Like in all industries, looking into your competitors may just be the origin of your success. This is why doing an SEO competitor analysis will help you in strategizing for your benefit.

In a nutshell, performing an SEO competitor analysis will:

Help you understand what works and what doesn’t for the others in your field.
Identify what works for your competitors.
Limit the number of errors on your part by looking at your competitors’ mistakes.
Guide you in planning out your next steps.

PHASE 1

How to identify your competitors

First things first, identify your SEO competitor. You must know upfront that your SEO competitor may not be the same as your direct business competitors.

What exactly is an SEO competitor? They are the websites that have a higher rank for the organic search queries you are involved in. In essence, these competitors aren’t bound to only one subject matter.

An easy way to identify them is by heading on to your preferred keyword platform, such as Semrush or Ahrefs, type in your website, and by scrolling down the webpage you can see who the platform thinks your competitors are.

From there you can get the data and figure out how you want to rank, but you must know that the data from the platform is based on the existing data on your website and what it is already ranking for, and the keywords that are already similar to those. That’s why if you are currently building up a new website with no existing data yet, you might just have to keep reading.

Learning from your competitors.

The best way to further identify your competitor is to figure out what you generally want to rank for in the next year, this will be followed by checking out who is already ranking for the specific keyword you are competing for.

Take a website that is ranking, plug it into your preferred platform and look at the top pages that are on the website. What you can do with this information is to consider these pages and incorporate them into your strategy.

The same thing applies to figuring out what to stay away from. With the same list figure out their pages that aren’t performing well and make a note not to include that in your list.

PHASE 2

Make your list.

The most important part of your analysis is taking notes. List down the important data from your research, this includes your competitors’:

Page URL
Page’s Traffic in Percent
Number of Keywords
Traffic

With this data at your disposal, you can easily create content that is similar to your competitors’ top-ranking pages, which in turn will help you rank. You are going to use this strategy to become as relevant as they are for your chosen keyword.

Building Content

After your initial research and building up your list, here comes the actual content creation for your website.

To start it off, you should focus on building content for your main keyword first. Make sure that your content is similar to the articles in your list, in terms of layout, content, length, etc. After this, you can start building up content for the other relevant pages based on your research.

Things to pay attention to after building content.

One more thing to consider is identifying the keywords that your competitors are ranking for but aren’t. Understand why they are ranking and you aren’t. Identify whether they are releasing better additional pages for the specific keywords or have a higher number of backlinks. After identifying the keyword gaps, you can start working on closing them. What must be done to your site so you can fill in the gaps with those keywords?

Final Thoughts

All that was mentioned above is just scratching the surface, these are just a few easy methods that can help you in doing your SEO competitor analysis. As your website evolves and grows, you have to schedule doing an SEO competitive analysis periodically to stay in touch with your competitors and see the trend so you can make your strategies accordingly. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out this video.

Easy Guide on How To Do SEO Competitor Analysis