Last Updated on by Azib Yaqoob
Before starting a website, every webmaster must perform SEO competitors research. It is an important part of developing a killer SEO strategy for your business.
Keeping this in mind, how should you actually perform competition research? You can use a variety of tools to perform great SEO competition Analysis, learn what your competitors are doing and how you can beat your competition in SERP.
Perform a Keyword research
The first step for you is to find out your keywords. You may use Google’s Keyword Planner to search those keywords.
Once you are sure of your keywords, it will be easier to find out your competitors using those keywords.
How to find out SEO Competition?
There are many ways that you can search for competitors SEO strategy. I will cover some of them in this article. Let’s first start how to manually find competitors.
Search keywords that you want to target in your SEO campaign on Google. Download top 10 search results from every targeting keyword.
Now you can perform a manual SEO audit and find out which meta tags they are using, how did they structure their website, and how many backlinks they are getting back to their website, how many of those backlinks have low-quality.
What information of Your Competitors is Important?
In order to rank higher than your competition, you should know where your website stands in comparison with the competition.
For that purpose, we need to collect data such as your competitors top performing pages, SEO techniques they are using, link building strategy, and more.
Find Out Competitors Link Building Strategy
A backlink analysis can be carried out by typing “link:” along with the site’s URL in Google’s search box. The results will show the sites that are currently linking to their site as well as the total number of backlinks.
You can also use plenty of link building tools to find out competitors backlinks.
You can use this information to get backlinks on your website too.
Use Tools to Find Out Competition SEO
SEMRush and SpyFu are research tools that provide keyword, search ranking of any website, and traffic data.
There are two versions available for both the tools; one is the free version while the other is the paid one. The free version of SpyFu provides up to five websites and SEMRush provides up to 10 URLs that they consider being your competitors.
You can find AdWords keywords and organic keywords, both of which are considered important. The paid version shows tons of sites which are competing on the same keywords as you. This technique is far better than doing it manually.
Similarweb is another similar tool that lets you identify the sites that are similar to yours. Enter your URL, using the free version you can get a list of up to 10 similar sites that are running the same business as yours.
Another advantage of using Similarweb tool is that it allows you to enter your competitor’s site to receive more relevant websites.
There are tools like Open site explorer and Buzzsumo that allow you to figure out high performing content on a certain site. The content can be filtered by language, date and content type (infographic, guest posts etc).
Compare Your SEO with your Competitors
You don’t need to find out every competitor of your website. Around 5-10 Competitors on each keyword are enough to give you the required information.
The next step is to figure out what is that they are doing to achieve higher ranking which you are not? Develop your SEO strategy according to that information.
Focus on Gap Content
Your competitors are getting highly ranked for certain keywords, while you are not. This, in turn, is the reason for them to acquire more traffic to the site. You need to fill in these gaps by creating more appropriate content which can divert traffic to your site.
Track Competitor Mentions
If you want to go to the extent that you wish to be alerted whenever your competitor has been linked or acquired a social mention, you should consider using tools like Google Alerts, Moz, and Talkwalker.
