Any marketing strategy’s fundamental objective is to persuade potential customers that your service is the greatest option available for their needs. To provide your clients with a superior offer, you must be conscious of what your competitors are providing.
The only way to accomplish this accurately, efficiently, and with long-term outcomes is through competition analysis, which allows you to look at what your competitors are doing.
The best practices in this handbook can be utilized to conduct an SEO analysis.
First, find who your competitors are
You may need to compete in SERPs with several different SEO rivals who operate outside of your niche, so you have to find them.
If you are a dentist in Sydney, and you are trying to rank for keywords “the best dentist in Sydney”, you will certainly have to compete with other Sydney dentists. However, if you want to write a blog with useful law advice and subjects, you will not only compete with other lawyers, but with other bloggers who write similar content.
Just remember that the websites that appear on the first search page for the terms you’re targeting are your top SEO rivals. The niche you work in is not so relevant for this, although it is important generally.
Make sure to have different lists for different competitors in case you provide services from different niches. This way you will always have concise information.
Analyze keywords and some specific factors
You should analyze the rankings of your competitors and their strength on the google search engine. You don’t have to focus on outsmarting the competition based on just keywords. This is where some more specific factors come into the equation.
- Analyze the domain authority, in other words, the potential of a website to rank on SERP
- Analyze the search engine indexing process
- Analyze backlink data
- Analyze traffic volumes
Some competitors will have strong SEO and it will be very difficult to beat them. This is why you should first focus on weaker opponents and gain some leverage before trying to take down some more serious opponents.
Always investigate potential keywords
If you don’t know about TF-IDF analysis, you should get familiarized with this name because it can improve your keyword usage. So there is a calculation on how often you should use a keyword on the page and that number should be multiplied by how often that keyword should be used. This is why many websites have similar phrases that repeat.
If you miss to include keywords that your opponents are using, you might not rank that well. Make sure you include them in your existing content or make a new one to boost the rankings.
Engage in backlinking
One of the most important parts of competitive SEO research is figuring out where your rivals are getting their hyperlinks from and using that information to build quality connections for your website.
As a great way to find new link chances for your website, you could examine the link portfolios of your competitors. In this manner, you may remain competitive.
Again, a strong SEO tool is needed for this step because it is practically impossible to finish it manually, due to the volume of the work and its complexity. Furthermore, you should look for SEO Sydney professionals to help you out with these more complex tasks.
Analyze your competitor’s social media usage
This doesn’t mean you should follow their every step and every tweet, but rather you should use a good social media tool. A good social listening tool does way more than just count tweets.
Monitoring social media mentions without links and engaging with your customers at the same time can help you enhance website traffic.
- To accomplish this right, monitor brand mentions on all social media platforms.
- Keep track of consumer input as well to get relevant data.
- Keep track of the platforms your competitors are using, and consider how you may improve.
- See how often they produce new material.
- See whatever kind of material is most effective for them
Pay attention to their website structure
Google is always focusing on enhancing user experience, which is why website structure is crucial. Over the past several years, the majority of technical modifications have been concentrated on things like quicker websites, better search results, and better mobile experiences. Everything is meant to be user-friendly. Therefore, it is clear that if your site is technically worse than those of your rivals, sluggish to load, unfriendly to mobile devices, or difficult to browse, you must immediately fix these issues if you want to attract more clients.
How can you improve it? Here are some ideas:
- Improve your sitemap’s visibility to Google crawlers.
- Improve picture loading speed because it might take longer for graphics to load than for simple text.
- Examine how many clicks are required to go from the homepage to the desired page (this is called click depth)
- Examine orphan pages, those that don’t have links connecting to them.
If your rivals continue to rank highly while not adhering to all of these optimization principles, there is an opportunity to ascertain the reason why and put it into practice.
Compare the costs of the paid ads
If you’ve followed all of the recommendations below to enhance your website but you’re still not outranking your rivals on search engine results pages, your rivals are probably investing more than you are and running paid advertising campaigns to drive visitors and sales. If you can replicate their actions, you could rethink your budget and plan.
For the time being, you can keep an eye on their Google Adwords advertising, promoted content, paid advertisements, status updates, and other funded campaigns to at least get a sense of how much money others in your market segment are choosing to spend on advertising and to gather useful information for some potential future campaigns.
Conclusion
With these helpful hints for doing a competitive analysis, all that’s needed to be done is to persevere and be consistent. As time passes, keep making incremental advancements and keep an eye on your rating. Your perseverance should eventually pay off, and you’ll start to raise your SERP ranks and establish yourself as a subject-matter authority.