Learning from your competitors is one of the best ways to stay ahead in the SEO game. It’s important to understand what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it, so that you can stay competitive and get a leg up on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
It starts with an SEO competitor analysis. This involves reviewing what keywords your competitors are targeting, understanding their content marketing strategies, analyzing their social media presence, and more. Through this process, you can better understand which areas they have optimized well and where they may be missing out on opportunities for improvement.
Here are 5 incredible insights you’ll uncover when you do an SEO competitive analysis:
Table of Contents
1. Do a Keyword Gap Analysis
By doing an SEO audit on your competitors, you can often turn up a keyword gap – a set of high-volume, low-difficulty keywords that they are not optimizing for, but could be perfect for your website. With careful SEO keyword research, you can identify these gaps and capitalize on them to increase your organic traffic.
Keyword gap analysis is a great way to gain an edge on your competition. Once you have identified the keywords that your competitors are not optimizing for, you can target them more effectively and maximize the return on investment from your SEO efforts.
To conduct a successful keyword gap analysis, start by creating detailed profiles of each of your competitors. This includes understanding their content strategies, social media presence and keyword rankings. You will then need to analyze which keywords they have optimized well and what areas they may be missing out on opportunities for improvement.
See our guide: Keyword Discovery: How to Find High Keyword Search Volume Terms Fast
Finally, do an SEO competitive analysis to determine how well their websites are competing for certain keywords and what gaps exist that you can fill. Once you have identified the keyword gap, create content tailored to those terms using SEO best practices and begin crafting your strategy to capture this organic traffic. Through careful SEO audit and competitive analysis, you can gain a competitive advantage over your competition in the search engine rankings.
In one of my companies, I found that a competitor had clearly hired an SEO agency because they had so many good rankings for hundreds of keywords. Every time I looked up a related term in our industry, they had an article on it. When I did an SEO competitive analysis to determine whether we could rank for some of the keywords they identified, I found quite a few that were ripe for picking. I found dozens of keyword phrases that had low keyword difficulty and sufficient search volume.
After creating a spreadsheet of terms that we wanted to pursue, we embarked on a writing strategy that resulted in page 1 rankings for dozens of new keywords that attracted qualified leads that we would not have gotten before.
By taking a comprehensive approach to competitor analysis, SEO keyword research and SEO audit, you can learn valuable lessons from your competitors that will help drive more organic traffic to your website.
2. See Competitor Rank Tracking
Your competitors’ rankings in the SERPs (search engine result pages) offer valuable insight into how well their SEO efforts are working. Regularly tracking their organic rank will help you stay informed of how they’re performing and give you clues as to how you should optimize your own content and strategies.
By looking up your competitors’ top performing pages, you can get an in-depth understanding of what they’re doing to drive their success. Analyzing the page titles and headings, as well as keywords used in the content, can give you insight into which topics or phrases they are targeting to rank better on search engines.
Additionally, analyzing the images and links within each page can help you understand how they are using multimedia strategies to maximize their SEO efforts. You may even find some link building opportunities that weren’t previously visible. Finally, reviewing other important on-page SEO factors such as meta descriptions and loading times will provide further insight into how your competitors are optimizing their pages for better visibility. All these pieces
You should also take note of any technical aspects that may be helping them rank well for specific keywords. For example, if you notice that their page loads faster than yours due to smaller image sizes or server optimization techniques, then this is something you can take advantage of as well.
By spending time analyzing the SEO performance of their top-ranking pages, you’ll have a much better idea of what strategies to implement on your own website for optimum SEO success. Ultimately, by learning from your competitors and studying their SEO tactics, you can give yourself an edge in the ever-changing search engine landscape.
3. Run a Competitor SEO Audit
A competitor SEO audit is a great way to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in terms of their SEO strategies. Through an audit, you can determine what technical SEO elements need to be optimized, such as page load speed and mobile optimization. You can also review their linking structures and see what external links they are leveraging for higher rankings.
An SEO audit will provide detailed insights into your competitors’ SEO performance, allowing you to identify areas of opportunity and potential weaknesses. For example, an SEO audit may reveal that your competitor is leveraging a lot of internal links in their content with anchor text containing their target keywords.
This is great for SEO as it helps search engines determine the relevance of the page to its keyword and increase the likelihood of ranking higher in the SERPs. On the other hand, if you find out that some webpages on your competitor’s site lack proper meta tags or don’t have any alt-text for images then these are actionable items that you can implement on your own website to boost visibility.
The SEO audit will provide a comprehensive overview of SEO technical elements, such as indexing and crawling, as well as a list of recommendations for actionable items. The SEO audit should also provide an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s content strategy and keyword usage, including the types of keywords being used in titles, headings, meta descriptions and body copy.
This type of analysis can help you identify which SEO topics are resonating with users so that you may adjust or improve upon your own SEO efforts. Finally, the SEO audit can help you uncover any potential issues with duplicate content or malicious code that could be hindering your Google rankings.
4. Analyze Content Strategy
An effective SEO strategy starts with content and your competitors can be a great source of inspiration for creating new content ideas. For example, by analyzing their blog posts, you may find topics related to your industry that you hadn’t previously considered writing about. Additionally, you can learn which content formats they are using in order to engage readers and capture more leads or conversions.
Furthermore, if they are leveraging multimedia elements such as videos or infographics these can serve as a great source of ideas on how to create compelling visual SEO content. Finally, studying the structure of their webpages will provide insights into what page layout works best for SEO success and user experience optimization. By understanding how your competitors have crafted their SEO content and associated SEO tags, you can create SEO content that is better optimized for search engine visibility.
Understanding what your competitors are doing SEO-wise can be an invaluable tool in helping to improve your own SEO performance. By analyzing competitor SEO tactics through keyword research, technical SEO audits and content strategy analysis, you will gain a better understanding of how to optimize your website for higher rankings in the search engines.
Not only will this enable you to stay ahead of the competition but it will also provide valuable insights into what strategies work best for SEO success. So don’t be afraid to take inspiration from your competitors – after all, there is always something new.
5. Monitor Social Media Presence
Social media signals are a part of SEO success and can have an impact on rankings, visibility and conversion rates. Therefore, it’s important to keep tabs on your competitors’ social media efforts in order to stay ahead of the curve. Analyzing their content, following patterns, engaging with influencers and tracking their performance across different platforms will give you valuable insights into what works best for SEO success.
This information can then be used to improve your own SEO strategy by creating better-targeted content that resonates with users on multiple levels. Additionally, monitoring competitor social media presence can also reveal trends in user engagement which may help you better optimize your SEO efforts. By taking cues from competitors social media strategies, you can gain a better understanding of SEO best practices and how to ensure that your content is seen by the right people.
Social media presence can have a significant impact on SEO performance due to the fact that it provides an additional platform for content promotion, links and engagement which ultimately boosts visibility. Additionally, social signals such as likes or shares indicate that content is deemed valuable and can be used by search engines like Google to understand user preferences and rank content accordingly.
Social media platforms also provide opportunities to build relationships with influencers who may have access to large audiences which in turn could lead to more website visits, backlinks and higher rankings. In addition, many of the major search engines use social media updates from companies when displaying results for certain queries. Finally, through social media activities you can optimize SEO efforts by using targeted hashtags or keywords related to your respective industry.
Take the MoreBusiness.com SEO Crash Course
In conclusion, SEO is an ever-evolving landscape and understanding what your competitors are doing SEO-wise can be a huge advantage when it comes to improving your SEO performance. By analyzing competitor SEO tactics through keyword research, technical SEO audits and content strategy analysis, you will gain valuable insights into how to optimize your website for better rankings in the SERPs.
SEO Crash Course →
If you’re looking for more ways to stay ahead of the competition with SEO, then consider taking our SEO Crash Course. Our course covers everything from developing a SEO strategy to optimizing your website for high rankings without having to pay for ads. With this comprehensive course, you’ll get actionable tips and strategies that you can implement right away.
This SEO Crash Course series, unlike other courses, offers unique tactics for specific industries. It walks you through everything you need to know about SEO, from the basics of keyword research to more advanced tactics like link building and social media outreach.
With actionable steps and easy-to-understand explanations, this course series will help you lay the foundation for a successful SEO campaign that will bring a constant stream of qualified clients to your door. Whether you’re a complete beginner or have some experience with SEO already, this course series has something for everyone.
Start growing your business today with the SEO Crash Course Series!
Author: Raj Khera, 3x CEO and CMO, is Managing Partner and Publisher of MoreBusiness.com where he provides SEO Coaching to small business and enterprise marketing teams
