What is SEO Competitive Analysis?
SEO competitive analysis is the process of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your and your competitors’ SEO.
Much like a typical competitive analysis, you’re working to discover any gaps between you and your competitor. But rather than focusing on marketing strategy, you’ll focus on SEO strategy.
A competitor analysis can help you:
- Benchmark your current SEO performance
- Identify areas of improvement in your SEO strategy
- Reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses
- Discover your competitors’ winning strategies
Why SEO Competitive Analysis is Important
Running a competitive analysis allows you to review your overall market, competitors, and how the current search landscape works for important keywords.
SEO competitor analysis works as a powerful research strategy in helping you to rank higher, get more traffic, and earn more conversions. Its magic happens by uncovering SEO opportunities you may not have seen otherwise.
Competitor analysis helps successfully answer questions like:
- Who are my actual SEO competitors?
- What keywords should I target?
- What topics should I cover?
- Where can I find links?
- What do I need to beat the competition?
There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO, but the basic principle works like this: analyze what’s working for your competition (keywords, content, links, etc.) and leverage this intelligence to improve your own SEO efforts.
Consider this your starter guide. Here’s what we’ll cover:
For this keyword gap analysis, we’ll use Moz’s Keyword Explorer
Competitive keyword analysis – sometimes called keyword gap analysis – is a process of identifying valuable keywords that your competitors rank highly for, which you don’t.
A few important points to consider:
- The keywords should be valuable (i.e. high-volume, related to your business, or likely to convert)
- The keywords should be ones you could rank for, or could rank for better
- Comparing two or more competitors often gives you a richer analysis
Keywords are one way to develop content ideas. Another is to look at your competitors’ top-performing content.
In this case, we’re interested in which content earned our competitors the most links. Since links are necessary for ranking — indeed, they’re one of the biggest ranking factors — it makes sense to focus on topics that others like to link to.
This is one of the oldest, most reliable methods of content creation in SEO. It works like this:
- Discover your competitor’s top content
- Create your own content that significantly improves upon it in one or more ways
- Promote your content to a similar group of people
The key is to not simply recreate your competitor’s content (that would have little chance of success) but to significantly improve upon it. You could add additional features, more data, stunning visuals — anything to make it more appealing or useful.
Similar to our process with keywords, a link gap analysis works to identify links your competitors have earned that you might also obtain.
Links are important for ranking. In fact, it’s darn difficult to rank without links. Conversely, good links are difficult to earn. So we use intelligence and data to determine where we might find good links that are somewhat easier to obtain. But where are these places?
sites that have already linked to your competitors, but haven’t linked to you.
For this analysis, we’re going to use Link Explorer’s Link Intersect tool. This report will show you domains and URLs that link to your competitors, but not to you.
- Start by entering your domain in the first field
- Enter your competitors below. For best results, two competitors is a good number, but you can enter up to five
- Sort and filter the results below
Typically, it’s not enough to understand the right keywords to target. If you want to win traffic, you need to understand search intent for your keyword.
This means getting inside the mind of the searcher to understand what they are looking for. This sounds impossible, but fortunately, Google has done 99% of the work for you. Simply start by Googling the keyword you want to target.
