How To Do An SEO Competitor Analysis | Small Business Tips

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Whether you are a small business just starting out, or a well established successful business –

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 SEO competitor analysis is essential. Analyzing your competitors can provide you with an extremely valuable collection of information that you can use to your advantage. SEO competitor analysis can give you information about every single aspect of your competitors which you can use to help your business.

In short simple terms, here is what SEO competitor analysis can do for you:

  • Learn works and what doesn’t in your specific niche
  • Find your competitors’ weaknesses and use them to your advantage
  • Identify your competitor’s strengths and copy their strategy
  • Learn what SEO tasks you need to prioritize
  • Find out how hard it will be to outperform competitors for specific keywords

There are many different strategies and techniques that professional SEOs use for competitor analysis. However, in this article, we will show you a simple yet effective SEO competitor analysis process that you can use.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

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Identify Your Competitors

 

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Competitors can be defined as other websites in the same niche that are ranking for the same keywords you want to rank for.

First things first – identify who your main competitors are. You can do this by searching google for the same keywords you are aiming to rank for. I would advise trying out Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to help with keyword analysis before searching for competitors. Sometimes the keywords you think might do well, have little to no search volume. Keyword tools can help identify the best keywords to use in your SEO strategy.

Make a list of roughly 5 of your top SEO competitors. The more competitors you analyze, the more useful data and information you will get.

You should only identify SEO competitors. You might have a competitor company near you in real life which takes a lot of your business, however, if they do not have a website or have bad SEO, they will be useless for this. Because of this, you only need to identify competitors for SEO, not competitors in general.

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Analyze Competitor Backlinks

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Backlinks and link popularity are a huge part of SEO in 2019 and all the previous years. This is why it is very important we understand our competitors’ link building efforts. A great tool to do this is Ahrefs Site Explorer. This tool will show you the link building efforts over a specific time-frame and give you a rough ballpark figure of what to aim for with your own link building strategy.

Another great tool to use for competitor backlink analysis is Free Backlink Checker by SEO Review Tools. As the name suggests, it is a free tool. It is also an extremely helpful tool for those who do not want to spend money on Ahrefs. Although it is not as in-depth as Ahrefs, it still provides you a ton of useful information that you can use to develop into an SEO plan.

By identifying and analyzing all of your competitor’s backlinks, you are able to make a start on planning your own long term link building strategy. Try and develop a relationship with the sites and people who are linking to your competitors and you might be able to get a very valuable backlink for your site. Good sites to build relationships with our high ranking blogs in related niches.

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Analyze Competitors’ Organic Keywords

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The next step is finding out what keywords are driving the most traffic to your competitor’s site. For this step, we can use the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool again.

To do this you need to enter competitors’ domain on Ahrefs Site Explorer then head to Organic Search, and then to Organic Keywords.

This page will display all the organic keywords for your competitor, along with all the statistics that you may want to know. Amount of traffic for each keyword, keyword rankings for each country, etc. This is where you can get some ideas about which keywords you should target.

You might find that certain keywords will be very hard to rank for, and in this case, it can be better to target long-tail keywords instead. Then over time as your SEO improves, you can start targeting harder to compete with keywords.

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Look At Competitors’ Most Popular Content

Keyword research is still an essential part of SEO these days, however Googles understanding of search intent is even better. And because of this, it is very common for a single page to rank for hundreds and even thousands of long-tail keywords.

By identifying your competitors’ most popular pages and content, you can figure out which of their articles:

  • Rank for plenty of keywords
  • Pull in loads of traffic

Then what you need to do is create an SEO friendly article about the same topics and gain lots of long-tail keyword traffic.

To identify your competitor’s most popular content, we are going to be using Ahrefs Site Explorer again. It really is an amazing tool!

We will only be aiming to look for the most popular blog posts so remember to not include the whole domain, but rather the blog subfolder of the domain.

Head over to the Site Explorer page on Ahrefs and enter your competitor’s blog domain (Example: marquemediallc.com/blog/). Then click on select “prefix” mode and click on Top Pages. It will now display the most popular pages of your competitor.

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Spy On Competitors’ PPC keywords

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Looking into your competitors’ PPC activity can provide you with a ton of useful information. If they are paying for traffic on certain keywords, then it is most likely a profitable keyword which you should also target.

To spy on your competitor’s PPC keywords, you can use Ahrefs Site Explorer. Enter your competitor’s domain and click on Paid Search, and then PPC Keywords. This will display a page with all the important information regarding the PPC keywords that your competitor is targeting. With this data, you are able to find low-volume but high-converting keywords that you may have missed when you did your keyword research.

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Analyze Competitor PPC Ads

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You can learn so much from analyzing your competitor’s PPC ads. Why go to all the effort of spending time and money testing your ad campaigns when you can look at what your competitors are doing and replicate their technique and strategy? To do this we will be using Ahrefs Site Explorer again and on the PPC Keywords page, just hover over the yellow “ad” icon on each keyword to preview their ad. Take note of the wording they use and make a similar ad.

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Conclusion & More Advice

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What we discussed in this article are just the rough guidelines you should use when conducting an SEO competitor analysis. More advanced competitor analysis strategies involve these main steps but go into much further detail. Keep an eye out for our follow up article which explains in further detail all the steps we mentioned in this article today.

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