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3 steps to carrying out your first competitor site analysis
Rebecca Appleton • 17 March 2020
Useful tips to make your competitor analysis helpful and actionable
There is a lot to learn when it comes to crafting a SEO campaign that actually delivers results. This job is made harder still by the fact that Google is less than transparent when it comes to saying what can impact your rankings, and what doesn’t. There is no blueprint to help your eCommerce website achieve better rankings. This is where your competitors come in.
By studying what they have done, where they are getting links from, how they have structured their pages and a host of other metrics, you can gain valuable insight which will help to move your own SEO forwards – in much less time that it would take you to perform trial and error yourself.
Step 1: Keywords
Keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO strategy and the way that your traffic discovers your site. They can only do this if you appear prominently on Google for the terms that they are using. Conducting keyword research should be an ongoing activity. As search habits change, your target keywords must also evolve. You also need to ensure that you’re targeting the right phrases initially. Your competitors can help you here and potentially give you new keyword ideas to plug gaps in your own strategy.
Beginning with a handful of your closest rivals and industry leaders, study which keywords are being used to drive traffic to those sites. There are a few ways to do this but one of the most telling is simply to visit their site. Note down phrases which appear in their page titles, headers, in bold, in link text, in menus and are repeated often in page content.
While somewhat labour intensive, this approach allows you to spot gaps and add keywords to your own strategy that your rivals are already succeeding with.
Step two: Perform a content gap analysis
Studying the content on competitor websites is a treasure trove of insight. If you mine this source carefully, you can not only identify where your rivals are falling down on content (and therefore where you can swoop in for the advantage), you’re also sure to get a good benchmark against which you can measure your own content.
Compare your content side-by-side, asking yourself questions such as who has the most up-to-date information (if it’s them, this is a point to work on), who has the better content structure, who has duplicated or thin content and so on.
Having this information to hand means you can identify where you need to improve to bring your site closer to that of your competitors, and where you can potentially gain the upper hand by exploiting a rival’s weakness. Is their content really lacking in detail on a particular subject for example? Have they got lots of duplication?
Step three: Perform a link analysis
Links are not just the most valued of all SEO currencies, they are also direct pathways into your site for visitors. Building links is one of the hardest of any SEO task but, you can lighten the workload by performing a competitor link audit. Start with the basics such as how many links they have, what kind of anchor text and from what type of sites. Next, hone in on where their best quality links come from. Now, compare with your own link profile. What do they have that you don’t which could be giving them a big search engine boost? And which sites are linking to them and not to you that you could target?
While competitor research is not a quick fix solution, it is an incredible source of insight and offers you lots of opportunities to learn from what someone else has shown already works – without any cost to you for months of leg work and mistakes.
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