SEO Competitive Analysis
To improve the rankings and the overall online performance of your own website it’s very important to research and analyze the online presence of your top competitors. By doing so you will be able to see what is helping them to rank higher and be more popular and have a stronger brand presence than you do and eventually lead to ranking gains for your site.
The first and probably the simplest thing you can do is to visit their website and do “on-site” SEO research. Look at the content, see the keywords they are using, check out the internal pages, internal links, the anchor text they are using. It will give you an idea about their strategy.
Social media plays a big role in brands’ and companies’ internet presence, it’s essential to be active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Posts, tweets, and pictures that grab user’s attention bring more likes, shares, retweets, and that eventually make your brand and website more popular and brings more traffic. Google’s reading of strong social signals helps generate a clearer understanding of the meaning behind the content, better indexing of the content, an assessment of the trust of the content based on social interaction, and an assessment of authority of the content based on social interaction.
There are 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Backlinks and link distribution are some of the strongest factors. With the help of SEO tools such as open site explorers from MOZ, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, SEMRush you can see every single link that your competitor is getting. You can dive deep into their link distribution, to see who they are getting links from. Knowing that information you can reach out to the same people, bloggers, websites, and directories and ask for backlinks to your website.
These and many other SEO tools will make your life much easier since they are automating steps that would take you days in some cases to research by hand. You can use those tools to not only find the links your competitors are getting, but also to see your competitor’s main keywords and the top keywords they are ranking for. For instance, you will be able to see social media stats, external links, link distribution, domain and page authority, number of visits, and more.
By using this strategy you will have a better idea about your main competitors’ effectiveness, and these few and relatively simple steps will hopefully drive your business forward by helping you gain search engine rankings and therefore traffic and sales.