A competitive analysis is the process of identifying major competitors in your industry and researching their products, services and marketing strategies. It is an important part of creating effective business strategies. By learning how your competitors operate, you can identify opportunities they haven’t taken advantage of and leverage them for your own business.
While a competitor analysis is an important element in the running and growth of a business, it requires a different take to analyse the SEO tactics of your competitors. Although the basic principles remain the same, there are certain things you have to do to build an effective picture of competitor SEO strategies. As a marketing manager or business owner, you might not be aware of specific SEO tools that can support this process.
What is an SEO Competitor Analysis?
An SEO competitor analysis involves finding out the links, keywords, content and more of your online competitors so you can take advantage of what is working for them and improve your own SEO strategy.
This will stop you from blind-guessing which keywords you should target, which content to create, which links you can build by finding out what works for your competitors and build upon their success.
You can find out How to do a Competitor Analysis in detail on the Ricemedia blog.
Why Must You Research Your Competitors?
It’s important to monitor your competitors and what they’re doing to see how big a threat they are to the success of your business. All you are doing is collecting little bits of information about these companies, which you can use to inform your own strategy.
The only way a business can grow is by looking at what the competition is doing, emulating what they are doing well and finding gaps which you can exploit for your own gain. A competitor analysis will help you achieve that.
While you can quickly get some information by reading news articles and doing a quick Google search of your target keywords, there are SEO tools that can help you build up an in-depth competitor analysis.
What is the Best Tool For Competitor Analysis in SEO?
As a digital marketing agency, we have access to some of the best SEO tools on the market, allowing us to monitor clients websites in-depth and seek opportunities. Depending on the size of the business, not all marketing managers will have access to these tools, meaning you are missing out on vital competitor analysis data. By simply entering your competitor’s domain, you can learn a lot about them. Here are tools we have used to complete effective competitor analysis and how they can benefit your business.
Ahrefs
The site explorer in Ahrefs is an incredible tool that allows you to identify the top-ranking organic keywords of any website. Alongside this, you’ll also get an estimate of how much traffic your competitor is getting on those top ranking keywords:
Ahrefs makes it simple to find a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (rather than shares). With this information, you can see what products and/or messaging works best for a brand in your industry:
You can also assess which keywords drive the most organic traffic to a competitor site:
Ahrefs can provide a detailed report with a complete list of competitors based on the number of related keywords:
The data you find in Ahrefs is precise because it doesn’t use such metrics as domain size or the type of industry a domain belongs to. This provides a more accurate picture with which to build your SEO strategy. Data from big domains such as Quora, Google and Apple are excluded from results to give you a better and more accurate outlook of your sector.
If you want to identify gaps in your keyword strategy, Ahrefs has a Content Gap report that allows you to find the keywords your rivals have visibility for which you don’t:
SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most widely used SEO tools, featuring a suite of helpful reports that give site owners and marketing managers a comprehensive overview of a site’s online visibility. It also has excellent competitive analysis tools that allow you to find and track competitor backlinks and keep a tab on their ranking.
With a database of 131 countries, it can quickly identify organic competitors easily as we can see in the domain overview:
Domain Overview now allows you to compare competitor websites as well in the same screen, giving you the latest insights into each competitor:
You can get a more in-depth rankings report on your site against competitors in Organic Research:
The Keyword Gap Report produces a detailed report highlighting the keywords your competitors are ranking for, so you can target those same keywords. It will identify keyword overlaps and opportunities for you to target against each competitor.
A similar report can also be created for finding outreach opportunities in the Backlink Gap analysis:
If you really want to keep up with your competition, you can set up a Ranking Tracker to see how their SEO output is faring. This can inform your own decisions when selecting the right steps in your SEO strategy.
Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics is a great organic research tool that gives you a detailed overview of your organic visibility compared to your competitors:
As you can see on the right-hand side, you also get a graph which identifies which websites have increased and decreased in their visibility.
You can also compare shared keywords, traffic index and how many keywords they are visible for:
Clicking on each competitor will take you to a full organic report on each, giving you a complete overview of the keywords they’re targeting and performing well for which you can add to your SEO strategy.
If you want to know the top-ranking URLs for a competitor and what keywords they rank for, Searchmetrics can show you:
This will certainly support your SEO content marketing, as well as giving you keywords you can target in your sector. You can also access High Potential URLs which you can use to your advantage in your own content creation.
SEO tools can be expensive for some businesses and difficult to navigate for novices. Why not take the stress out of your competitor analysis? By working Ricemedia SEO agency, we can sift through these reports and work with you to create a winning strategy that will help you soar above the competition.
Get in touch with us today and let’s find out how we can help you.
