SEO Competitive Analysis: The Definitive Guide
- SEO |
Marketing is all about explaining to potential customers why your product fits their needs the best. To know that, you need to know what your competitors are offering. The only way to do that is through competitor analysis - studying what your competitors are doing. This guide includes best practices that will help you identify your competitors, how they rank, and what you can do about it. And make sure to combine these tips with your favorite competitor research tools!
- Identify Your SEO Competitors: You probably already know who the big players in your industry are, but can you name your main SEO rivals? They aren't necessarily the same. In fact, you might have multiple SEO competitors who exist outside of your niche that you need to contend with in SERPs. Your top SEO competitors are the ones who rank on the first search page of the keywords you're targeting, regardless of whether they're your business competitors. Fortunately, finding out who your competitors are is as easy as entering your top keywords into Google and writing down the domains of your main competitors.
- Evaluate Keyword Difficulty: Before you begin analyzing specific link-building strategies or on-page SEO, it's a good idea to assess the strength of your SEO competitors. Use your competitor analysis tool to look at your competitors' total domain strength and then analyze specific factors, such as domain authority, domain country and age, catalog listings, and backlink data.
- Look For New Keyword Opportunities: Term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis (or, because that's a mouthful, TF-IDF analysis) can be a useful method for enriching your existing content with "proper" keywords your competitors are using. This allows you to properly optimize your pages for search engines, or to discover low-competition keywords you might have missed. Simply put, TF-IDF is a measurement of how often a keyword appears on a page (term frequency) multiplied by how often a keyword is expected to appear on page (inverse document frequency).
- Analyze On-Page Optimization & On-Site Content: Using your competitive analysis tool to analyze your competitors' on-site SEO will give you a veritable goldmine of new information to work with. You'll learn how often they're publishing content, what types of content they're publishing, and which keywords they're targeting. Pay special attention to metadata, headline strategies (title length, keywords in the title, proper title tags, etc), and try to unravel their internal linking strategies, too. Use this information as a benchmark for your on-site SEO efforts.
- Dig Into Competitor Backlink Profiles: One of the most important parts of a competitive analysis is figuring out where your rivals are earning their backlinks from and using that information to build high-quality links for your website. Dissecting your opponents' link profiles is a great way to find new link opportunities. Again, you'll need a robust SEO tool for this step - it's practically impossible to pull off manually.
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