What no one tells you about the importance of competitive analysis in SEO and how to do it?

Competition is healthy in every industry; preventing contemplacency, encouraging innovation, improving every aspect of your business and strategically planning your attack against your competitors. A way for your business to successfully compete with other competitors with search engine optimisation (SEO) is to perform a competitive analysis. 

Competitive SEO analysis is a formidable research strategy that is important within digital marketing, helping you to rank higher, get more traffic and earn more conversions. Utilising the information gathered with competitive analysis highlights the areas of strengths and weaknesses of your site and your competitors’ sites. Allowing you to capitalize on your competitors' weaknesses and improve your own. 

Competitive SEO analysis can be used as a guideline to improve search rankings, user experience and innovation. It can consist of:

• keyword gap analysis
•  keyword searches
• website traffic analysis
• audience insights
• minutes per visit
• cost per click and more

With competitive analysis you can step back and reflect on the overall market and where you stand in relation to your competitors.

There are various tools that will allow you to search the top result pages. Pay attention to keywords that all your competitors are utilising but you are not, analyse which pages rank for the most keywords. 

• Ask yourself, why are their pages ranking and not yours? Another piece of data that you should consider in your analysis is traffic statistics. Examining engagement metrics is a great way to see consumer interests and what they search for.‍

Assess the critical factors of your competitors. This competitive benchmarking, including your own site’s traffic from search, keywords, and backlinks will help you improve your site and take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses. 

• Examine content gaps, what is your competitor missing, could you fill this gap and is this the lucrative piece to improving site engagement?  To start your analysis focus on these 4 aspects of competitive SEO data you should always watch: site visibility, indexation, links and consumer attention/engagement. 
  

Whilst compiling this information:

• Never assume you know what the most popular pages are on your competitor’s website, research is a process and expect some surprises. Additionally, if you are struggling to determine weak areas of your site ask your employees and other stakeholders what they see. 
• Remember, the goal of your Competitive SEO analysis is to analyze your target competitors with your site based on the search terms they are targeting. This will help you glean a lot of information about who you're up against, including their current business initiatives, what drives traffic for them, or how they position their sites and product market. 
• It's necessary to understand the difference between your bigger and smaller competitors as it will present you data that illustrates their differences in success and engagement. You can then use this data to your advantage to improve optimisation for your online site. 
  

Completing an SEO competitive analysis is a strategic asset to increase your site’s engagement, making small improvements, keeping tabs on your competitors and monitoring your ranks. Eventually you will see an improvement and innovation in your company will excel.

You can utilise and analyse our competitive  reports. Each sample report will focus on various data such as: Advertising Insights, Competitor Social Media Tracker, SEO Overview, Self Site Audit, Keyword Analysis and Competitors Backlink report.

These reports show:

• positive or negative growth trends on your sites keywords, competitors, backlinks, CPC and traffic chart over a period of time
• engagements with content on site pages and links, discussing the user experience crawling through your site.
• As well as comparing these against your competitors' sites, utilise this data to identify and develop your site and capitalise from your competitors' content gaps.

‍