5 Vital Elements of an Intelligent SEO Competitive Analysis
Why does your competitor’s website rank higher than your site in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)? What are they doing that you’re not? Are you missing out something? For starters, following the basics of SEO best practices blindly is not enough to rank your website highly in SERPs.
You must delve deeper and unearth what it really takes to carry out a successful SEO campaign that will improve your site’s ranking. To get you started, here are vital elements of an intelligent SEO competitive analysis.
Identify Your Primary Competitors
Start by identifying your top competitors. You may not always know who your competitors are in regards to SEO because they may differ from one search engine to the other. For this, use KeywordSpy, one of the best SEO tools that enables you to identify your competitors by search engines.
Just type a target keyword phrase into the search box, go to the radio buttons for Keywords, and click the Search button. Once the data is populated, click on the Organic Competitors tab. Using KeywordSpy will not only help you identify your top competitors but also how competition varies around different keywords.
Analyze Backlinks of Competing Sites
Analyzing the competitor’s backlinks is one of the most important on-site SEO strategies to help improve your site’s ranking. The quality of backlinks is imperative as far as SEO goes. Quality links come from a website with a high domain authority, and with the same subject as yours. Here’s what analyzing your competitor’s backlinks will help you achieve.
- It will enable you to discover link building opportunities
- You will know sites with high domain authority
- You will identify partners for guest blogging and other cross-marketing initiatives
- You will know the image your competitor has
- You will discover forums and discussions about your niche
Some of our favority backlink anaylsis tools include Majestic and Ahrefs.
Evaultate Quality of Content
There are many ways to analyze the quality of content on your competitor’s website including keyword density, language, and grammar, images, heading and video. You may also look at how often the site is updated and the presence of promotional offers. Be sure to check the number of ads on display and make a comparison between text-to-HTML ratios of the content.
Look at the content’s layout and Meta titles as well as Meta descriptions throughout the site. Is the content unique on every page? How are the keywords placed? How has the site used brand names?
Assess Social Media Clout
Since the advent of Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, ranking of websites in SERPs has changed significantly. In essence, social media signal contributes substantially to a site rankings. As a result, some of the best SEO companies place social media has a primary component to their services.
Check which social media platforms your competitor is visible on, the level of engagement, the number of followers/likes and how often the site interacts with its fans. While you’re at it, check the average number of times the members mention the site’s name on social media.
Determine Domain Authority Metrics
How long a website has been in existence as well as its backlinks has the greatest affect on ranking. Most authority sites have been around for a while and have gained trust, links, and traffic over the years, helping to grow their domain authority.
While the domain authority and age of your competitors may not be necessarily relevant, it may help you identify possible spammers who are likely to drop domains quickly. It can also help you distinguish illegitimate and legitimate sites. In a nutshell, finding how long your competitors have been in existence is imperative particularly if you’re serious about your SEO efforts.
