How to do an SEO Competitive Analysis
If you get the opportunity to see an internet market at work who has over a decade of experience in building SEO-friendly websites, you’ll quickly notice one thing—They use a bunch of tools. Their Google searches look different with all these additional snippets of information, when they watch a YouTube video there are all sorts of extra analytics, and when they get down to work on a website, they have a bunch of subscriptions, tools, and browser plugins to get the job done faster and more effectively.
But those tools will come to you in their own time. For now, we’ve distilled the essence of how to do an SEO competitor analysis using fundamental metrics and free tools so that even a beginner knows where to start!
Nailing Down Your Market
The first step is asking questions and writing down detailed answers. These are the questions:
- What is my exact niche? Describe your niche within the market in a single sentence.
- Who are my real competitors? Find websites that have better SEO than you in your niche.
- Who is linking to my competitors? Analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors and see how and why are they linking.
- What keywords should I target? Check which keywords are your competitors ranking for.
- What can I improve vs. my competitors? Copycats run out of juice sooner than later. It’s those who innovate continually that end up providing true value to users.
Once you have answers to these questions, a rough strategy will start to form in your head. Formally document your strategy and get to work!
Ranking for a top keyword is important. The #1 organic result is 10 times more likely to be clicked compared to the #10 spot on Google as per Backlinko’s Google CTR stats. But it’s also true that getting ahead of the competition becomes harder as you start targeting keywords and competitors that are big.
Some tips to keep in mind:
- If you’re starting a new website, don’t aim to compete with the biggest competitors or to rank for keywords that have a difficulty of over 50/100. You need an SEO agency to tackle that.
- Focus 100% on writing valuable content. Awareness and education are far superior to promotional, filler, thin, or repetitive content that adds no value. You might need to hire competent content writers for this.
- Manually approaching like-minded websites for a link (called link begging) can surprise you with results sometimes.
Knowing your market well is a prerequisite to a robust inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing includes SEO, blog, automation, etc. and it’s well-known that it’s significantly more effective than outbound marketing. In fact, HubSpot Research found that 53% of marketers see higher ROI with inbound vs. 16% with outbound.
Using Free Tools
It’s hard to emulate the success of a digital marketing agency mainly because they leverage tools and expertise that you simply lack.
But there are a bunch of free tools to get started with!
- Set up Google Search Console and Analytics on your website.
- Make an Ahrefs free account and connect your website for audits, backlink profile, and more.
- Use Semrush (10 free searches per day) and Moz (10 free queries per month) to analyze competitors, what are they ranking for, and more.
- Use Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, a nifty tool to find SEO opportunities with 3 free daily searches.
- Browser extensions like SEO Minion and Keywords Everywhere for Google Chrome can help you get more data for keywords that matter to you.
You’ll quickly notice that almost all tools that can be a game-changer for your SEO strategy and gain a competitive edge come with a premium version. When they start paying off and your traffic starts to increase, you can switch to a paid subscription easily in any of them.
Nobody can become skilled in SEO overnight. But what one can do is learn from internet marketers and how they beat competitors.