How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO? : Ultimate Guide (Updated 2024)

If you want to stay one step ahead of your competition in the ranking game, you need to look into their SEO tactics, find their best approaches, be cautious of their mistakes, and leverage all of that info to your benefit.

That means you need to first study your competitors carefully. But how to do competitor analysis in SEO?

This is what this blog is all about. Here we will make you familiar with the different types of competitor analysis and how to do each one of them with popular SEO tools.

Types of SEO Competitive Analysis

Here are some ways to research on your competitors:

• Keyword Analysis

This one is self-explanatory. You research and discover keywords that your competitors are ranking for. The goal is to find new keywords that have high search volumes but low competition, which enhances their ranking possibilities.

• Content Analysis

It’s obvious that you’ll want to do better than your competitors in the SERPs. One of the best ways to do that is through developing killer content. The key is knowing how your competitors create, manage, and market their content. Analyze their strategies and implement the best ones.

• Backlinks Analysis

You will need the backlink sources of your competition’s so you can reach out to those credible sources and gain quality and relevant inbound links.

• Technical Analysis

The technical aspects of your competitor websites are also important. There are ways to check out their site speed, navigation and structure, indexing and crawl issues, and other technical aspects,  and improve yours accordingly.

• Social Media Analysis

Yes, the social profiles of your competitors are worth looking into as well. You need to know how your competitors promote and market their brands on different social media platforms so you can see why they’re successful at their campaigns.

How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO?

1. Competitor Identification

To start off with competitor analysis, first you need to figure out who you’re actually competing against. There are a few ways to list out your competitors:

You can directly search on Google or use SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz or Ubersuggests, and look for your true competitors in the SERPs.

Imagine you are a tech firm located in Kansas City, Missouri. How do you find out your competitors?

Just Google something like “tech services in Kansas” and see what pops up.

Your true competitors would be ones that provide similar services as yours. In this SERP, the first five websites, including GroovyTek, HelloTech and Strategy Tech are all tech firms in your area. So, they are your direct competitors and will rival you for the IT products and solutions you’re providing in Kansas.

Although the next few ones are also your competitors, they are not tech firms or services by any means but they’re still ranking alongside your niche websites.

The reason is that they’ve targeted similar keywords as yours. So, while they may not be competing for your products or services, they can still outrank you.

You’ll get similar results with SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs or Moz.

Let’s take SEMRush for example. Go to the “Organic Research” feature and type in the same keyword.

You need to know who your real competitors are. For example, here one of the organic results is Yelp.com, which is not exactly an IT company. So, don’t waste your time with domains that’re not even your competitors.

Here’s how to find niche-based competitors with Semrush:

Step 1: Go to SEMRUSH’ “Organic Research”

Step 2: Enter your domain

Step 3: Go to “Competitors”

Step 4: Get your results

2. Competitor SEO Keyword Analysis

• Find Keyword Gaps

Let’s do a keyword gap analysis first. The purpose is to find keywords that your competitors are ranked for but you aren’t.

Go to “Keyword Gap” in SEMRush. Type in your domain in one of the boxes and your competitors in the rest. Click “Compare” and see the result for yourself.

Let’s look at the keyword gap between Kansascitytech.com and their competitors.

If you select the “Untapped” filter, you’ll see a list of keywords that Kansascitytech.com never used but their competitors did. So, you can capitalize on those keywords and strategize accordingly for better rankings.

The goal is to use keywords with lesser keyword difficulties (KD) but more search volumes (SV). So, find your ideal keywords from the list and build your SEO from the ground up.

• Target New Keywords

You should be aware whether your competitors are using new keywords or not. If they are, you should also use the same keywords.

Go to SEMRush’s “Organic Research” tool again. Type in your competitor domain and click “Search.”

We are going to take hellotech.com as our primary competitor and analyze their keywords.

The search result for the domain will return with all the keywords it has ever used. However, you have to go over to the “Position Changes” tab and choose the “New” filter to get the new keywords.

Individually analyze each keyword to stay ahead of the competition. You’ll find the page URL wherein a specific keyword is located. Navigate to the page and see how relevantly they used their keywords and what the content was all about.

Focus on the search volume and KD and pick the best keyword to work with.The right keyword not only depends on how you can use it to meet your business goals but how the global competitors are leveraging that keyword as well.

For instance, we can see in the last result that “airdrop turn on” is a popular keyword with lesser keyword difficulty. A simple google search with the keyword will give you an idea about how you can make the best out of it.

As you can see, the SERP shows mostly blog posts for this keyword. So, if you can create high-quality informative blogs on “airdrop turn on,” you’ll have a higher chance to make it to the top.

Again, it’s all about the user intent. You should analyze all such keywords and optimize your own strategy to cater to the right audience. You can use long-tail keywords to further narrow down to a specific audience and increase user engagement.

• Bring Back the Lost Keywords

This is a simple trick you can use to take advantage of your competitor’s data.

Your competitors might have lost a lot of keywords in their journey so far. The reasons may be varied such as Google spam updates for which they had to remove a questionable page or content or they had stopped giving information about a specific topic.

Whatever may be the case, this serves as a golden opportunity for you to pick up the pieces and leverage them to your benefits.

Again, it’s very easy to find out the lost keywords of your competitors with SEMRush.

Go to “Organic Research” and type in your competitor’s root domain.

Now choose the “Lost” option from the “Position Change” dropdown tab.

This will show all the keywords that the site has lost over time.

Let’s go after the lost keywords of hellotech.com:

The keyword “how to cancel youtube tv” seems like an obvious choice for its good search volume and a reasonable KD score.

Keep the essentials in mind: you need to target keywords with lesser difficulty in SERP competition and those that users search for more. The rest is up to you in terms of how you want to analyze the keywords with an SEO tool.

3. Competitor Content Analysis

• Measure Content Strengths and Weaknesses

Your competitor content analysis has to be mostly manual. Tools are not equipped to tell you a whole story about the content.

You have to observe each of your competitor’s content and note down what has made them exceptional and in some cases, what went wrong.

Read between the lines and try to crack their content strategy.

Do they publish a specific type of content throughout? Do they diversify their content very often? Are they more focused on product pages or blogs and guides? Can you call them “quality content” after all?

• How Content Varies

You should also think about: what type of content is working for them and what isn’t?

Imagine your competitors are putting out blogs and gaining regular traction. You can then start optimizing your own blogs to be more SEO-friendly.

There is an easier way to do that if you are an opportunist. If a competitor’s content is failing for some reason, you can take advantage of this situation.

For example, if the competitor is not regularly updating their blogs, you can start being more active with new blogs and fill up the information gaps for the niche audience.

You can also make use of the “Skyscraper” technique. This is where you need to give more effort to create more efficient content than your competitors’ basic ones and grab more attention.

• Keyword-based Content Analysis

If you have a keyword in mind but don’t know if you should proceed with it for your new content, you can use SEMRush’s “SEO Content Template” to analyze the competitors’ content for a specific keyword and get tons of other suggestions for your content.

Go to “SEO Content Template” and type in a keyword of your choice. Suppose you want to write about “the best video doorbells.” Type it in and click ‘Create Content Template.’

The result shows the top 10 competitors for this keyword and based on them, provides you with SEO recommendations like semantically-related keywords that you can incorporate in your content to enrich your text, referring domains you can get your backlinks from, and even the number of words that your content should have.

• Take a Look at Titles and Meta Descriptions

You’re learning here how to do competitor analysis in SEO. So, don’t leave any stone unturned.

Not all analysis requires a specialized SEO tool. If you have some idea about SEO, you can find your own way.

For example, titles and meta descriptions are an important part of SEO but there’s no specific metric to decide how these texts are helping your competitors with their rankings. You need to apply logic to find the pattern that works best.

Let’s take our earlier example of the keyword “airdrop turn on” and search it up on Google.

The top competitors are showing varied types of title tags. You have to consider a couple of things here:

• The pattern they used to incorporate the keyword e.g. how-to guide or directly; i.e., “Turn AirDrop On/Off”
• Where they placed the keyword e.g. at the beginning of the title like “How to turn on AirDrop…” or towards the end e.g. “Apple iPhone – Turn AirDrop On/Off.”
• If they used any modifier like “Best” and “Easy.”
• If the title is a click-bait one.

After a thorough analysis like this, you can now create your title tags to rank better.

The same goes for meta-descriptions as well although they are often overlooked since they’re not a direct ranking factor. However, if the description can summarize a content effectively, it can still help drive traffic to your site.

See how your competitors have written their meta-descriptions and make yours better to entice the audience into clicking on your link.

4. Competitor Backlink Analysis

• Get a Backlink Profile Overview

First paste a competitor’s root domain in SEMRush’s ‘Backlink Analytics’ tool.

We’re working with “hellotech.com” again for this analysis.

The very first page you see is the overview. This one is only here for a quick look at the backlink profile of your competitor. You’ll find out the number of backlinks and referring domains, the domain authority score and other graphical data to get you started on the analysis.

• Analyze Backlinks Individually

Switch to the ‘Backlinks’ tab on the same window and see the complete list of backlinks your competitor has.

You can now analyze every single backlink from this interface by manually scrolling through and understanding their placement. Find the referral domains or websites they came from and see how many of them were authoritative. You can also examine the anchor texts that your competitor used and how they were written.

• Analyze by Attributes

This has been made easier with different filters you can use now to satisfy your search intent.

For example, you can decide whether you want to analyze the dofollowed or nofollowed backlinks only.

Your competitors might have lost a lot of backlinks for one reason or another. If you want to sweep them away for broken link building, choose the Lost filter and make your mark.

• Conduct Backlink Gap Analysis

This type of analysis gives you a list of referring domains that have provided backlinks to your rivals but not you.

This is useful in competitor research since it opens up new opportunities for you to chase backlinks. Since those websites have linked to your competitors, there’s a high probability that they’ll link to you as well if you can convince them with your content and authority.

Go to ‘Backlinks Gap’ in SEMRush and paste your root domain alongside those of your competitors.

We’re going to input Kansascitytech.com in the “You” tab and the rest from our list as its competitors.

Click ‘Find Prospects’ and look out for your backlink gaps!

The referring domains in this page are ones that provided backlinks to the competitors but not to Kansascitytech.com. The ‘Matches’ column shows how many of the top competitors have received links from a particular website.

Now, you can analyze individual domains and see if it makes sense for you to go ahead and ask for a link from those sites as well.

If you’re smart enough, you should be able to figure out the pattern of websites that have provided inbound links to your niche. This will help you pick the right prospects for backlinks and of course, your business.

• Do Bulk Backlink Analysis

High-quality backlinks usually translate to higher authority. You can measure the authority of a site by their backlink profiles using the “Bulk Analysis” feature on SEMRush.

Just go to the tool and paste your competitor domains. Click “Compare” to get results.

The higher your competitors’ AS (authority score- a metric developed by SEMRush scoring 0 to 100 based on backlink profiles of a site), the more difficult it’ll be to outrank them in the SERPs.

In this example, hellotech.com seems to be the most difficult competitor in your niche because of their higher AS and a robust backlink profile.

To increase your AS, manage your link building strategies better and get quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites.

5. Competitor Technical Analysis

• Check out Technical SEO Health

Technical SEO means optimizing your website for improved user experience. Fortunately, you can directly measure how your site and your competitors are doing on their technical front with SEMRush’s ‘Site Audit’ tool.

Create a project in site audit and run the audit on the sites- both yours and your competitors’ so you can compare.

We are going to audit the competitor domain hellotech.com. Let’s see how it does in site audit.

The “Overview’ page represents the overall technical SEO elements of the site. The ‘Site Health’ metric is the one that summarizes everything.

This SEMRush score ranges from 0 to 100 and reflects the total number of technical issues in that site. The higher the score, the fewer the issues.

Comparing the scores between your site and those of your competitors will give you an idea on how you should improve your site performance.

To determine the specific areas to work on, you have to navigate to the ‘Issues’ tab and find out.

The “Issues” page lists all the technical errors of the site e.g. slow speed, duplicate content, broken links and so on. You have to take them all into account and try to fix them.

SEMRush offers some recommendations for each issue. You can follow them on your own or consult with an SEO expert to remove those red flags from your site (if any).

• Check Out Manually

Your audit will reveal the errors that your competitors may have made. You can stand clear of them yourself and try to maximize your site performance from there on.

You need to be aware of other technical aspects that the audit may not cover. They might be some simple stuff that you can check out for yourself.

• Internal link structure: Just navigate through the content of your competitors and find out how well adjusted their internal links are. The better they’re connected, the stronger their content strategy and easier for search engines to crawl them. Follow their example yourself and improve your own internal links.
• Website structure: A site structure tells you a lot about how authoritative and functional they are. So, check your competitor website and how professionally it’s been built to predict how it might perform. Design your own site accordingly.
• Mobile friendliness: Develop your site keeping the mobile users in mind. Learn from the very best of your industry and make sure the site is well-optimized for mobile users no matter what.
• Topical Cluster: Look at the topical cluster or category mapping a site has resorted to. What it means is how a website has maintained the topical relevance by arranging different pages and tabs.

For example, let’s look at how Hellotech.com has done its topical clustering.

They provide different services as they’ve categorized here. Now, if you want to avail only computer support, you can pick from the homepage and navigate directly to their computer services.

You can follow a similar model for your own website and cluster your services like this to make it easy for users.

Things to Do After Running an SEO Competitive Analysis

Once you know how to do competitor analysis in SEO, all there’s left to do is optimize your own SEO strategy.

Of course, you can’t just copy-paste your competitors’ strategy onto yours because every website goes through a subjective experience in their niche when they’re trying to outrank each other.

You have to readjust your tactics learning from your top competitors but with the mindset of satisfying the user intent.

Some specific measures you can take are-

• Exploit the holes in your competitors’ game and build your content through the skyscraper technique. Surpass their content by quality and research.
• Title tags, meta-descriptions and other on-page SEO elements should also be taken care of. Incorporate multimedia to further enrich your text and content and make them engaging enough.
• After keyword analysis, figure out your keyword gaps and try to target high performing keywords to rank better on SERP. You can use long tail, short volume keywords to maximize the possibilities.
• The backlinks analysis will leave you with potential domains you can get your own links from. Perform a genuine outreach and manage backlinks through guest posting, partnerships or other organic means.
• Regularly audit your technical SEO and optimize your website structure as well as page loading speed and UX design.
• Always monitor your progress and keep improving with routine maintenance and analysis.

Benefits of SEO Competitor Analysis

Website competitor analysis is important for a number of reasons.

• This is a widely accepted standard SEO practice in the world of digital marketing to always keep your eyes on competitors. Of course, that has to take place in an ethical way. But this is how digital markets have grown over the years and will continue to evolve with time.
• By applying what works for your competitors, you can develop a foolproof strategy for your own SEO success.
• Same goes for stuff that’s failing them. Learn from their errors and weaknesses and create opportunities for yourself.
• Use information like the referring domains that provide backlinks to your niche, you can make it work for yourself.
• Your goal is to rank for your services. Analyzing your competitors gives you a great chance to capitalize on the important keywords and tailor them to design long tail keywords that match your audience’s search intent.

When to Conduct SEO Competitor Research?

SEO performance is never constant for a site. With the evolving Google algorithms and fluid search engine ranking, you have to adapt and reinvent your strategies.

Many think SEO competitor analysis is a one-time activity but that’s far from the truth. There are many instances you might have to research your competitors for a clue on how to take your next step. For example,

• It’s almost a mandatory SEO practice to analyze your competitors when you’re a new start-up. You should get familiar with your niche and industry giants and buckle up for a tough ride!
• When planning and writing a content, it’s recommended to check on your competitor’s content and find gaps in their information to fill in your own.
• When your competitors have outranked you, find out the exact mechanism that got them over through this competitive analysis.
• If your site is not moving up from one of the lower pages in SERP, it’s time you looked around the competitors and learned a thing or two about why there’s no improvement in your optimization.
• Google updates usually shake up the search engine ranking pretty good. So, after every Google update, don’t forget to evaluate where your new position is and how your competitors have outranked you. Set your game-plan according to the update and retain your rank.

SEO Competitive Analysis: Best Practices

• The analysis has to be ethical. We can’t emphasize this one enough. So, please refrain from any unethical or illegal means to study your rivals. There’s no need. You get sufficient data using the SEO tools available.
• Speaking of tools, try to use their premium versions. Sure, they have free trials but they’re limited and the results don’t give you a complete picture either. So, invest a little in these amazing SEO tools and enjoy the profound return.
• Prepare a report of your competitive analysis. Keep it concise, simple and comprehensive. Interpret what each data means for your company going forward head-to-head. Use visual inputs such as graphs and charts to make it more engaging.
• Get a second opinion. If you’re a large enough firm, assign the analysis to someone with more experience and SEO skills. Experience speaks better, right? Make your efforts count and work together with your team members to extract the best out of your analysis.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t throw away your investment of time and efforts into competitive analysis by making some very common errors-

• Overlooking local SEO: Local SEO research is just as important to see where you stand with your business based on your geographical position. So, don’t just ignore it.
• Sole focus on keywords: Keywords are not the only factor that helps your rank. See the other aspects of SEO as well in your competitor sites.
• Ignoring user intent: You can optimize your content to the highest degree but if you don’t keep user-intent in mind, that’s useless. So, don’t just take from them how they create content; use your own unique spin to make it accessible to your specific audience.
• Copy-pasting: If you follow your competitors blindly, be sure to stay where you are forever. Unless you are creative and unique with your own content and site performance, you can’t expect to outrank anyone.
• Irregularity: As we said before, competitive analysis is not a one-time thing. Know when to research your competitors for the right reasons.

How LinkBuilderPros.com can Help You Conduct a Robust SEO Competitor Analysis

If you are a fresh face in digital marketing with no idea how to get all of this done effectively or too engaged to give special attention to time-to-time competitive analysis, you can rely on LinkBuilderPros.

We have been a full-fledged SEO agency for 10 years now. Our services are well-received globally due to our professionalism and result-driven approach, proven track records on a number of services, and higher efficiency in all departments.

Get in touch with us with your demands for your competitive analysis, we’ll be there for you with a custom solution in hand.

Final Thoughts

Competition is a huge part of the grind in SEO marketing.

If you’re down in the field, expect some cut-throat competitors – all looking to outrank you!

If you think about it, you’re just the same to them. So, there’s no way to avoid it.

What you can do is learn how to do competitor analysis in SEO and cut your way through the SERP.

Our blog here has outlined everything there is to know about how to do competitor analysis in a step-by-step format. We also talked about when you should conduct an analysis, what you should be looking for in each and what stuff to avoid while coming to a conclusion.

Note them all down and get to work! Good luck.

FAQs

Q. Can I Conduct Competitor Analysis Manually?

Ans. You sure can. However, using specific SEO tools only streamlines the process, saves the time and helps you score accuracy with the analysis.

Q. Is Local SEO Considered in Competitor Analysis?

Ans. Absolutely. You should look at location-based keywords and analyze Google business profiles for your local competitors.

Q. What Role Does Social Media Play in Competitor Analysis?

Ans. Social media analysis reveals the user engagement of your competitors. Find out the content pattern on their social media pages and take a note of how they interact with the users.

Q. Can I Use Competitor Analysis for Paid Advertising Strategies?

Ans. Yes, you can assess your competitor’s paid strategies such as advertising campaigns and try to make sense of how you can run one as well.

mothasim

SEO & Growth Manager

A distinguished SEO and Business Development Consultant with a proven track record of helping businesses achieve outstanding results in the digital landscape. Throughout his career, Mothasim has worked with a diverse range of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

His strategies are characterized by his meticulous attention to detail, data-driven decision-making, and a deep understanding of search engine algorithms. In his personal life, Mothasim enjoys hiking, photography, and volunteering in his community. He believes in giving back and is actively involved in mentoring aspiring SEO professionals. LinkedIn .