A Comprehensive Guide To SEO Competitive Insights
SEO helps search engines understand your content and improve website visibility, driving relevant traffic by ranking higher on search engine results pages.
A Comprehensive Guide To SEO Competitive Insights
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization that helps search engines understand your website’s content and connect it with users by delivering relevant, valuable results based on their search queries. The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) for the most relevant and valuable keywords to your target demographic, driving qualified traffic to your site.
SEO is considered a digital marketing practice that can be applied to any website, ultimately helping in improving the site’s visibility on search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing. Whether your site promotes products, offers services, or shares expert knowledge on a specific topic, SEO can help drive traffic and increase online visibility.
How to Gather SEO Competitive Insights in 5 Steps
1. Define the Competition
Identifying your SEO competitors. If you already know who your traditional business rivals are, do remember that these may differ from your actual search competitors.
The simplest way to figure out who you are competing against is to search Google for the type of terms you want for ranking and take note of the sites that consistently appear.
For instance, if you want to rank for the term (men jordans low), in that case, your SEO competitors would include Nike, Foot Locker, and Farfetch.
2. Analyze Their Keyword Strategy
Once you know your competitors, build a full picture of the keywords they are ranking for. This would help you identify new terms that you should be targeting.
The most efficient way to approach competitor keyword research is by using a dedicated SEO competitor analysis tool, such as Semrush or Ahrefs. These tools require a paid subscription (although Semrush does offer a 14-day free trial).
Heading to “Organic Research” and enter your competitor’s domain name.
Exporting the keyword list into a spreadsheet and filtering out branded terms would enable you leave with a full list of all the non-branded keywords your competitor ranks for, like monthly search volumes and a link to each ranking page. Repeating the process for all your main competitors enables comparing the data with your own ranking keywords and identifying terms you don’t yet rank for.
3. Assess Their Content Strategy
Do examine the competitor content performing well for your desired terms so that you know what it takes to rank for them.
Firstly, consider the content type for each keyword.
Do remember that Google invests a lot of time and energy into serving users results that best match their search intent. The top-ranking results are an excellent guide for how you should approach the content. Finally, study how successful competitors optimizing their on-page elements for the keyword in question. The URL, page title, H1 header element, and body copy are likely to contain the term. Do make sure to record the usage of any versions of the keywords so you can utilize them in your own writing.
4. Conduct A Competitor Backlink Analysis
Overstating the significance of backlinks for SEO. Competitor analysis is a necessity in digital marketing and SEO. In marketing, the part of success comes from knowing best practices and part from experimenting. Being a trailblazer can be expensive, which means spending a portion of your marketing budget on strategies may not produce results.
Tools for competitor backlink analysis include Ahrefs, Majestic, and SEMrush. The tools need a paid subscription for accessing comprehensive data sets, while some also give you a free snapshot of the links pointing to your competitor sites. For instance, Ahref’s free backlink checker offers the top 100 backlinks for any domain, including the referring page, anchor, and target URL.
5. Evaluate Your Competitors’ User Experience
For uncovering SEO competitive insights, assess how your high-performing competitors deliver a positive user experience to their visitors. Page experience signal is used by Google for determining where your site should rank in its search results.
“Core Web Vitals” is the most important UX performance metric, that include page load speed, interactivity and visual stability of on-page elements. You can compare your site’s user-friendliness with your competitors by entering their domain name into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.
Conclusion
Researching competitors’ organic search strategies can be a shortcut to building a more effective SEO campaign. By understanding why other websites excel compared with yours, you can take steps to reverse-engineer their success by integrating similar tactics on your own site.
