Every company needs to be aware of its competition. If you are an entrepreneur or business owner, you need to know your competitors and what they’re doing for SEO.

What is SEO Competitors’ Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis helps business owners and company executives understand the competitive landscape for their industry. It involves researching the content and other elements, like the keyword a competitor used or the link.

In order to perform a competitor analysis efficiently and collect enough data without putting in a lot of effort, most marketers use an SEO competitor analysis tool. These tools can also be used to generate competitor analysis SEO reports. Among the tools used to analyze SEO competitors are Ahrefs and SEMush.

The SEO competitor analysis may include:

A list of top competitors and how they stack up against your brand, as determined by Alexa ranking, Facebook likes Google+ followers, and Twitter following.
Detailed information about each competitor’s website, including social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube, where applicable. This data will help you identify which sites to focus on targeting with your marketing efforts.
The strategies used by your competitor to achieve their objective
SEO keyword competition analysis
Competitor’s backlink analysis

Why is SEO competitor’s analysis important?

Healthy competition is necessary. Competition drives innovation and stops complacency. However, it’s more fun when you’re the one at the top. Although your website might rank number one for a particular keyword right now, this will not be the case forever. People will always try to outwit you rather than the other way around. Other websites, mostly your competitors, will learn to optimize their content and gain an advantage over yours over time. Therefore, SEO competitive analysis should be a continuous endeavor for any business.

Business owners often ignore competitor analysis, assuming they have done everything possible to optimize their SEO efforts. The reality, however, is that they have not. So, no matter how well you accomplish your goals, you may wonder why analyzing your competition is essential. Here are some reasons:

You can always improve your results to stay ahead of the competition. SEO keyword competition analysis, for instance, can help you learn from your competitors’ tactics and use them in your SEO campaigns.
Identifies weaknesses in your strategy. There is no perfect SEO strategy. By observing what your competitors are doing, you realize any gaps in your strategy and correct them.
Identifies what you do well. The chances are that you are better at some things than your competitors. Identifying them will enable you to do more of them and also widen your reach.
Provides you with new ways to reach your audience. There may be tactics your competitors are using that are entirely new, giving you the chance to improve your results. By doing a competitive analysis, your business will grow. As a result, you’ll be able to identify and adopt new strategies that will help improve your online visibility and increase your bottom line.

How to do a competitor’s analysis?

Let’s take a look at some basic steps to conducting a competitive analysis. Here are simple steps that you can apply right away.

Identify your true competitor

Understanding competitor analysis SEO begins with recognizing your competition. Finding out who your real competitors are for your keywords is crucial since not all websites rank higher than your competitors. Therefore, your SEO analysis must be thorough and accurate to uncover your actual SEO competition.

Perform a page analysis

A competitive analysis can also involve looking at the best-performing pages on a competitor’s website. What keywords are used on these pages, and how?

Analyzing the gaps between keywords is called keyword gap analysis. It is here that you find keywords your competitors are ranking for, and your site is not. You can identify keywords that rank for specific domains using Ahrefs competitor analysis tool’s Content Gap feature.

Focus on high return-on-investment keywords

Analyze keywords that will increase your profits or revenue by studying your competitors’ SEO efforts. Concentrate your efforts on ranking for keywords related to your high-profile product or service so that you can generate more leads related to this specific category. You could also create unique content that would interest your customers but has not been created by your competitors.

The success of an SEO campaign involving competitive analysis is primarily determined by finding where there is a disconnect between the competition and the target audience and bridging that gap. This could be a low-competition keyword or an article with strong search traffic for which your competition has not yet written.

Develop and implement a content strategy

After collecting the data, it’s time to analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies using this data. You can then plan your SEO content strategy based on the report. Make a list of keywords or content ideas and save them in a spreadsheet or use a tool like Ahrefs to make a content plan.

Keep track of your progress

As soon as you publish new content or optimize old ones, you should monitor their performance. In addition, you should perform regular keyword audits and generate competitor analysis SEO reports to determine whether or not your competitive analysis strategy worked.

Any free SEO tool can be used for this, but you can type the target keyword into Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. Next, click on the Traffic Share by Pages link on the left-hand side. This will display the top pages and their positions. It’s a jungle out there and you need to be prepared. There are many ways that your competitors can give themselves an edge on search engine rankings, but they all have one thing in common – they want to beat you! So do yourself a favor and take the time now to research their SEO strategy so you know what is coming at you.