How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis

You might be doing everything correct to make one website successful – choosing right keywords, making proper design, putting new content, and so on. But still you are finding difficult to get your site top rank. This is probably because your competitors are way ahead of you in their job. Like any other business, it is important to keep an eye over the competitors in the world of SEOs.

Define Your Competitors

In SEO competitor analysis, first you have to know your competitors. In some cases, it is easier to identify the competitor – any website promoting the same product or service like your website is the competitor. But everything is not always so straightforward.

Your competitors could be the websites having high page ranks with the major keywords you use, sites of your niche etc. Keyword analysis is an important tool for SEO competitor analysis.

For keyword analysis, you can take help of Google adwords or Soovle. Soovle is a website that brings up result of “Suggest” function of multiple search engines.

In Google adwords, use the keyword tool, but ensure the “match type” criteria on the left hand side to be “exact”. Enter your keywords and write down the “Global Monthly searches” for each result. It will indicate the popularity of your keyword. But your main aim is to find the number of pages optimized for those keywords. For each keyword, do a Google search using the allintitle tag. For example – type allintitle: Christmas cookies. The result will show pages in which the phrase is used in the title.

Analysis of the Competitors’ Website

Once the competitors are identified, the next phase of SEO competitor analysis is the study of the website. You have to closely analyse several factors like –

• Design
• Content
• Link Distribution
• Use of keywords
• Anchor text and metatags
• Indexed pages
• Traffic in every page
• Marketing strategy and presence in social media

Always keep updated yourself about the modification of keywords, bakclinks, flow of traffic, advertisements in your competitor’s website. Also from SEO competitor analysis perspective, it is important to know the latest promotion of the competitor brand in social media.

Nowadays, several tools are available to do the work for you. Here is a list of some tools –

• HTTrack – Use this site to host your competitor’s site locally on your machine and use it as reference. For comparison of two old copies, use the tool quickdff.
• Quantcast – It is used to view historic rankings data to see how you and your competitor are doing. Other tools to serve this purpose are Searchmetrics, Compete, SEMRush, Alexa.
• Changedetetion.com, TalkWalker Alerts or webkit2png – These tools allow in keeping vigil over the keywords of the competitor’s website.
• Newsle, Social Mention, IceRocket –These tools enable one to know about the presence of the competing brand in different social media.
• OpenSiteExplore Compare Pages is used to compare backlinks and domains. LinkAlert is another tool worth mentioning.
• Zoomrank, Authority Labs do ranking analysis of websites.

SEO competitor analysis is a never ending activity which makes you aware of the latest developments of your competitor and helps to improvise your search engine optimization process.