).
This is where SEO competitor analysis comes into play. Performing an SEO competitor analysis helps you understand who your competition is in terms of keywords you will want to target, backlinks, and more. This allows you to essentially “reverse engineer” an effective approach based on what is already working for your direct search competitors, as they are the primary concern.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at just what an SEO competitor analysis is, why it is important for any small business to perform, how to do a competitor analysis in SEO, and how you can use an SEO competitor analysis checklist to make the process seamless and beneficial for your business.
What is an SEO competitor analysis?
As mentioned above, an SEO competitor analysis looks at your SEO competitors specifically. But what does that mean? In short, it means that you are identifying businesses that are ranking higher than yours on search engine results pages. Much like a standard competitive analysis, your SEO competitor analysis will most likely identify companies that are in the same industry as yours, offering the same products or services, and generally operating in a similar way.
The main difference, and the main benefit of a competitive analysis in SEO, is that you get to learn what your competition is doing right in terms of their SEO tactics and content development. This is critical information you can use to inform your company’s own SEO strategy and approach, from content development gaps to additional keywords you should be using, areas where your competition may lack the credibility that your brand has, and so on.
Through the process of performing this competitor SEO analysis, you may also find businesses and firms that you were not aware of, product or service areas you are not currently offering, and information about audiences and prospective customers. All of this is useful information you can apply to your entire marketing strategy. The value of an SEO competitor analysis, then, goes far beyond simply improving your website content, and offers information that can benefit your entire business.
SEO competitor analysis checklist
If you are already active in and familiar with search engine optimization processes, then some of these steps will ring a bell. But there are some specific nuances that apply to the SEO competitor analysis process, and the checklist below is designed to guide you through each of them so that you don’t miss any important steps or information.
Pinpoint your SEO competitors
Whether you begin with your existing list of industry competitors or you choose to start from a blank page, the very first thing you should do is identify your SEO competitors. There are a number of ways to do this, and some of them are more manual than others.
The simplest start may be to review the websites that are highly ranked in a Google search—organically, of course. Paid placements make this manual approach a bit more difficult, but it is still possible to gather some basic information to get your competitor analysis for SEO started.
You could simply begin your process by punching each of your target keywords into Google and reviewing the companies and organizations that rank in the top 10 search results for each of them. Obviously this is a time-intensive process, and there are a number of tools available to make this much faster and easier to do.
Some SEO software tools and suites offer functions specific to organic research or site reviews. By opening the tool and entering your company’s domain, the tool will perform searches for you and generate a report identifying your competitors in organic search, as well as information including keywords, backlinks, and so on.
Whichever method you choose, you are likely to gain some very valuable insights on your SEO and marketing efforts, and even learn a few things you didn’t know about your industry, your customers, and your competition.
Review your competitors’ websites
It’s not enough to search your keywords and see who rises to the top of the organic search results. With this first step taken care of, you will want to spend some time reviewing your competitors’ websites. This includes taking a deeper look at how the sites are organized, what type of content they are developing and sharing, how often they are updating or creating/posting content, and so on.[1]
You can also learn a great deal about how they communicate with customers and how they direct them through their website. This is valuable information that you can apply, because part of any good search engine optimization process is looking at ways to improve site function and ease of navigation, content relevance, and credibility.
Research your competitor’s ranking keywords
Gaining an understanding of the most effective and important keywords or phrases to use in your content is key to getting in front of the right audiences (prospects, customers, etc.).[2] As the term would imply, keywords are absolutely the key. And your SEO competitors are certainly aware of this.
Whether the competition is outranking you in organic search results or they are coming up just behind your business, understanding their keywords and rankings is important to formulating your optimization plan. Not only because of the terms that they are using, but perhaps more importantly because you can identify gaps in their keyword strategy and content, allowing you to develop content that fills in these gaps and improves both search performance and customer experience.
Audit your competitor’s backlinks and page-level SEO
On the list of SEO tactics that is key to providing credibility and improving ranking, backlinks are one of the biggest factors. Backlinks from relevant sites, which are directing traffic to a business site, are extremely valuable. And this information about your competitors is key.
Understanding and analyzing their backlinks provides you with a wealth of information about the competition, including where their customers are coming from, which sites trust them as a source of reputable information/products/services, and so on.
Additionally, getting granular about your SEO competitor analysis and looking at the page-level SEO results (such as page loading speed, mobile friendliness, URL, and more) is helpful as well. Not only for content, but to gain a full picture of how the competition brings traffic to their site or pages, and where they send them from those pages. This information is useful both from a UX perspective as well as a content outline and sales funnel perspective.
Standardize and automate SEO competitor tracking
Once you’ve established a process for your SEO competitor analysis, you’ll want to find ways to standardize it, schedule it (regularly), and automate it if possible. The tools listed above have some automation features built into them, and there are many other SEO software tools you can consider. Ranging from the simple to the robust, these SEO suites can assist you and your team in performing many SEO tasks, from keyword analysis to content mapping and more.
Take action with your SEO competitor analysis findings
While analyzing your SEO competitors is not an easy task, the real work begins once you have all of this information in hand. But before you go jumping right in and adding content or keywords all over your website, it’s important to put together a strategy for how to implement your findings.
First, incorporate the information you’ve gained into your existing content schedule and SEO analysis of your own site. This includes creating a timetable (if you are not already on a sprint cycle) for when it will be reasonable to expect pages to be updated, and which pages to prioritize first. You’ll also include strategies such as developing stronger backlinks by contributing expert advice and useful content to other sites.
As for your content development strategy, you might consider incorporating topic clusters into your content. Recent research indicates that topic clusters are useful for guiding content development because a) it helps you focus on key subjects that are important to your customers, and b) they offer a guide for your messaging by keeping the focus on the audience.[3]
Other steps you may want to incorporate include reviewing meta titles and descriptions to improve keyword usage and results, comparing your content quality to the competition’s, reviewing your competitors’ readability (and your own), and reviewing the mobile responsiveness score of your own site versus the competition.
SEO services and tools to help with your competitor analysis
Just like any search engine optimization project, SEO competitor analysis is an involved process and one that can certainly take up a lot of time. Whether you have a small team or are just getting your business started, you should keep in mind that there are SEO companies available to help you through this process. SEO firms can help SMBs like you perform these types of analyses, delivering valuable results that you might not be able to achieve on your own.
However, if you have an established SEO team in-house and want to maintain control of your analysis efforts, you can take a look at a variety of SEO software which can streamline your processes and automate aspects of your SEO competitor analysis that otherwise would have to be done manually.
Kick off your SEO competitor analysis today
Competitive analysis is critical for any business, and especially for small businesses. From SWOT analyses to PPC and digital marketing efforts and more, the benefits of continually learning and analyzing the competition, as well as your own performance, are enormous. And SEO competitor analysis is a key component of any effective SEO strategy, because of the wealth of information you can gain by regularly reviewing the competitive landscape and adjusting your approaches to stay ahead of the curve.
Before you dive right in, you can continue the research and the conversation with additional resources including our “Guide to Building a Local SEO Strategy for Your Business” and our breakdown of “The Different Types of SEO Services & Strategies.” And be sure to explore the SEO firms in our directory to speak with experts about your specific business needs, goals, and competitive advantage.
