SEO Competitor Analysis
Updated
SEO Competitor Analysis
What is?
An SEO competitor analysis (also called an SEO competitive analysis) is the process of researching your competitors to gather insights about their keyword, content, and backlink strategy and using those insights to improve your own SEO.
Why?
This type of analysis helps you determine what SEO keywords your competitors rank for. This will help you understand their area of focus and figure out how to compete in the battle of keywords.
A few techniques you can use are to:
- Compare SEO or website performance
- Find keywords gaps
- Compare backlinks and where they get them
- Look at strategies on how they rank for more keywords - e.g. do they have a blog or resources section?
- Examine Top Pages and traffic.
Assess the Competitors Landscape
One of the best sources to find keywords you should be ranking for but aren’t yet is your competitors.
It’s also important to include phrases that competitors rank for. If competitors have been doing SEO, they’ve done a lot of this work for you already, so you can borrow their efforts and strategies. You can also get creative and come up with variations.
Using Google
Free method of competitive keyword discovery. Google is most helpful in identifying who your top online competitors.
- Start by searching on Google for the products or services you sell, and see who comes up in the top few results consistently.
For Example, let's say one of SD Worx UK solution is 'absence management'.
Type the word 'absence management' on https://www.google.co.uk. Google will display a list of websites ranking for this keyword.
- On the results, you will see PeopleHum, and Gartner are among the Top Organic Competitor's for this solution in UK.
Note: If you sell multiple products or services and these two competitors show up again and again in searches, add them to a list of top competitors.
Be sure to also to search any alternative names searchers might use for your products or services. - Next, do a Google site search for each product and its alternatives names for each competitor domain.
On Google.co.uk type: the search term site:domainname.com (using the domain of the competitor).
Type: absence management site:gartner.com |
See Example below:
This search tells us the alternative keywords that the competitor (gartner.com) ranks for in Google for this product (absence management). (See figure below)
In the above search results, we see that Google might show Gartner's absence management solutions to people searching for the foll:
(1) Absence Management - Human Resources Glossary
(2) Best Workforce Management Applications Reviews 2024
(3) Workforce Management Software : How to Choose the Best
(4) Definition of Management by Objectives - Gartner Glossary
(5) Employee Experience - Human Resources Glossary
(6) Definition of HCM Suite Applications
You will already get an idea of your competitors' keywords. Add all of these to your keyword list on an excel sheet.
