Competitive analysis is the backbone of a successful marketing strategy – even regarding SEO planning and optimization. You can hire the best content writers and designers, get the best ERP software to manage your team, and give them the highest salaries.
Still, without neat competitive research, you can’t succeed in this over-saturated industry of SEO optimization.
Of course, you want to appear as the best in the market, and you surely want to leave that impression on your potential clients. However, you have to know what exactly your competitors offer so you can find ways to separate yourself from them. For all these reasons, you need to perform SEO consultant competitive analysis before planning further steps. So, let’s see what three steps you should include in your competitor research.
4 Important Steps for a Successful SEO Competitive Analysis
- Find Your SEO Competitors
First things first – you can’t start a competitive analysis without directly knowing your competitors. Identifying your competitors is the first step in your research as you have to know who are you and others comparing your brand.
Though you may have dozens of competitors, you can’t track every one of them. Instead, stick with 5-6 competitors who seem the closest to your business. Additionally, you have to find both your physical and online competitors.
Physical competitors are those who are close to you locally. Online competitors are those who appear beneath or above yourself in search results. Find the one who seems to impact your business the most. You have to pay the most attention to this competitor.
- Steal Backlinks From Your Competitors
Okay, we know that stealing is a bad thing – but not when it comes to backlinks. Plus, it’s not really stealing if it is presented right to you, right? Competitive analysis can help you find which websites give external links(or backlinks) to your competitors that they don’t deliver to you.
This can be done with a free backlink checker that doesn’t require much knowledge and expertise. It allows you to deeply analyze the linking domains that give backlinks to your competitors. When you find these domains, you can plan a strategy to get links from them. You can ask them to perform a link insertion or find broken backlinks in their pages and ask them to replace them with your link.
- Analyze Their Site Structure and Design
You may already know how important is the user experience for Google algorithms. Especially the last significant updates of the algorithm were all concerning UX on some level.
So, you have to pay closer attention to the site structure of your competitors with better search engine results. Take a closer look at everything – from mobile experience to the speed of their loading time. See what aspects are managed better on their website than on yours. See what mistakes you can fix to achieve better optimization. If you learn from your and others’ mistakes, you can significantly improve your search rankings.
Final Thoughts
Competitive analysis is vital even for SEO optimization. You must have great knowledge about your competitions, or all your strategies will fall flat. Fortunately, we’ve gathered the three best steps to ease your task of identifying and analyzing your competition. Make sure to implement them in your strategy to see great results!
