Competitive research is intrinsic for any business today when the competition only keeps increasing by the day.
But what exactly is SEO competitive research?
Let us find out below.
What is SEO competitor research?
Put simply, SEO competitive research or competitor research comprises comparison and analysis of SEO and its different components between competitor websites. So, it is all about researching your competitors’ content, and all the different elements of content, like keywords, and links used. SEO competitive research can also include analysis of SEO competition keywords, backlinks, and best content, and keyword gaps too. You can also visit for Increase Website DA.
SEO competitive analysis is one of the most effective means of how the most visited websites maintain high rankings and retain their competitive edge in the face of ever-increasing competition. And the best thing is that, here, you do not need to start from scratch. You can simply begin from the current scenario and put your findings to gain the advantage.
How to conduct SEO competitive research?
- The first step is to identify your competitors for SEO analysis.
Please note that your industry rivals may or may not be your actual SEO rivals! This might be more surprising, but your main SEO competitors might not even belong to your industry niche. And this will keep diversifying if your business operates in multiple niches.
To identify your SEO competitors, you must closely monitor the SERP scenario that you are about to enter. You also need to closely watch those competitors who occupy local packs and position zero. These two are the most coveted spots that you should target.
- Estimate domain strength, and focus on high ROI keywords.
The next step is to evaluate the overall domain strength of your SEO competitors based on niche keywords. For assessing the domain you have to check different parameters like:
- Domain authority of their website
- Indexing in search engines
- Domain age and country
- Backlink data
- Traffic volumes
- Catalog listings
- Social indicators
The trick here is to analyze these deeply. If you find any gaps, it gives you the opportunity to turn them to your advantage. Remember, keywords with great difficulty indicate a strong SEO game of your competitors. So they are the ones that are most tough to outrank here!
You have to conduct SEO analysis on those keywords that can bring you greater profits. If you have a high-profile service or product, you should focus your efforts on keywords related to this service or product line. Or you can create high-quality content that is unique to this specific product or service and relevant to your niche of customers. This will help you fetch more leads and generate higher conversion rates ultimately. You may want to monitor competitors with overall lower scores but impressive rankings for niche keywords.
- Search for new keyword prospects with TF-IDF analysis.
TF-IDF or term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis is used to measure a particular keyword frequency on a page and the expected frequency of that keyword on the page. This method is especially useful in enriching existing web content with appropriate keywords that your competitors are also using. So ideally, this analysis helps to correctly optimize web pages for search engines. It can even reveal keywords with low competition.
TF-IDF analysis will help you discover all the keywords you should target along with certain terms and phrases that are present in all the top-ranking pages. You can add these keywords, terms, and phrases to existing web pages wherever suitable, to boost the relevance of your pages in semantic searches.
- Analyze on-page content and on-page optimization.
Analyzing your competitors’ on-page content and optimization is an excellent way to reveal highly useful insights to improve your SEO. You will find out what kinds of content they publish, how they publish and also learn about their targeted keywords. For this, you need to focus on the headline strategies they follow (like keywords used in the title, length of title, title tags), and also metadata.
While analyzing their content, you also need to pay attention to details such as the type of content they create (videos or images), the relevance of topics, length of videos, or word count of articles and blog posts.
- Evaluate your competitors’ backlink profiles and website structure.
Discovering effective backlink strategies is one of the most vital parts of SEO competitor analysis. You should find out from where your rivals earn their backlinks and use the information to develop high-quality link building services for your website. Here, using an SEO tool will be worth your while.
Along with link profiles, it is absolutely essential to develop a robust site structure for delivering a high-class user experience (UX). Google focuses almost all of its ranking algorithms on UX and favors faster websites that offer better mobile-friendliness, and enriched search results. To make your website favorable for higher rankings, you must take care of the following:
- Optimize your sitemap for easier crawling by search engines
- Optimize the page speed especially for landing pages
- Building web pages focusing on the searcher’s intent
- Evaluate your competitors’ PageRank distribution
- Assess click depth
- Evaluate their use of social media
Every health SEO research strategy must undoubtedly include social media in today’s times. Investing in a solid social listening tool is the secret to finding out how your rivals are leveraging social media. You must find out all the social platforms where your rivals are present, their frequency of publishing content, how they engage with their followers, and what kind of content attracts maximum engagement. Such tools help you to better engage with your target audience on social platforms, increase traffic to your website, and understand user sentiments, and more.
Conclusion
Even after covering all these aspects, if you are unable to achieve the desired SEO rankings, try looking into how much your competitors spend on advertisements. Analyzing their promoted content, Google Ads campaigns, paid posts and banners, will reveal a wealth of information that you can also utilize to fine-tune your SEO performance.
