When you’re developing an SEO strategy for your company, it’s crucial to keep an eye on your competition. Before getting started with an effective SEO strategy, you need to be sure of what your competitors are doing to rank on search engines. So, in this article, we explain in detail how to conduct competitor analysis to ensure that you have the information you need to launch your own SEO strategy.
Why is competitor analysis important?
SEO competitor analysis enables you to analyse the links, keywords, content, and general scope of your competitors’ websites in order to include their best practices in your approach to search engine optimisation. You can ascertain what brands are doing well and what they need to improve on, which will help you create killer content that helps your rank on Google. You can compare it to the offline strategy of visiting your competitor’s stores or place of work when trying to outmanoeuvre them with the retail of products, for instance.
How to conduct effective competitor research
With the importance of competitor research in mind, here are some top tips for implementing effective competitor research before getting started with your SEO strategy:
Identify your competitors
Keeping your friends close but your enemies closer couldn’t be any more important as far as SEO is concerned. It’s so important to know who you’re competing with and what it is that they’re doing well. Google has all the information that you need to know about your competitors, so you can use the search engine to your advantage. Undertake a search and make a list of the sites that you’re competing with – this is an important place to begin.
Conduct keyword analysis
Competitive keyword research is so important because it helps you to understand the difficulty of competing against other companies and sites for specific words and phrases. As such, you need to identify keywords that are underserved, as opposed to terms that have already been comprehensively covered. When you’ve discovered key terms and phrases that aren’t too competitive, you can begin crafting your content to meet the relevant search queries.
Implement page analysis
Next, you need to learn which of your competitors’ pages rank the highest. You can do this by reading through their content and considering how well their keywords and phrases complement one another. Page analysis is a great way to identify keywords that your competitors haven’t fully maximised.
Analyse their backlinks
Google prioritises backlinks when considering the authority of a website, so you need to create a strong profile to reflect this. A good place to start is by looking at the backlinks that your competitors currently have. If you think similar backlinks could help your site, you can model your backlink strategy accordingly.
Create high-quality content
With all of the above information available to you, it’s time to start creating content. To outrank your competitors, your content needs to be original, engaging, and 100% unique. You need to offer a fresh perspective on a particular subject, and it helps to show your authority. If your content is below par, it’s really difficult to compete with established competitors, so you need to make sure that you’re able to compete for the keywords and phrases that command a lot of interest from search queries.
Recap
Often, companies overlook the value and importance of competitor analysis for other SEO strategies and tactics. But as explained, it’s a crucial foundation on which to build your own strategy, so you need to get it right. If you’re looking for help with your SEO strategy, reach out to Terrier and begin a conversation about how to take your brand to the next level online.