In SEO, it is important to keep an eye on the competition. Not only those websites and businesses in your niche that compete directly against you but also those sites that dominate the rankings and get huge amounts of traffic through search engines.
Now, if we are going to do an SEO competition analysis, let's start at the beginning:
How to identify your competitors in SEO?
If you have a restaurant, it is possible that you have very well located your competitors: restaurants in your area, with your theme, with a similar concept or that are aimed at the same audience. On a blog or e-commerce, it may not be so obvious.
Look in your day-to-day: Daily experience is a source of knowledge. If you start in a sector you should know some examples of people or companies that are doing things similar to you. It is your natural competition.
- Look in your day-to-day: Daily experience is a source of knowledge. If you start in a sector you should know some examples of people or companies that are doing things similar to you. It is your natural competition.
- Search in listings and communities: The web is full of useful resources such as tops, rankings, award lists, and small communities that know different sectors inside out. Search for terms like "online board game stores" or "best design blogs." Prize shows are usually easy ways to get a list of the best exponents of something. In specialized blogs and forums on a topic, you can raise any doubts you may have in the community, not only to identify competitors but also to evaluate qualitative aspects .
- Search Google: The most complete and realistic way to find your competition is to search for the keywords for which you want to rank and see which pages occupy the first positions. It does not matter if they do not do the same as you, if they go out there they are a competition to beat. The reason it's good to save it until last is that developing a keyword plan requires researching your competition beforehand. Once you have identified the main competitors and what terms they are trying to rank for, you can create a keyword plan and see if any competitors are missing.
In this sense, the discovery of new competitors has to be a constant process. You may discover them after a long time knowing the market: the Internet is fast and immense.
Now that we have identified our competition, it is time to analyze it, do we know how?
How is the web architecture of your competition?
What will give you the key to a website is how its content is structured: What is the name of the categories? How do you group your pages? How do you display the information? How do you link the internal content? This provides you with information on which pages and areas of the web are being prioritized.
All this will provide you with information about what keywords it is using to position itself, what topics it touches and most importantly, in which areas you can overcome it or which ones it leaves untapped so that you can occupy that place.
To do this, it analyzes which pages are linked from the home in addition to the main menu, how the content pages (articles, products, etc.) are linked to each other. In short, in which baskets your competitor is laying eggs.
How is the content of your competition?
The content of your competitors' websites gives you information on what audience they are targeting, what is successful and what is not, what they offer the customer and what opportunities they miss:
- What content is on the site? It is not the same to include a technical and specialized language as one that is close and understandable by everyone. See what the content consists of: They offer step-by-step guides, they have a blog, what they write about, they have controversial articles or rare articles ... This can give you an idea of who is the target audience they are targeting and what value they offer them.
- How much content do they generate? Do you experiment with new formats and concepts? It is important to know what emphasis they are putting on generating content. If you compete against a website that is not regularly updated or whose content is bad, it will be easy for you to overcome it with some effort. If you fight against a website with a huge investment in content, you must be creative to overcome them.
- Format: They have presentations, videos, audio, infographics, user-generated content ... or is it all text? Your competitors' content gives you insight into their strategy and how you can improve it or target a profile that they are not paying attention to. Can you provide differential value by generating the content of this type? Can you provide links, external resources, or any material that makes what you offer more complete?
- How does it work? Knowing what works with others is a way to validate hypotheses regarding your own content. Be careful, just because it works for someone else does not mean that it will work for you. Even if you have very similar audiences, they will never be exactly the same.
- How do they convert? Do they offer a newsletter, do they have a share to download or does their purpose not imply conversion at any visible point? The elements visible to conversion give you information about your competition's business strategy and their profitability models.
And remember, if you can take something that someone else has already done and improve it, do it. If it's clear which niche they leave unattended, take advantage of it. If they make mistakes, learn from them without making them yourself. And above all, try to innovate with concepts that they have not yet experimented with.
What profile of links does your competition have?
The link profile will tell you what SEO potential each page has regardless of how well optimized it is, to know if the sector in which you operate is very competitive or not very competitive. Among other things it lets you know:
- Who are you up against : You can find out if that website that takes all the interesting searches is there because of a great optimization or because of a huge link profile. It also gives you an idea of the magnitude of the profile of links against which you face, and what you will have to generate to compete with equal opportunities.
- How they get links: By researching their link profile you can know what type of pages they are getting links on. If government institutions or university pages are doing something with the competition, what blogs talk about your sector, what niche directories that add value are you overlooking, etc.
- What content receives links : Analyzing which pages of a website receive the most links, it is easy to see which content has been more successful. The normal thing is that the home page is the one that stands out from the rest, but after this there will be the contents that have worked best at the level as link building .
The two most relevant metrics to identify the authority of a website are the number of links linking to a website and the number of domains from which they link. Be careful, it is important to also measure the authority of the pages that link to see if those links are of higher or lower quality. Some tools such as MOZ's Open Site Explorer give us domain and page authority data.
To do this work you can use free tools like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or Majestic SEO.
Once you have identified your competition and you know where you are, decide what you need: If you are at a disadvantage, the idea is that you invest in actions focused on the achievement of links and on-site optimization as the main purpose. Don't forget to target niches, or focus on the long tail. If your competition has an advantage, you cannot play the same game as them and hope to win. As you progress, you can work more on finding creative ways to differentiate yourself and gain branding; While if you have a leadership situation, you may prefer to involve your community in the generation of content and look for formulas to increase the conversion that this traffic generates.
How is the SEO strategy of your competition?
With all this data it is easy to understand what your competitors are doing. What is the reason why they score well for some terms and badly for others, how they structure their content, how they get links and in what content, etc.
If you know what your main competitors do, you know the market and you have done good keyword research, you have all the information you need to create your own strategy, not only SEO but also online marketing.
SEO competition analysis tools :
- MOZ Open Site Explorer: A link profile that does not analyze in detail, but does detect what is important. It is updated monthly, it is somewhat slow.
- Ahrefs: It gives you a broad link profile that is constantly updated.
- Majestic SEO: This allows you to analyze the link profile of your competition and the value of each link in authority and trust.
- SemRush: It gives you an estimate of the SEO and SEM traffic generated by your competition and their link profile.
- Alexa: In addition to its own link indicator (which I would take with a grain of salt) it gives us an estimate of traffic.