Why Your Business Needs an SEO Competitor Analysis

Every business owner understands the importance of knowing your competitors and what they are doing well or not well within your industry. But, how does that translate online? And what does that mean for their organic presence online?

It’s not enough to know who your competitors are. It’s vital to have processes in place to be able to monitor where they are outperforming you and pinpoint blind spots in their current SEO or content strategy.

Enter SEO competitive analyses.

What does a competitive analysis for SEO look like?

The key pieces in an SEO competitive analysis are traffic, keywords, backlinks, and user experience. It’s a holistic view of how you’re website fares against your top competitors.

Traffic

This metric is pretty straightforward. You want to get a sense of their monthly traffic. Obviously, you can’t peek into their Google Analytics to see their exact numbers, but SEO tools, like seoClarity or SEMrush, can give you estimates based on their keyword portfolio rankings.

This can be taken a step further by analyzing the exact pages that receive the highest amounts of estimated organic traffic and glean insights on what types of pages are currently missing from your business’ site.

Keywords

This is going to be the most valuable portion of the analysis. Reviewing your competitors’ keyword portfolios compared to your own is a foolproof way of understanding what types of content they are writing about, focusing on, and missing out on. This helps craft a content gap analysis where content categories are identified that your business does not rank for.

Keyword analyses also paint a clear picture of what your company has cornered the SEO market on in order to keep pushing those content initiatives.

Backlinks

The third aspect of competitive analyses is to review the highest quality backlinks (links from another website to your own) of your competitors to find ideas of where your website could gain similar backlinks to improve your site’s domain authority.

For example, Competitor A might have a backlink from a blog post written by a well-known influencer in the space, leading to your team reaching out to him or her for a guest post or feature.

User Experience

The last part we’re mentioning is more subjective than the others. We take a critical, UX-driven look at each of your competitors’ website designs, site structures, and aesthetics to pinpoint what they are doing well and how we could incorporate some of their features into our own site.

SEO competitive analyses are important for your company, here’s why:

By conducting frequent competitive analyses, your business is not only staying on top of what your competitors are doing, but you are able to consistently evolve your marketing strategy and website by finding holes in theirs.

SEO is not a “set it and forget it” one-time project. The overall strategy also greatly depends on the industry your business is in, so competitive analyses like these help you understand what the best practices are for your product or service specifically. SEO strategies that fit for educational institutions are going to look a lot different than those zeroed in on for e-commerce websites.

Perfect Search is a full-service SEO agency with a team that has 15+ years of expertise. Competitive analyses are baked into our project roadmaps for all clients to ensure we are not only staying on top of what our competitors are doing, but also crafting concrete next steps and insights from what we discover.

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We want to work with you! Contact us for our insights on your competitors and for a strategy to help you outperform them.