The first step of an SEO strategy is competitive analysis. Improve the organic traffic of your website by analyzing SEO related information about your competitors. This analysis helps you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, prioritize SEO activities and learn what works the best in your industry. Following are the points for SEO competitor analysis:
A. Identification of Competitors: You have to create a list of competitors before doing anything else. Download Google Chrome Extension 'SEO SERP | INSTANT RANK CHECKER', enter the relevant keyword and your website URL to know the top 10 competitors ranking in Google search results. You can also visit the Google search engine directly and perform competitive analysis. Digital Marketing Boy suggests you find the websites that rank for several keywords.
B. Content Comparison: Gain a better understanding of the content published by your competitors. Your SEO expert should analyze webinars, podcasts, videos, eBooks, whitepapers, blog posts, visual content, slides, featured articles, press releases, news and case studies. Work in a much better way once you know the quality of content your competitors are publishing. Posting of blogs regularly will help your company to drive more organic traffic to your website. Be sure that the content that you write is unique and relevant to your business.
C. Analysis of SEO Structure: It could be that the SEO structure of your competitors is better than yours. Thus you should analyze several SEO factors such as H1 tags, internal links, ALT tags, content, URL architecture, Title Tags and more. Refer to SEO Glossary for more information. Also, check the types of keywords your competitors are utilizing in their SEO strategies.
You can use the Ahrefs tool to discover the backlinks to your website. Digital Marketing Boy also suggests you check the Moz Pro tool for Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) analysis. Read Powerful SEO Tools for more details.
D. Social Media: Interaction with users and fans is possible through Social Media networks. It is a must for you to analyze how your competitors integrated Social Media into their marketing. Monitor the profiles of your competitors by keeping track of how many times and what type of information do they post in a month? Learn from key influencers in your industry and search for your competitor that develops great content.
E. Areas to Improve: The above analysis will provide you insights into what your competitors are doing. Identify the key areas that you can improve upon in regards to your social media, SEO, content management, Schema Markup, blog posts and more.