SEO competition analysis Complete strategy

Do you sometimes get the question “How do I get a higher position in Google?” Then an SEO competition analysis is a nice next step when you have completed the SEO basics. The beauty of the worldwide web is that there is much to discover. Similarly, most SEO signals that your competitor passes to the search engine.

In this blog I explain how to make an SEO competition analysis, what benefits can be gained for your website and how you can monitor future steps of your competitor online.

Advantages SEO competition analysis

There can be several reasons for doing a competitive analysis:

• You are going to enter a new market and want to know where the opportunities lie.

• You no longer rank high in Google and want to know why.

• You are looking for new inspiration to improve the performance of your organic traffic.

• You want to know how you perform compared to the competitor.

• You want to know what new steps your competitor has taken.

• etc.

There are plenty of reasons why it is useful to check what is happening on the market from time to time. This is one of the qualities that belongs to a marketer, in this case you as an SEO specialist. You are the one who sets the course in the field of SEO and is (probably) held responsible for the final results. To do that properly, you have to periodically check what is happening on the market.

Get started with your SEO competition analysis

There are many ways in which you can discover what your competitor wants or is found. With this information you will soon be able to determine whether you want to optimize your website for these search terms, or if you want to sail a different course. There are many arguments why you do or do not go for something. Try to also involve other specialists in your choice, for example a SEA specialist. He may have been advertising the terms for which you may want to optimize your website for a while and this person can already tell you a bit more whether or not these search terms work. It is also useful to open a spreadsheet in which during your competition research you note opportunities that the competitors do better than you.

See what your competitors rank on

My first step when I start with a competitive analysis is: what do my competitors rank on? I always make a distinction between two types of competitors: first, your actual competitors, these competitors are often known from a market research. Second, your online competitors: other companies that rank on search terms that you would like to be found on. Both types of competitors are important to look at and take a closer look at. With your online competitors, the question is always to what extent you can call this a competitor. For example, if they rank on only three terms you want to rank on, ignore them. If they rank on a topic with many terms and if they have a large display share, be sure to include them in your research.

I use SEMrush to view the keywords on which competitors rank. If you enter the name of your competitor under the heading ‘domain overview’, you will immediately see what your competitor ranks on (see image below).

If you scroll down a little further, you will immediately see your main online competitors.

Your main competitor in the picture? Then take a look at:

• How often your competitor ranks in the top 10.

• How many positions they have in place 1,2,3 etc.

• And whether they rank well in a certain niche, are an authority within a larger domain, or bake nothing ;-).

In addition to this report, you can enrich your analysis with the “keyword gap tool”. With the keyword gap tool you can also see what your competitor is ranking on and you are not. You can find this under GAP analyzes (see the image below).

Ideal for getting new content ideas. If you filter in this overview by, for example, keywords with a higher search volume than 200 impressions per month and a low keyword difficulty (the difficulty level to rank on), you will quickly find opportunities where you can write better content.

If you want to see who your competitors are at the keyword level, enter the term under which you would like to rank under the heading ‘keyword analytics’.

Now that you know what your competitors rank on, you may have received an indication on which terms you want to optimize your website. In this choice, take the steps mentioned below and involve (as mentioned before) other specialists in your choice.

See how your competitor has optimized his website

Now that you know what your competitors rank on, let’s take a closer look at the details to find out why your competitors rank on certain terms. For this I look at a number of things such as:

• Content

On which topics has content been created, what does that content look like (informative, commercial research, transactional, etc.) and where do you see possible areas for improvement with your website?

• On page SEO

With a web crawler you look at things such as: which anchor texts have been used, which pages receive the most internal links, which h1 tags are used, which words are in the title tags and which category tags are most common.

• Benchmark the speed of your website

See how fast your competitors’ website is. Look at things like: TTFB, TTI, FMP and your speed index score. It is also useful to compare the speed differences on desktop and mobile.

Tip: A handy and free tool to do this on a large scale is batch speed. This API tool uses Lighthouse, Google’s speedometer.

• View your competitors’ backlinks Receiving backlinks strengthens the authority of your website. By looking at what the competitors receive external links from, you find out that the competitor is doing better, where opportunities lie and which pages are reinforced with backlinks.

To find out where the backlinks come from, I use SEMrush.

Login and navigate to “backlink gap” under GAP analysis. Enter the names of your competitors and click “start”. The result you will see now is an overview of backlinks that you may or may not have and your competitors will. Download this list and use it as input for your action plan when you get started with Linkbuilding.

Other interesting factors

When I start with a competitive analysis, I always feel like a spy. And I can tell you, that’s quite nice. I am always looking for additional opportunities to learn more about my competitor. The following steps are not necessarily essential, but can be a nice addition to your research.

• Successful traffic sources

To see which traffic sources are most successful, I use the traffic analytics report in SEMrush (found under the heading “marketing insights”). This report tells me more about the most successful traffic sources. Think of: direct traffic, social media, search engine advertisements etc.

If you scroll a little further down, you can filter the results even further, for example: the different search engines where the traffic comes from, or the successful social media channels.

• In which markets are your competitors active? To find out if your competitors are active in other countries, you can do two things: see if they have hreflang tags in their source code and in addition to that, you can use SEMrush to get an indication how much traffic these websites bring in.

I hope I have helped you with the steps mentioned above to get a better picture of your competitors. It is useful to continue to periodically monitor your main competitors for things such as: keyword positions, new pages, new links, visibility in the search engine, etc. In this way you (hopefully) stay ahead of your competitor, or know how to beat him online.

Good to know: Some SEO tools even offer the possibility to get an alert when, for example, a new page has been created.

Now you again, what insights has the competitive analysis given you? Which things do I still miss in my competition investigation? Let me know in a comment below.

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