Have you invested in availing SEO services, but not getting the desired result? Are you wondering what would be the right solution, then maybe you should be looking at your competitor’s website. In a competitive world like today, having the lion’s share in any business niche is the primary objective for any company owner. That’s why you need to do an SEO competitive analysis.
This is done to find out where your competitor is taking the lead and what is that something that you are missing. Here we will be exploring seven ways to do an SEO competitive analysis.
Seven steps to do SEO competitive analysis:
1. Keyword search- Keywords play a key role in enhancing the website ranking; in fact, it is the most important aspect for any business. You need to check whether the keywords that you are using are the popular ones, and if not, you need to know what are the keywords that you are missing on. A good SEO competitive analysis will first study the competitor’s website, and based on it; they will suggest corrective measures. Some of the popular links that will help you in this process are Open Site Explorer, Monitor Backlinks, SpyFu, etc. While searching for this, you also need to check the keyword density.
2. Meta description analysis- Once you get to know who is your competitor, the next step is to check their meta descriptions. Most of the customer’s while searching for any information product or services often look at the metadata. After thoroughly studying their metadata, you can compare them with yours and find out the missing area. An important aspect that you need to consider here is that the meta description must have keywords that you had searched in the first step.
3. Assess the difficulty of the keyword- The next step is to analyze the strength of your competitors. While you are checking the domain strength, you need to assess the following:
- Domain country
- Domain authority
- Search engine indexing
- Traffic volumes
- Social performance
- Alexa ranking
- Backlink data
Once you have thoroughly studied the area mentioned above, you would be easily able to analyze what is missing from your portal.
4. Look for new keywords- If you have been sticking around with good keyword choices and still not getting the desired result, then probably you need to start looking for new keywords. You may turn to tools that will help you in keyword analysis. For example, TF-IDF analysis will help you find the top ranking pages for your keywords that have the same terms and phrases. If you wish to focus on topic-relevant terms, then you can add these phrases and keywords to your current content, or you can create new content which focusses on them.
5. Content analysis- We all know that content is the king, and pages have more content rank better than the ones who don’t have any content. To make your website rich in content, you need to take into account the following:
- Word count- Contents with long-form SEO perform well in Google. You can use the keyword density tool to check your competitor’s website and content.
- Uniqueness- The next parameter that will work in your favor is the uniqueness of content. Adding gibberish content to the portal won’t be helpful; you need to focus on creating unique and engaging content.
- Media- Infographics is yet another parameter that you need to take into account. Adding more images and videos makes the content more engaging and improves user experience.
- Outbound links- It enhances the credibility of your content.
6. Analysis of on-page and on-site optimization- Analysing these aspects of your will let you know how your website would be as good as or even better than your competitor’s website. While doing this, you need to take into account the following aspects:
- Metadata
- Headline strategies like keywords in the title, title length, etc.
- Unfold their internal linking strategies.
In addition to this, you need to keep track of the following :
- Type of content
- Video length
- Infographics
- Pictures
7. Examining site structure and UX- You must know that Google pays special attention the way your website is structured. For it, good user experience is a must. In recent years, it has been seen that all the recent changes have been focused on UX is faster loading of pages, better mobile, and good search results. If you have yet not focused on this, then you need to work on optimizing your sitemap, make sure that your website is mobile friendly and offer cross-browser compatibility. Also, you also need to work on creating faster loading pages. Pages which take time to load will not be helpful for you.
Bonus Tip- Analyze the social media strategies-Social media platforms have become integral for most of the websites; it not only enhances brand visibility but at the same time help in garnering attention and traffic to your portal.
Conclusion- SEO will only work for your website if you have been using it effectively and smartly. The points mentioned above let you do the comparative analysis and understand how you can make your website rank better and higher than your competitor’s website.
