SEO Competitor Analysis Step by Step

How to Analyze Your SEO Competitors: SEO Competitor Analysis Step by Step Guide

SEO Competitor Analysis Step by Step Guide: SEO competitor analysis is extremely important if you want your website to replicate or do better than your competitors, and it should be done before designing your website. The aim of SEO competitor analysis is to understand how your online competitors have gained ranks through the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It will give you an overall picture of your competitors and may expose opportunities for your website. You need to know what keywords they used to make the top positions in the SERPs.
 

How To Perform An SEO Competitor Analysis

SEO competitor analysis is broken into two parts – on-page SEO analysis and off-page SEO analysis. Off-page is usually the amount of quality backlinks to a website. On-page is the usually the standard SEO elements of a website such as site structure, keyword focus, page title, internal linking, rich content etc. 

How to Easily Analyze Your Competitor’s Keywords
 

Analyze Your Competitor’s Keywords: Now let’s start finding your competitors! Make a list of the main keywords that your website is about. For example, if your website is renting holiday homes in Kerry, then some of the keywords would be ‘holiday homes’, ‘rent holiday home’, ‘cottages for rent’, ‘holiday’, etc. Search for the most relevant keywords on Google. Make sure you do an international and local search on Google. For an international search, the URL would be www.google.com/NCR (No Country Redirect), and a local search would depend on the country your business resides in. For example, Ireland – .ie, UK – .co.uk, Spain – .es, France – .fr. These are local country extensions, e.g. www.google.ie. Pick the first few relevant organic results. Select at least 5 competitors websites from each local and international search. In total, you should now have 10 competitors websites to analyse.

 How to Perform Competitive SEO Analysis | SEO Analysis Tools | Free | Paid

 
Let’s start the SEO competitor analysis! You should have 5 international and 5 local websites. You need to get information on the 4 metrics below. Use some SEO analysis tools  to improve seo site ranking to get this information. Sign up for a free month trial with Alexa, but be sure to cancel your account before the free trial ends. In my opinion, Alexa is a great tool to compare many websites together for these metrics. It will also allow you to compare them on a country by country basis if there is enough traffic. There is a list of SEO competitor analysis tools in this article. The following 4 metrics are a good starting point for your SEO competitor analysis.

 Website Major Analysis Terms: Google PR, Alexa, DA, PA, Backlinks

Google Page Rank – PageRank determines the authority and popularity of a website. If you want to find more information on PageRank, check Wikipedia. Google PageRank goes from 0-10. 10 is excellent and 0 is poor. From 4 onwards is difficult to get.
 
Alexa Ranking – opposite of Google PageRank. It goes from 1- onwards. Number 1 is the best score. Anything from 1 – 250,000 is a reasonably good ranking.
 
Domain Authority – this is a good ranking measure of the authority or popularity of a website.
 
Website Backlinks – backlinks will only count towards your PageRank if they are from quality and authority websites.
 
It may be a good idea to open an Excel file with your 10 competitors as headings and use the above 4 points for your rows. When you have all the information entered, pick the top 5 competitors based on the 4 metrics above. Now, you are left with 5 competitor websites to analyse. The next step is to do an on-page and off-page SEO competitor analysis on these 5 websites. 

SEO Competitor Analysis: On Page Website Analysis

Let’s first start doing an on-page SEO analysis. This will give you a good indication into the amount of  work required on design and development for your website. The homepage for each website is usually a good place to start and look out for the main SEO elements such as the following.
 

Keywords Research / Finder Tools: How to Find Best Keywords for Our Services

Keywords – is there a keyword focus, are there one or many keywords on the page, is the keyword used in the titles?, etc. Start collecting all the keywords and do some keyword research. You should collect around 500 keywords and keyword phrases, categories them and collate them into an Excel file. Lookout for keywords/ phrases that are rising or declining in popularity and lookout for keywords that have a high number of searches. Market Sumrami, Alexa and Wordtracker are great tools for this job. Researching keywords is very important as it will give you an idea of how to lay out your website. You can structure your website based on the keywords and keyword phrases. Search Google on a particular keyword and see are any other keywords/ phrases returned. This is a good way to expand your list of keywords. Keywords are an important part of SEO competitor analysis.
 

SEO On page Analysis Main Factors

Images, videos – does the website make good use of images and videos, and are they used in the right places etc.
 
Site structure – is the website well structured, are there many pages, and are they in a well structured hierarchy etc.
 
Site performance – do pages and images load quickly, does it have a shopping cart and does that work ok etc.
 
Internal linking – is there a lot of internal linking and good navigation, does it make good use of anchor text, is there too much internal linking?
 
Other files – does it have robots.txt and sitemap.xml – are these setup correctly? are there any 404 error pages etc.
 
Usability – is it a clear website, are the sections labelled clearly, is it easy to understand, can you find what you are looking for easily, is there a clear call to action etc.
 
Content – is the content rich and unique and is it updated regularly etc.Off-Page SEO analysis
 

Check what backlinks your competitors have: Website Backlinks checker

Backlinks – use a tool such as ahrefs. Check what backlinks your competitors have. Maybe there are links to niche directories, comments to blogs, relevant forums etc. This will give you ideas to see if you can gain these links also. For example, you may not have known about a particular directory that you can submit your site to. Check out the website that has the blog comment and see if you can add relevant information with a backlink to your own site. Backlinks are a very important part of SEO competitor analysis as backlinks play an important part in gaining a high PageRank.
 

You should set aside plenty of time to do on-page and off-page analysis, as it is an extremely important part of SEO competitor analysis.
 

SWOT Analysis: Check Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats Analysis

The next step in SEO competitor analysis is to do a SWOT analysis on these 5 websites. Make sure you have a complete understanding of your competitors website before doing a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis is basically asking the following questions:
 
What are their strengths? – high quality backlinks, good website, rich content, keywords, etc.
 
What are their weaknesses? – maybe the website isn’t kept updated, lacking in popular keywords, no subscriptions to newsletter etc.
 
What are the opportunities? – could be a few keywords your competitor isn’t using, difficult to navigate website, not easy to understand etc.
 
What are the threats? A threat could be a competitor buying an already well ranking website.Questions to ask about your competitors
 

When doing an SEO competitor analysis, you should ask the following questions.

What are the key products/ services they are offering?
 
How do they generate revenue? – advertising, affiliate programs etc
 
Can potential customers subscribe to email updates, Facebook updates, YouTube updates etc.?

List of SEO Competitor Analysis Tools
 

These tools aid SEO competitor analysis. Some are free and some paid.

The following is just a small selection available on the internet today.

Alexa – sign up and get one months free trial.

Semrush

MOZ

Market Samurai– mainly used for their keyword tool.

Raven tools

Webceo

Hubspot

Buzzsumo – helps you to identify the most shared content and authority websites for any topic.

Majestic SEO – sign up for a free account and get limited access to their link analysis tools and database.

Ahrefs – free backlinks checker.

SEO Competitor Analysis Step by Step