How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis?

If you are not satisfied with your website’s ranking in the results of the search engines and want to correct this situation, you need to do an SEO competitor analysis. SEO is essential to managing organic search engines and driving online sales. That’s what makes a website appear at the top of search engines like Google. However, using SEO tools to eliminate your competitors may not be enough. Yet, it is possible with SEO competitor analysis to examine what your competitors are doing in this race and their strategies. In this article, we will explain what SEO competitor analysis is, how to do an SEO competitor analysis, and what should be considered in this regard.

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?

First of all, it would be better to talk about SEO tools. SEO is an essential element in e-commerce and for businesses. The correct use of SEO tools and their implementation throughout the site make it easier to appear in the top rankings in organic search results. It prevents your competitors from overtaking you. In short, SEO is a crucial tool to drive organic traffic to your site. Creating a good SEO structure on your e-commerce site alone will not be enough for your site to be successful in competing with other websites. You need to know what your competitors are doing and how they are pursuing strategies. As a result, you should develop your work one step ahead of them. 

Don’t forget that your competitors are an essential source where you can learn and build your SEO strategy and raise your site’s organic traffic. SEO competitor analysis is a strategy created to understand all of these.

Why Is SEO Competitor Analysis Important?

Before an SEO strategy is determined, competitor analysis must be done because it is very important for SEO. The depth and detail of the SEO competitor analysis depend on the sector you are in and the general situation of the competitors. Know what kind of keywords your competitors are successful in. Also, learning what SEO strategy they pursue in their content and within the site should be discussed in detail. You will be very profitable when you do this kind of SEO competitor analysis for your SEO strategy because you can understand the ranking factor well. 

Since you can see your website’s position, you can also understand how to overtake competitors. Don’t forget that it is difficult for an SEO strategy without a competitor analysis to succeed.

The benefits you will get when you use SEO competitor analysis are like this:

• You can find the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and take advantage of their weaknesses. But, of course, you can apply your competitors’ strengths as an example for your website.
• You can grasp which SEO strategy is the priority for your site. Also, you can come to the fore by developing your SEO strategy accordingly.
• In short, you can clearly see and understand what works and what does not work in search engines. All this information will also provide a lot of benefits to your website.

How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis in 6 Steps

SEO competitor analysis is usually an analysis that all businesses need to do to feature their sites. To reach the top of the search results of search engines like Google, you need to analyze your competitors and develop your website accordingly. Reviewing the keywords, backlinks, social media accounts, website designs, and competing site content is very important. They are the methods for you to move your site to higher rankings than competing sites. Now, we will explain how you can do SEO competitor analysis with the following six items. And learn why is SEO important in digital marketing in detail.

Find Competitors’ Keywords

In the first step of SEO Competitor Analysis, you should identify the keywords used by your competitors. Finding the keywords on your competitor’s website is the first step of the process. The easiest way to find the competitors’ keywords is to use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. With these tools, you can understand how your competitors are performing on search engines and how you should perform too. With these tools, you can also discover new keywords that you may have missed.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Content

Pages with more content are always ranked high in the search results. Content that has been written longer always performs well in search engines. By using the keyword density tool, it is possible to analyze the word count of the contents on the pages of competing websites. The average number of keywords used by your competitors and the length of their articles will give you a general idea of ​​your content. 

Thus, you can prepare longer and higher quality content than this average. Another factor you should not forget at this point is to prepare unique and original content. As long as your content is not original, it is useless to write too many pages. Your content should be unique and different from your competitors. Don’t forget that you can beat your competitors with uniquely prepared and well-researched content.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Domain and Backlink Profile

Some SEO competitor analysis tools allow you to analyze backlinks. Getting links from high-quality sites increases your domain power and thus helps boost your ranking in search results. If you want to see your website in higher ranks, you should examine your competitors’ backlinks. If you determine which sites connect to your competitors, you can take links from these sites and move your website to the top. You can use popular SEO tools for backlink analysis because they provide very beneficial results for you.

Review Your Competitors’ Website Design

Design is a very important issue for websites. One of the things that users first pay attention to when entering a site is definitely the site’s design. If the design of your competitor’s website is good and better than your site’s design, you will need to make some changes to the design of your website. While examining the website designs, you should be objective and examine other details such as logo, visual appeal, branding, and mobile compatibility in competing sites. Do not forget that if the competitor’s website’s ranking is very good but has a terrible website design, this is an excellent opportunity for you because you can beat your competitor by making a good website design. Even if you are a small local business, the rule that your site design should be good also applies to you.

Analyze Competitors’ Social Media Accounts

Today, we see the impact and power of social media in every area, and, of course, social media also has an effect on attracting visitors to sites. 

Social media is a widely used platform to attract more visitors to sites. To see your competitors’ content on their social media accounts, visit some of their popular social media accounts, such as Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, and see if they are active on these platforms. You should look at how your competitors use social media, how effectively they use it, and what their accounts on social media look like. 

Remember, an excellent social media campaign allows you to market your content well. Using social media helps build relationships between the customer and the business and will enable you to interact with your customers more strongly. Even if your competitors do not use social media, using it will put you ahead of them. Therefore, to be more successful than your competitors, you should give importance to using social media.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Offline Strategies

The fact that a website is in the foreground may not always be related to that site using organic keywords, SEO tools, or great content. Sometimes, competitors’ non-internet advertising and campaigns may be the reason why they are more searched for and visited on search engines. Therefore, you may need to pay attention to areas other than the Internet. It will be useful to know what your competitors are doing in areas such as television, newspaper, magazine, and even billboard ads. Analyzing your competitor’s offline marketing moves will bring many benefits to your site.

When Should You Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis?

Checking out what your competitors are doing with SEO (getting found on Google) is indeed important for your strategy. It helps you see what’s good and what needs fixing in your industry. By doing this, you can make your website better and stand out from the competition. But when to do SEO competitor analysis? The analysis is done when changes occur in search engine algorithms, new competitors appear in your industry, or you fall in the rankings. Remember that you are in a constant race in the digital world. When you take a break from development, your competitors take advantage of this and take you one step back with SEO work. The number of websites is increasing rapidly, and every organization, whether it is a sectoral economic enterprise or an institutional organization, has its own web page. The service areas of information provider sites are becoming increasingly diverse.

Best SEO Competitive Analysis Tools

One of the elements that should be considered while doing SEO work is SEO competitor analysis. Especially in sectors with high competition, it is very important to closely follow the work done by competitors in order to get ahead of them by improving SEO analysis on your site. You can see which keywords competitors are focusing on, and by seeing the keywords that are focused on a product basis, you can focus on different keyword groups from them.

You can see which keywords competitors are focusing on; you can focus on different keyword groups from them by seeing the keywords focused on a product basis. In addition, it is very important to examine your competitors’ SEO efforts to find keyword groups that will increase your site traffic with organic searches. Competitor analysis SEO is a very effective study to see what your competitors are doing on the content marketing side and to see how they get results in these studies. Finding the best SEO tools is easy because there is a lot of content available online.

Let’s see the best SEO competitive analysis tools:

1. Ahrefs
2. Semrush
3. Google Keyword Planner
4. SpyFu
5. Moz

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most important SEO tools that will be recommended by many people. It has the largest site crawlers after Google. SEO experts will have the best SEO analysis they can get by taking advantage of Ahrefs’ Site Audit feature. This tool will show you the tools that need to be developed on your site. In terms of competitive analysis, Ahrefs will be able to analyze the links of your competitors and make them the starting point of your brand. You can even use this SEO competitive analysis tool to find the most linked content in your field.

In short, it is the ultimate tool to learn from, get ideas from, and be inspired by the best sites to implement on your website. Especially on the backlink side, Ahrefs offers more data than any other tool, which makes it stand out among other tools. The Ahrefs tool is mainly used to analyze the backlink profile, keyword analysis, keyword rankings, and SEO visibility as a result of links to websites.

Semrush

Semrush is a comprehensive analysis program with many functions that help in the development of websites. This program, which offers different features within SEO competitive analysis tools, is the biggest supporter in the development of sites on a personal or corporate basis. It is a software that can be called the best among its competitors in terms of functionality and analysis.

The usage area is quite wide. This analysis program has a very wide scope, including adwords, SEO, and digital marketing sectors, including word suggestions to bring the site to the forefront in many areas, taking data from the domain to produce analysis reports. When a site’s domain name is registered with Semrush, it provides a wealth of site-specific data. Semrush, as an SEO competitor tool, also helps determine content marketing and social media marketing strategies for the site so that it has the features that customers will demand. Google ads and other campaign activities can also be tracked with the analysis tool. The competition rate in the sector in which the site is located can also be learned with the tool.

Google Keyword Planner

One of the important points of reaching the target audience is the use of the right keywords. The way to reach a wider audience and increase the traffic of the site is to rank high on Google, so Google Keyword Planner is an essential SEO competitor analysis tool. There are some methods to move the site to the top of the search engine. One of them is to do SEO work. With Google Keyword Planner offered on Google Ads, it is possible to plan according to search volumes. Google Keyword Planner, which is connected to Adwords, provides detailed information about the search results performed on Google. It is necessary to take advantage of this program before word-oriented SEO efforts, advertising on AdWords, and keyword planning. Google Keyword Planner is designed to help you plan keywords and find the right keywords, report search volumes, click costs, and similar information.

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool for word analysis. One of the purposes of using Google Keyword Planner is for Google Ads or Google Ads studies. Thanks to Google Keyword Planner, it is possible to develop much more effective strategies in SEO efforts for your site. Before doing SEO competitor analysis, you can access a lot of information about keywords, such as the competitive situation.

SpyFu

SpyFu is an excellent and powerful competitor analysis tool that helps you check the keyword data of your competitor’s website. You can check not only organic keywords but also Google AdWords keywords. You can do SEO Overview, PPC Research, Keyword Research, Backlinks, etc. It is also very easy to use with its user-friendly interface. SpyFu is relatively inexpensive and has a range of options for competitive analysis for organic and paid search, including keywords, spending, and ad copy. It allows you to compare yourself directly against 2 competitors. You can see what you are bidding on and where competitors are bidding and you are not. It’s also a useful tool to see how your domain has changed over time.

Spyfu is also a great tool for keyword expansion and discovering new keywords for better campaign performance. It offers suggestions to users about the performance of the words. In addition, users can view how their domains are performing and for which keywords they are ranking in organic search in an SEO competitor world.

Moz

The most important feature of the MOZ SEO analysis tool is the ability to conduct keyword research in the most accurate and up-to-date way. In this way, it becomes significantly easier to realize which keywords are searched and which words stand out in internet research.

While the MOZ SEO analysis tool can be used to examine backlinks and obtain data, such as site audits, operations can be carried out simply. Thus, the tool can be beneficial, especially in terms of the quality of backlinks.

What to Do After a Major Algorithm Update

Whenever there’s a major Google update, it’s a good idea to check how your keywords are doing.

• Has your ranking changed?
• Have your competitors surpassed you in the word you are high in?
• Are you showing a decline?

It’s worth checking the details.

While doing deep research and review, it is very important to research and review competing sites in your field. It’s like a continuous flow. These ups and downs will not stop. That’s why you should definitely analyze your analysis and your competitors after updates and changes.

Conclusion

In this article, we explained what SEO competitor analysis is, its importance, and how SEO competitor research is done. By doing SEO competitive analysis, you can beat your competitors in the search engine results page and take your website to a much more successful level than it is. Sizes your competitors ranking; after that, make a move for yourself. With many different tactics, strategies, and tips we mentioned in our article, you can make your site more prominent than your competitors.