You might want to learn how to do competitive analysis in SEO to understand where your website stands in comparison to others targeting similar keywords and audiences. Studying what works for your rivals can reveal gaps, opportunities, and winning tactics that can elevate your website performance. This guide offers a clear and structured process for identifying, analyzing, and learning from your digital competitors.
What is Competitive Analysis in SEO?
It is the process of evaluating your website’s performance by comparing it with others in your industry. It involves assessing their content, keywords, backlinks, technical performance, and overall presence on search engines. The aim is to uncover what they are doing right, where they fall short, and how your website can improve by leveraging those insights.
This kind of analysis doesn’t focus on guesswork. It uses real data to track and study competitors’ strengths and weaknesses so you can refine your own website optimization strategy accordingly.
Why is Competitive Analysis Important for SEO Campaign?
When running a website ranking campaign, understanding the competition is crucial. Here’s why competitive analysis is important:
1. Highlights Your Strengths
You may already be doing some things better than your competitors. A focused review can reveal which areas you outperform them in, allowing you to reinforce and expand on those strengths for long-term advantage.
2. Reveals Missed Opportunities
No optimization strategy covers everything. By studying what your competitors are doing, you’ll often find areas they’ve explored that you haven’t yet. These gaps could be specific keywords, content formats, or technical elements that are driving their results.
3. Improves Audience Understanding
By seeing how others structure their messaging and user experience, you can gain ideas on how to better engage your audience. Adopting new formats or improving messaging clarity based on what’s working elsewhere can help boost retention and relevance.
How to Do SEO Competitive Analysis?
Take a look at the steps to conduct competitor analysis for improving search performance.
1. Identify Competitors
To begin learning how to do competitive analysis in SEO, you need to identify your key competitors. Without knowing who they are, meaningful comparison isn’t possible.
Most businesses have many competitors, but analyzing all of them isn’t efficient. Focus on four to six that closely relate to your niche or location.
Include both physical competitors near your business and online ones that appear above or below you in search results. Choose those that directly influence your visibility to make your analysis more effective.
2. Select Pages for Comparison
Once you identify your competitors, the next step is to compare your website with theirs. This helps you understand where you stand and what improvements you can make.
To do this effectively, select pages from their site that match your own. Common examples include:
- Home page
- Product or service pages
- Category or browse pages
- Informational or blog pages
Choose pages that are most similar to yours. This ensures a fair comparison and helps you spot key differences in content, layout, or structure that might affect performance.
3. Conduct Keyword Gap Analysis
After selecting your competitors and the pages to compare, the next step is to analyze their keywords. This helps you understand what terms they rank for that you might be missing.
A keyword gap analysis shows the overlap and gaps between your keywords and those of your competitors. Tools like Ahrefs can help you identify high-value keywords they use that are not yet part of your content.
This gives you the chance to target untapped keywords, improve your visibility, and attract new traffic. By creating better content around these terms, you increase the chances of outranking them and gaining more qualified leads.
4. Analyze Content
Content strongly influences how well a website ranks, so reviewing what your competitors publish is essential.
Start by checking the types of content they produce. Do they publish blogs, guides, or case studies? Is their content short or in-depth? Take note of how well their content aligns with the target keywords and whether it provides real value or just surface-level information.
Look at the variety of topics they cover. If their content is repetitive, you can use that as a chance to introduce fresh ideas on your site. Also, see whether they include visuals like images or videos. If not, adding multimedia to your pages can help make your content more engaging.
Evaluating your competitors’ content helps you create stronger, more relevant material that performs better in search results.
5. Check Out Their Web Design
Your website’s design greatly influences how people view your business. It also affects your site’s visibility in search engines. Poor design can lead to a high bounce rate, which may lower your rankings over time.
When you perform an SEO competitor analysis, pay close attention to your competitor’s web design. Look at how their site is structured and whether it’s visually appealing and easy to navigate. A user-friendly layout can keep visitors engaged longer.
Notice details like how their navigation works or where they place calls to action (CTAs). These elements can offer useful ideas to enhance your own site’s design. Also, check whether their website uses responsive design.
A responsive layout ensures a good user experience across all devices. If your competitors lack this feature, it’s a chance for your business to stand out by offering a smoother and more accessible experience.
6. Analyze User Experience (UX)
User experience affects how long visitors stay on your site and how they interact with your content. It includes how easy the site is to use, how attractive it looks, and whether the content is useful.
When you perform an SEO competitor analysis, go beyond the design alone. Explore how your competitors structure the overall experience. Check if their calls to action (CTAs), contact page, navigation, and visual elements help users find information quickly and easily.
Ask whether these features make the site easier to explore. If some parts of their experience are confusing or lacking, you can improve those areas on your own site.
Offering a smoother, more helpful user experience than your competitors can help your site attract and retain more visitors.
7. Analyze their Google Business Profile listing
Google Business Profile is essential for local visibility. When nearby users search for businesses, these listings appear in the results. To perform an SEO competitor analysis, compare your listing with your competitors’.
Check if they’ve completed their profile. If not, it gives you an advantage. A complete listing with accurate contact info, business hours, and other details builds trust with potential customers.
Also look at extras like photos, posts, or service links. If their listing lacks these, it’s an opportunity for your business to stand out. If they’ve added useful content, make sure yours offers the same or better to stay competitive.
8. Look for Opportunities to Outrank Your Competition
After you perform an SEO competitor analysis, the final step is identifying where you can gain an edge. The goal is to make your business more appealing than the alternatives, so users are more likely to visit your pages.
Review the gaps or weaknesses in your competitors’ websites. Can you create more helpful content? Improve navigation? Add useful features they’re missing?
Once you spot those opportunities, begin applying them to your site. These enhancements can give your business the boost it needs to attract more leads and rank higher in search results.
SEO Tools for Competitor Analysis
Here are five reliable tools that can help you gain insights and improve your approach:
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs helps you discover your competitors’ top-performing pages, backlink profiles, and keyword rankings. Its keyword gap feature is ideal for identifying opportunities to target terms your competitors rank for but you don’t.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush offers in-depth domain and keyword comparisons, traffic analysis, and backlink audits. It allows you to uncover what drives traffic to competitor sites and find areas where your own SEO can improve.
3. Moz Pro
Moz Pro provides tools for tracking keyword rankings, site visibility, and link analysis. Use it to evaluate competitor domain authority, on-page elements, and to uncover content gaps in your niche.
4. Google Search Console
While primarily used for your own site, it helps measure keyword performance and identify ranking changes. When used alongside competitor research, it shows how your site compares in terms of visibility and click-throughs.
5. SpyFu
SpyFu reveals competitor keywords, both organic and paid, along with their historical performance. It helps you understand where your rivals invest in content or ads and where you can gain ground.
Get Started with Competitive Analysis for Your Site
The steps given in this guide will help you if you want to learn how to do SEO competitor analysis effectively and identify areas where your website can improve. It requires an experienced professional to perform the analysis more thoroughly and spot opportunities that automated tools may miss. Our reliable SEO company offers in-depth competitor evaluation tailored to your business goals.