SEO Competitor Analysis Using SEO Tools
5.00/5The ever-changing world of SEO may make you feel like you will never be able to outrank your competitors. But the good news is that you can always opt for SEO competitive analysis.
In short, this is an ethical way to spy on your competitors’ SEO efforts and understand:
- What keywords they are ranking for.
- What their backlink profile and content strategy is.
Gathering this information serves as a source of motivation and inspiration for your own SEO efforts.
Let’s dive deeply into this concept and the various SEO tools that will come in handy.
Key Takeaways:
- SEO Competitive Analysis: Essential for understanding competitors’ strategies in keywords, content, backlinks, and technical SEO.
- Key Areas:
- Keywords: Identify competitor keywords for optimization.
- Content: Analyze competitors’ content for inspiration.
- Backlinks: Assess competitor backlinks to build your own.
- Technical SEO: Evaluate competitors’ site health for improvements.
- Steps:
- Identify competitors.
- Analyze keyword gaps.
- Understand user search intent.
- Review competitors’ content.
- Examine backlink profiles.
Benefits of using SEO tools for competitor analysis
Understanding what your competitors are doing is key to any SEO strategy. You are part of an industry, and every day you compete against others for a piece of the market. That’s why you should regularly try to answer these questions
- What relevant keywords are they ranking for?
- How much organic traffic are they getting?
- How many backlinks do they have?
- What contentare they producing?
This process of evaluating and analyzing your competitors’ SEO efforts will help you uncover valuable data that you can use:
- Understand who your competitors are. Sites that are ranking high on Google’s first results page for the same keywords you are working with.
- Get a better sense of your competitors’ content marketing and SEO strengths and weaknesses.
- Understand where your competitors are struggling or falling short and use that to your advantage.
Ultimately, the goal of a competitive analysis is to gather enough data to beat your competition. You want to position your brand and website as the first result on the search engine page for various keywords.
How to run an SEO competitor analysis?
Depending on the tool you choose to use, we will cover this particular point in another section of this blog post, your competitive analysis will vary. But in general, it consists of 5 steps.
- Step 1: Identify your SEO competitors. Remember, we are not talking about brands that sell products similar to yours, we are talking about the web pages that are trying to rank for the same keywords as you. You can find your organic competitors by doing a Google search for your keywords or using SEO competitor analysis tools.
- Step 2: Perform a keyword gap analysis. This will help you discover opportunities for keywords that your competitors are ranking for but your website is not. Targeting these keywords will help you reach a wider audience and increase your website’s search traffic.
- Step 3: Evaluate user search intent. You need to pay special attention to analyzing the search engine results pages for each keyword and understanding how your competitors are addressing the needs of the target audience.
- Step 4: Analyze your competitors’ content. Pay close attention to the content they share on their site. What keywords are they targeting? How are users engaging with it? These answers will form the basis for improving your content strategy.
- Step 5: Perform a competitors backlink analysis. Backlinks are a key part of any SEO strategy because they let Google know that your content is reliable, valuable, and insightful. It’s important to understand what your competitors are doing and the quality of the backlinks they’re getting.
But before you start scrambling to find the information for each and every step, let’s slow down a bit.
Key Areas of Analysis
Keywords
The first area you need to focus your analysis on is keywords. You need to understand what terms your competitors are ranking for and how much organic traffic they are getting from each of these terms.
As we said before, this will help you identify target keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you are not using as part of your efforts. Once you have a list of these keywords, you can start optimizing pages and creating relevant content around them.
To perform a keyword competitive analysis, you need to rely on SEO keyword research tools. There are tons of options out there, both paid and free. You can read more about them in this blog post.
At Sortlist, we recommend starting with the Moz Keyword Explorer. It’s a powerful free tool with features like
- Competitor ranking of keywords.
- Competitors’ top keywords.
- Keyword gaps.
- Search engine rankings, search volume, keyword difficulty score.
Remember, your goal is to generate a new list of keywords (good search volume, low competition) so you can create new content and start your search engine optimization process.
Content
The second thing you need to pay attention to is your competitors’ content. As you may know, content plays a key role in SEO because it’s the main channel for attracting new and targeted users to your site.
So you want to understand what’s working for them to try to replicate in your website and blog.
In this process, you must try to find the answers to these questions:
- What topics do they cover?
- What formats do they use?
- How long is their content?
- How often are they posting something new?
- What are their engagement rates?
An intelligent and time-saving way to find the answers is to use SEO tools like SimilarWeb, SpyFu, SEOquake, and BuzzSumo. Make sure you choose a tool with features that help you understand more than just the keywords they rank for. You want to go deep and learn what their top pages get more traffic and clicks.
Once you find those pages, it’s your job to go in and review the format (blog posts, infographics, lists, videos, etc.) they’re using. How they’re approaching the topic and any other details will help you create better pieces and more aligned with the needs of your target audience.
Backlinks
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: backlinks matter. They are the perfect way to let Google and other search engines know that your site has valuable, up-to-date, and insightful content that other sites are linking to.
Part of your SEO competitor analysis must include a solid understanding of what they are doing in this area so that you can try to build a similar profile to theirs and outrank them.
To do this, you will need to rely on tools such as Ahrefs Backlink Checker or Majestic and pay close attention to the following data:
- Quality of the backlinks. High-quality backlinks come from high-traffic, authoritative, relevant and trustworthy sites. Toxic backlinks, on the other hand, come from suspicious domains or involve questionable backlink strategies such as buying links.
- No follow and follow backlinks. Learning how many backlinks of each type each competitor has makes it easier for you to understand your competitors backlink profiles.
- Backlink gaps. Provides you with a detailed list of websites that link to a domain and not to yours. You can always contact them and ask them for a link to your site. In the end they are already linking to a company similar to yours.
Remember, you always have to use this data for your own benefit. Understanding what your competitors are doing and who is linking to them opens the doors to potential partnerships that will help you better position yourself in the eyes of Google’s bots and algorithms.
Technical SEO
Finally, it’s always a good idea to check how your competitors are doing in terms of the health of their websites. Do they provide a smooth user experience? Are they mobile optimized? What’s their average page load time?
Key technical SEO elements are very important if you want to rank in Google’s top ranking pages. Plus, learning how your competitors’ websites are doing is a great way to find areas of improvement for your own site.
At Sortlist, we recommend using SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Google PageSpeed Insights, or Lighthouse.
Tools and Tips
Popular SEO tools for competitor analysis
Along with the tools mentioned above, here is a list of the best options on the market to perform an SEO competitive analysis.
Ahrefs
This is definitely one of the dominant tools for SEO purposes. It will come in very handy when you start doing SEO competitive analysis.
At Sortlist, we recommend that you pay close attention to the Competing Domains tab. There you will find insight into who your main competitors are. And under the Content Gap section, you can run a content or keyword gap analysis. This allows you to see the keywords your competitors are using and your site is not ranking for, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC.
Overall, it’s a great tool and the interface is very user-friendly. Making it easier for your team to get up to speed and understand where and how to get each data point.
Ahrefs pricing plans start at $99 per month.
Moz Pro
Moz Pro is another great option for you to perform recurring SEO competitive analysis. Its main differentiator is that it identifies your top 25 competitors based on a ranking that considers both domain authority and keyword volume of each website.
At the same time, this tool is packed with the following features
- Content gaps analysis.
- Traffic lift: An estimator that calculates how much traffic you can expect by outranking your competitors for each keyword.
- MozBar: Free SEO extension designed to study the profile of any website, including page authority, spam score, backlinks and more.
Moz Pro starts at $99 per month and offers a 30-day free trial.
SpyFu
While this is a cheaper option, that doesn’t mean its data won’t work for your SEO competitive analysis. In fact, it’s perfect if you want to understand what your competitors have been doing in terms of search engine advertising.
Another great feature is it;s backlink report that allows you to see the top 5,000 sites for any search queries. If you are just looking to compare 2 sites, then you can use their Backlink Kombat feature and see the common links they have and that your site is missing out on.
SpyFu’s pricing plans start at $39 per month and depending on the time of year you may run into special limited time offers with significant price reductions.
SimilarWeb
This is one of the tools that allows you to drill down into the details of your competitors’ SEO efforts, allowing you to gather data on
- Their audience, including demographics, interests, and engagement metrics.
- What sites or influencers are sending more traffic to their site.
- Industry trends, including traffic channels, historical traffic, engagement data, etc.
SimilarWeb pricing plans start at $125 per month and include a free trial.
Screaming Frog
This option is perfect for those who want to focus on the technical side of SEO. It comes equipped with data on your competitors’ website optimization efforts, including website structure, titles, meta descriptions, content clusters, and internal linking strategy.
Screaming Frog has both a free and a paid version that starts at $259 per year.
Actionable Insights
How to transform competitor data into actionable steps for your SEO strategy
Your work does not begin until you have gathered data on your competitors’ SEO efforts. Then, and only then, can you begin to analyze, interpret, and use that data to your advantage.
For starters, understanding what keywords your competitors are ranking for opens the doors to a world of opportunity. This information can help you optimize pages and blog posts for keywords you may not have considered before. And it also serves as a source of inspiration, so you can update your content calendar with titles and suggestions that will help you outrank your competitors.
At the same time, having real data on the types of content that are helping other brands attract more qualified traffic helps you make the necessary improvements to your content marketing strategy. Changes that can only have a positive impact: more targeted organic traffic, a better conversion rate, and an improvement in your engagement levels.
While the backlink comparison allows you to have a better picture of how the Internet is behaving in terms of your content. This data helps you understand which sites are willing to link to others with content similar to yours, so you can contact them and ask them to link back to your site. Or even take advantage of broken links and use them to your advantage.
But keep in mind. SEO competitive analysis is not a one-time thing. This is something you need to do on a recurring basis, monthly if possible, so you can stay up to date on what your main competitors are doing and what you need to change in your own SEO strategy, website optimization, or content marketing efforts.
Case Studies and Success Stories
Real-world examples of companies who achieved SEO success through competitor analysis
Many companies have put into practice SEO competitor analysis and SEO strategies proving that these efforts pay off.
Take the case of Wordstream. This online advertising platform has invested a lot of time and resources in their SEO efforts. By analyzing content and internal links, revamping and optimizing their blog, offering value to sites with similar topics, and using the right keywords, they were able to increase their organic traffic by 600%.
In the same vein, Walmart has shown that having a clear set of SEO goals can help you rank in search engines, drive traffic to your site, and increase sales. In 2021 alone, their SEO strategy helped them generate over $43 billion in online sales. Their strategy? Creating content that educates their customers, optimizing their site for mobile devices, leveraging internal links, and using a parent-child structure for their product pages.
Finally, Backlinkoincreased their organic traffic by 652% in just seven days. How did they do it? Creating and optimizing content to meet user intent and optimizing the user experience. In other words, adding videos, a table of contents, a short introduction, using subheadings, and providing actionable examples throughout their content.
SEO works, it’s a matter of doing it right and taking advantage of the different tools designed to help you understand which keywords to use and how to get the most out of each action.
Challenges and Considerations
Potential challenges in SEO competitor analysis
When you start implementing an SEO competitive analysis, it’s possible to find yourself immersed in a vast amount of data and not knowing exactly what to do with it or what exactly can be used as actionable information. Trust us when we say that this is perfectly normal.
The different tools are designed to give you tons of information, it’s your job to filter, process and act on it. This guide is designed with that in mind, to serve as a starting point for understanding what specific insights will help you win a piece of the market and your competitors’ traffic.
The challenges don’t stop there:
- You need to be careful which SEO competitive analysis tools you work with. Not all of them rely on accurate and up-to-date information, leading you to work with outdated keyword and backlink data. Our suggestion is to try a mix and match of tools (it could even be a paid and free tool like Google Search Console) so you can ensure a level of accuracy and reliability of the information you get.
- Most tools will give you a long list of competitors. Trying to rank them all is not only nearly impossible, it is not efficient. You need to carefully decide which sites and companies are more aligned with what you do and try to beat their search engine rankings. Not only will this drive more targeted traffic to your site, but it will also help you improve KPIs such as conversion and engagement rates.
- While we always recommend that you try to replicate the successful strategies of your SEO competitors, this does not mean that you will copy them exactly on your site. You need to be creative, add value, and always have an innovative approach. You want your visitors to consume your content, engage with it, and not think it’s plagiarized from other sites.
Conclusion
Ramping up this introductory guide to SEO competitor analysis tools, we just want to understand that your efforts need to go beyond good keyword research. You need to understand what other organizations are doing to rank in the first search engine results pages. Only then will you be able to master the art of SEO.
As we said, there are free and paid tools to help you in this process. Each comes with a set of features that will help you get a better picture of their keyword ranking, search traffic, and backlink profile. You can choose any of the options shared in this article, but our suggestion would be for you to work with a mix and match of at least 2 tools.
Each one will give you valuable insights. But the real work comes when your team needs to process, analyze, and use these metrics for your own benefit.
Are you ready to get started? The following blog articles will help:
