In order to defeat your competitors, you need to spy them down. The better you are at spying your competitor’s marketing move, the easier it will be to beat their search rankings, social engagement, referral traffic, CTA (Call to Action), CTR (Clickthrough Rate) etc.
Step 1: Identify your SEO competitors
Your target audience is already under the influence of your competitors and they are having a certain share of the overall market that you are looking to capture. Sometimes, competitor analysis helps you to better understand your own market. In order to identify your main organic competitors, you can make use of the following strategies:
-
A- Use tools like SEMrush, Spyfoo, Alexa, SimilarWeb and iSpionage to find the organic search competitors.
-
B- Ask your client who are the major players in this business.
-
C- Prepare a list of long-term industry players.
Step 2: Prepare a list of organic keywords
Prepare a list of organic keywords that your competitors are ranking along with the keywords that the client wants to rank.
It is important to carefully refine all the potential keywords and ignore the overly competitive keywords like “bags”, “purse”, “hotels” etc.
You can make use of tools listed in Step 1 in order to determine all the organic keywords that your competitors are already ranking.
Step 3: Compare major SEO metrics
At this moment, you will be having 2 sheets with you. The first sheet will be having your major competitors and the second sheet will be having a list of keywords that you want your client to rank. Now, we will further analyze the competitors on the basis of the major SEO metrics and compare them with the metrics of our client website.
The SEO metrics that you need to analyze are as follows:
-
Domain Authority
-
Total Number of Backlinks
-
Total Number of Referring Domains
-
Ratio of Do-follow Vs No-follow links
-
Top Variations of Anchor Texts
-
Majestic Trust Flow
-
Majestic Citation Flow
-
Keyword Density
-
Presence of Keyword in URL
-
Presence of Keyword in H1 Tag
-
Search Snippet
-
Average Number of Words Per Page
-
Moz Spam Score
-
SEMrush Traffic Rank
-
Social Metrics
-
Presence of Blog
-
Frequency of Blog Posting
-
Frequency of New Content Addition
-
Average Number of Link Acquisition Per Week
Step 4: Create Alerts
Last, but not the least is to create different types of alerts in order to regularly remain updated of your competitor’s SEO strategy.
-
Backlink Alert: Create email alerts for new backlinks using Open Site Explorer.
-
New Mention Alert: Create Google Alerts for monitoring mentions of your competitors.
-
New Social Mention Alert: Use social mentions to track keyword mentions and company mentions across social networks.
It is suggested to use these alerts for your top 3 organic competitors so that you are able to easily analyze their strategy and plan a counter plan accordingly.
Competitor analysis forms a crucial part of the overall SEO strategy and often determines how successful any SEO strategy would be. The above guide will serve as the starting point of your SEO strategy.
Are there any essential metrics that you would like to include in the SEO competitive analysis plan? Please let me know in the comments below.
Also See:
How to do Competitor Analysis
How to Make Your Website More User Friendly
Step by Step Seo Copywriting Guide
How to Find Out Which Keywords You Rank For
Using Google Trends to Find the Popularity of Keyword
Keyword Research and Seo
Long Tail Keywords Vs Short Tail Keywords
