A beginner’s guide to Competitive Analysis

Doing a competitive analysis is crucial, particularly when beginning work with a new client or employer.

It is a necessary component of any successful SEO strategy. It doesn’t matter if the competitor is a giant (like Amazon ) or small (like any other neighborhood business) – what matters is that doing the competitive analysis can help us immensely.

How can we do our jobs as SEO experts if we don’t know how the market is functioning and what are the things we need to focus on?

We become much better, more informed consultants as a result of competitor analysis. It assists us in identifying areas of opportunity and threat.

These are some of the questions that competitor analysis can assist us with answering:

• Getting a sense of the competitive landscape:
• What can we learn from our rivals?
• Why do we think competitors rank high?
• What are our competitors not doing that we can exploit?

Doing Competitor research/competitive analysis not only answers our questions about how to strategise but also provides us insight into how the business functions such as:

• Who are the most visible rivals? Is there a way to identify SEO rivals separately from “traditional competitors”? Do they fare well in terms of transactional or informational terms? Or perhaps both?
• Are competitors increasing brand awareness?
• One of the most effective ways to gain stakeholder support is to demonstrate what a competitor is doing better than you.

Importance of Competitive Analysis for SEO

A competitive study allows you to examine your overall market, competitors, and how the current search landscape works for key keywords.

If you’re already ranking highly for your most important terms, you should still monitor your SEO to make sure you don’t lose your spot.

When to conduct SEO Competitive Analysis

Your SEO performance is never isolated; it is constantly relative to your competition. It is also not static. With search engine algorithm adjustments, new competitors emerging, and the other side’s digital marketers working relentlessly to surpass you, you can’t afford to take your foot off the throttle when it comes to SEO.

Analyzing your competitors on a regular basis to understand where you are (in comparison to them) will help you identify areas for development before they have a negative influence on your rankings.

Here are several important processes and occurrences that should always prompt you to conduct an SEO competitor study:

• Writing content will ensure that your page responds to user search intent better and more thoroughly than your competitors.
• Planning your content: a great way to boost your search engine rankings is to look into what your rivals are doing well and then do it better. To determine how much work is needed to outrank competitors for a given subject, SEO analysis of competition can also be used.
• Following a sudden decline in ranking: Determine what your search competitor is doing to suddenly outrank you, as well as what is currently working and not working in your business.
• When search engine results for your website stop moving: If traffic to your site is flat and you’re not showing up in the top search results, a competitive study could help you find places to improve.
• If your website is no longer ranked first for a particular keyword after a period of time, you should perform SEO competitor analysis to determine why.

So far we have talked about the need of doing a competitive analysis. Let’s now dive right into the main star of this whole blog – the whole process of doing the analysis.

SEO competitor keyword research

Finding profitable keywords for which your rivals’ websites score highly but your own do not, and then using that knowledge to redirect their traffic to your own, is what competitor keyword analysis is all about.

How can I conduct effective competitor research? What terms should I use?

Not all phrases are equally valuable in terms of time and effort. You should focus your efforts on keywords that are relevant to your company, have a high search volume, and are not overly tough to rank for.

Still, you’ll have a plethora of options to choose from. You can use programs like SEMRush or Ahrefs to narrow down the domains based on keywords. Google Keyword Planner is also a good tool for doing this research. If you don’t know how to utilize this amazing but free tool, check out the guide for Google keyword planner.

Search for a certain domain to discover a competitor’s top 100 keywords by the search volume. Use this data to determine which keywords you should be actively monitoring and optimizing for. From there, you can make a list of all the content themes that you can put your twist on and, ideally, outrank them.

Search Intent is as important as Search Volume:

Simply because a term has a high search volume does not imply that ranking highly for it will result in a significant increase in search traffic. Instead, it is advised to concentrate on meeting search intent, often known as user intent.

When analyzing, you have to think about search intent of a user rather than volume. An example of an informational search would be “opening hours of XYZ business,” while an example of a transactional search would be “buy 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle,” and an example of a navigational search would be “Hindustan Times” rather than the domain URL.

Regardless of the sort of search your user is conducting, your web pages must match their search intent by providing high-quality, optimized content that gives a value and relevant answer to their query.

Google encourages websites that give a relevant and enjoyable user experience, which includes increasing search results that provide a great user experience by meeting their search needs. Therefore, your content is more likely to be rewarded with a ranking boost if it addresses the user’s search intent better and more fully than your search competitors’ content.

Things to keep in mind:

• Establish yourself as a more authoritative and reliable source of knowledge.
• Make sure that the reader knows about your expertise in the field.
• Remember that focusing on meeting the user’s search purpose rather than just on search volumes for the keywords you’re targeting can drive more relevant traffic to your page, propel you up the search rankings, and generate more qualified leads.

Long tail keywords are hidden mines

What if your website is newer or less well-known than your search competition? Since 60% of the top ten Google results are three years old or more, it is wise to shift your emphasis away from the most competitive keywords and towards more winnable long-tail keyword variations. This sort of search makes up more than 70% of all Google queries.

With 50% of search searches including four or more words, it’s a good idea to go beyond the basics. Popular one-word keywords like “headphones” present a substantial keyword challenge because they yield over 778,000,000 results.  To stand out from the crowd, try using a more precise phrase such as “noise-cancelling headphones,” “cheap wireless headphones,” or “headphones for sleeping,” which are more descriptive possibilities with less search competition.

Be on the lookout for your competitor’s paid listings

While organic and sponsored search are sometimes treated as distinct entities, evaluating your competitors’ PPC keywords can provide highly important insights into which phrases they consider desirable and even profitable.

If your rivals are willing to pay to be displayed next to this phrase in the paid search results, they must place a high value on this term and the clicks it will bring them. You want to zero in on keywords with minimal competition but high conversion rates.

Constant Monitoring is the key

These actions for SEO competitor research are only the beginning, and we all know that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It is essential to monitor your own and your rivals’ positions for targeted keywords as rankings tend to shift over time.

You can react quickly to fluctuations in search engine rankings with regular, automated monitoring, preventing a precipitous drop in traffic.

Content Analysis of your Competitor

Without a doubt, keywords are a vital part of any SEO competition analysis. Your assessment, however, does not begin and end with them. You can also boost your SEO by learning from what works for your rivals.

The goal is to identify your competitors’ most popular content and use it to improve your own. Since you can assume these sites are ranking well in search engines and driving traffic to their site, you can save time and energy focusing on them.  By imitating — and then competing with — their approach, you can better match user search intent and produce a more engaging content experience for your website’s users. Your content may eventually appear higher than theirs in search engine results.

When optimizing your content to outrank a rival on a specific topic, you should pay great attention to the following content elements:

• Format of the content
• Titles
• Keyword placement on the web page
• Meta descriptions and titles
• Count the words. According to studies, organic search results on page one of Google contain an average of 1,447 words.
• Readability of the content
• Page structure, such as information architecture and headings
• Utilization of supplementary photos, movies, and other media files
• The format of the query response. Do they make use of bullet points? Infographics? Q&As?
• Structured data is present.
• Publishing frequency

Backlink analysis of Competitor

While content is still an important ranking criteria, obtaining high-quality, reputable backlinks is an essential component of any successful SEO plan. Inbound links, or backlinks, are references to your website that appear on other websites.

Search engines use backlinks as one of many factors when determining a website’s trustworthiness; the more essential and trustworthy a website is, the higher it will appear in search engine results and, consequently, receive more organic traffic. Despite their value, 66% of online pages have no backlinks at all, according to research.

Google still uses backlinks as a ranking component. It will be challenging to outrank rivals who have more backlinks than you do. Therefore, one of your primary website objectives ought to be to strengthen your hyperlink profile. Researching your competitors’ existing backlinks will help you shorten this procedure and fine-tune your own backlink strategy.

This is also known as SEO link gap analysis.

Here are some suggestions for catching up with your competitors and improving your backlink profile:

• Keep an eye out for continued, aggressive link-building activity from your competitors so you can mimic their strategy and create similar – but better – content.
• Building respectable links to your page by aggressively outreaching your superior content, as outlined in the Content Analysis part of this article.
• Keep an eye out for domains that have linked to a few of your competitors; these sites can be an excellent target for grabbing low-hanging backlinks fruit.
• Claiming unlinked mentions of your brand by contacting site managers and asking them to include a link to your website.

Conclusion

Competitor analysis is a crucial activity that you must complete if you want to design a truly powerful SEO plan – and be the best expert you can be for your client.

You may determine which difficulties and dangers require immediate attention, which opportunities to seize for maximum value, and deliver clear business intelligence to help your team gain client buy-in.

Now you can get to work, start diving into areas of opportunity, and make a genuine difference for your brand or team.

Despite this, many business owners are hesitant to apply competitive analysis SEO because they lack the necessary people and resources. Hiring a digital marketing agency like GIT Infosys could be the best decision for your company in this instance. GIT Infosys offers professional SEO management services, including competitive analysis SEO, so contact us today and let’s get your data-driven marketing campaign underway.