The Importance of Competitive Analysis in SEO

If you’re in the business world, you know that understanding your competition is an important factor in your success. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), this is doubly true.

Your SEO efforts don’t exist in a vacuum. If you want that number 1 spot in the Google SERPs, it means knocking the website that is currently there out of its position. When working with a new client, one of the first things I do is conduct an SEO competitive analysis. This helps us understand where we stand in Google, where our competitors stand, and exactly what we need to do to close that gap. 

Why Are SEO Competitive Analyses Important?  

Competitive analysis is a core part of any SEO strategy. SEO competitor analysis refers to gathering information about your competitors’ sites and using that data to improve your website’s results. The goal is to figure out what your competitors’ websites are doing so that you can use it for your benefit—analyzing their quality content or figuring out what specific keywords they are using to get more traffic than you in organic search results. 

As mentioned in the intro, SEO is competitive by design. If you’re going to rank in any given position on Google, it means someone else isn’t ranking anymore. So understanding your competitors’ keywords, backlinks, and content strategies is key to figuring out a way to outrank them. 

Conducting a competitive analysis is vital for your SEO success because it helps you create realistic goals for your website. While making your competitive analysis, you’re discovering things about your competitors and learning about your own website’s position in Google. Are you far behind the competition for your target keywords? Do you need to reevaluate the keywords you are going for until you’ve built up enough momentum to go after the big guys? Will you need to implement a link building strategy to strengthen your backlink profile? Knowing exactly where you stand among the competition will help you make smarter decisions and ultimately have more SEO success.  

Who Are My SEO Competitors?

When working with a new client, I often ask them to send a list of their competitors. These competitors can be who they want to be like, or, even better, who they want to crush. However, just because a specific business is a direct competitor doesn’t mean it will be an SEO competitor. This is because your competition might not utilize Google for their marketing. They might be dumping their entire budget into paid ads, social media, or another form of digital marketing. So while they are a leader in your industry, trying to outrank them in Google might be a straightforward path to success. 

Luckily, there is a straightforward way to determine who you need to outrank for your target keyword. Google it. For instance, if you want to rank for “pickleball supplies,” Google that keyword, and the shops that appear on the first page of Google are your direct competitors. 

You can use an SEO tool like Ahref’s Keyword Explorer to get a quick competitive analysis for this keyword. It will often feature stats for the top-ranking websites for a given term. You can easily see how many backlinks they have, their domain ratings, and how much estimated organic traffic they are getting. 

Things to Track In Your SEO Competitive Analysis

To get even more granular with your SEO competitive analysis, you can create a spreadsheet to track their SEO from various angles. 

I like to look at the following: 

• Numbers of Indexed URLs

• Estimated Organic Traffic

• Number of Keywords

• Number of Blog Posts (also consider what type of content they publish)

• Number of Keywords from Blog

• Estimated Blog Search Traffic

• Target Keyword

• Mobile Pagespeed 

• Desktop Pagespeed

• Backlinks

• Referring Domains

• Domain Authority 

For even more fun, you can color code it. 

These metrics will give you an easy view of where you stand among the competition. You can make a lot of decisions off this data alone. For instance, if all of your competitors have a domain rating of 35+, and your domain rating is 20, that is a clear gap that needs to close. 

Once you’ve set some high-level SEO goals, you can take the competitive analysis further by digging into a backlink analysis and keyword research to see what they are ranking for and where their links are coming from. You can also see which blog posts drive the most relevant traffic to their websites and use that information to inform your content strategy. By pinpointing their top pages and the top sites sending high-quality links to your competition, you can challenge your main competitors by creating specific pages to dethrone them from the SERPs.

You can even perform a competitive analysis on a single blog post to see exactly how you can outrank it when you go after the same keyword. Where are quality backlinks coming from? Are they going after new keywords that you’ve never targeted before? What are their long-tail keywords? This kind of in-depth single-post content analysis can reveal significant details about your competitors’ content.

Remember, when conducting your competitive analysis, also record the stats for your website. That way, you can easily compare where you stand to the competition. 

How to Set Goals Based on Your Competitive Analysis Findings

No matter how high-level or granular your competitive research, asking yourself the following questions can help you start setting goals:

• What are we doing better? 

• What gaps do we need to close? 

• What areas need the most improvement? 

After finishing your competitive analysis, you might realize that your domain authority is on par with the competition; however, you are not optimized for your target keyword as well as they are. A few simple changes could have you ranking above them in a matter of weeks.

Or, you realize that the only thing holding you back is that your website’s page speed is far worse than the competition. That could mean your goal for the next quarter would be to focus on page speed and watch the organic traffic roll in! 

More realistically, you may realize that, while you are optimized for the right keywords, your competition’s DR is far above yours, their blog has thousands more entries than yours, and they have 20,000 more backlinks than you. In these instances, it is best to create a long-term goal to help you outrank your competitors. In the meantime, conducting a keyword gap analysis and selecting a few less competitive keywords to go after will help you build momentum and get that organic traffic flowing while you build up your keyword rankings and backlinks. 

In conclusion, it is essential to do a competitive analysis before starting any SEO campaign. It will help you understand the competition’s digital marketing strategy and understand how they successfully (or unsuccessfully) create new content that engages your target audience. You can then use this knowledge to set goals and ensure that your website beats them!