Even though your website might be ranked number one for a particular keyword today, the status will not last forever. As other websites, most competitors, learn how to optimize their content, they will outrank yours. Businesses should conduct ongoing SEO competitive analysis as part of their ongoing SEO strategy.
Most businesses assume their SEO efforts have been successful by analyzing their competitors. This is not true. To stay ahead of the competition, there is always something that can be improved. With data-driven marketing strategies like SEO keyword competition analysis, you can learn what tactics your competitors are using and use this information in your SEO campaign.
How Does Data-Driven Marketing Work?
The term “data-driven marketing” refers to digital marketing campaigns that utilize data gathered from research to make decisions. There are usually a lot of details about a business’s target audience or existing customers in this kind of information.
SEO falls under the category of data-driven marketing. Data-driven marketing also includes more specific SEO practices like keyword competition analysis and competitor analysis.
An important goal of data-driven marketing is to ensure that any marketing campaign addresses a customer’s need or behavior. Various types of information are collected about a business, including online reviews, website traffic, and conversion rates.
SEO Competitor Analysis: What Is It?
To conduct an SEO competitor analysis or SEO competitive analysis, it is necessary to conduct thorough research of the content, as well as other elements of the content, including the links and keywords that a competitor has used in their content. A comparison of SEO between two websites in a similar industry or business can be defined simply as a comparison of two competing websites.
SEO competitor analysis includes:
- Keyword competition analysis for SEO
- Analyzing competitor backlinks
- Analyzing the keyword gap
- Analyzing the most popular content
By using SEO competitive analysis, you can save time and money, since you don’t need to start from scratch. Using what your competitors are doing, you can improve your SEO efforts.
For a more efficient process, most marketers use an SEO competitor analysis tool that streamlines the process and collects a large amount of data without too much effort. Additionally, these tools can be used to generate competitor analysis SEO reports. Competitor analysis tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are examples of SEO competitor analysis tools.
To remain competitive in their industries, marketers learn how to conduct competitor analysis SEO.
Competitive Analysis: How To Do It
After answering the question, what is SEO competitor analysis? Here is a brief explanation of how to do a competitive analysis in a few basic steps. The following steps are the most commonly followed, and you can begin implementing them immediately.
Step 1: Analyze Your True Competitors
To learn how to do competitor analysis SEO, you must first recognize the competition. When it comes to your keywords, Moz recommends learning who your real competitors are since not all websites that rank higher than yours are your competitors.
Your SEO analysis must be thorough and accurate to discover your true SEO competition. The analysis involves comparing SEO rankings for multiple keywords and looking for the top 10 or 20 websites that show up consistently for all of them. To do this, you can use a free SEO analytics tool such as Ubersuggest and type in a keyword. A list of links and domains that rank for the keyword is available in the Content Ideas section.
As Ubersuggest is a free tool, the number of keywords and top-ranking domains that can be analyzed can be limited. If you want to dive deeper into SEO comparison data and get accurate results, you might need a paid SEO tool like Ahrefs. Ahrefs competitor analysis tool has countless features to help you perform competitor analysis more easily and more quickly.
Step 2: Analyze The Page
As part of competitive analysis, the next step is to examine a competitor’s website and its top-performing pages. Which keywords are used on these pages and how are they used in the content?
This process is known as keyword gap analysis. As part of your competitor SEO analysis, you identify keywords on a competitor’s site that your website does not rank for. Ahrefs’ competitor analysis tool includes a feature called Content Gap, which identifies keywords that rank for the specific domains you specify.
Once you uncover relevant keywords that are relevant to your business, you can create a page dedicated to ranking these keywords. As a result, you can direct customers to your site instead of your competitors.
2a: Analyze competitor backlinks
It is also important to check a site’s backlink statistics when doing competitor analysis. In a competitor backlink analysis, you examine which websites link to their content and how they are affecting their domain authority and rank. With this data-driven technique, you can gain valuable insight and replicate their link-building strategy.
Here are some qualities to look for in the backlinks of your competitors:
- The number of backlinks
- Linking websites’ domain authority
- The relevance of the linked content
By understanding what your competitors are doing to acquire backlinks, you will be able to create a similar strategy and implement it.
Step 3: Identify Keywords With High Return On Investment
Top competitive keywords can rank dozens of popular businesses. Does that mean you have to compete as well? It’s not necessary. The fact is that large companies have the budget to make sure they are always in the top ten when it comes to keywords.
Neil Patel recommends analyzing your competitor’s SEO efforts on keywords that will increase your revenue or profit. As an example, if the pet shop sells only $2 dog keychains, it wouldn’t make any sense to rank for that keyword.
Concentrate on keywords that will bring you more leads for your high-profile product or service. Consider creating unique content for your customer base that your competitors haven’t considered.
A successful competitor analysis SEO campaign depends mainly on finding a gap or disconnect between the competition and the audience, and then filling it in. If your competitors have not created a highly searched article for a low-competition keyword, you can create one that is simple, helpful, and low-competition.
Step 4: Develop and Implement a Content Strategy
Following data collection, you will create a competitor analysis report based on this information. Your SEO content strategy can be built based on the report. Use an Ahrefs tool or a spreadsheet to make a keyword list or content ideas list to start making a content plan.
A quick SEO competitor analysis report can be created by exporting selected keywords and content ideas into a spreadsheet using Ahrefs’ competitor analysis tool.
Step 5: Monitor Your Progress
When you publish new content or re-optimize old ones, it’s important to track their performance. To determine whether your competitive analysis strategy is working, regular keyword audits should be conducted and SEO reports generated for competitor analysis.
You can use any free SEO tool to do this, but you need to type the target keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Step 6: Use a Template To Analyze SEO Competitors
An effective competitor analysis SEO can be implemented in a variety of ways. For a more detailed analysis of your competitors, you can use a free SEO competitor analysis template. By having a ready document on hand, you can save time and be more organized when it comes to your SEO competitive analysis project. It is also easier and faster to generate an SEO competitor analysis report when you use a template.
It takes time and resources to conduct a thorough competitor analysis, but the results are well worth the effort. An SEO agency specializing in SEO competitor analysis, franchise SEO, or local SEO can handle the work for you if you prefer to outsource. SEO competitor analysis is a specialty of Mac J Web, a reputable SEO company in Las Vegas with years of experience.
Final Thoughts
Without competitor data, what does data-driven marketing mean? Many business owners are overwhelmed with unfamiliar concepts and they find the process daunting and complex, making it impossible to learn how to perform SEO competitive analysis.
Some people may lack the time to learn how to create competitor analysis SEO reports using the software. In other words, you can simply improve upon what your competitors are doing.
The challenge is that few business owners have the resources or people to implement competitive analysis SEO. In this situation, you may benefit from hiring a digital marketing company like Mac J Web. We at Mac J Web provide premium SEO management services that include competitor analysis SEO services; contact us today to get started on developing your data-driven marketing strategy.