SEO Competitor Analysis: Complete Guide to Research & Analyze Your Competition To Outrank!

‘COMPETITORS!’ The word that almost every business owner is afraid of. Competitors are the one who always makes the best efforts to steal your traffic, your existing and potential customers and ranking on their own site. Wonder if they are actually using the SEO tools or strategies or Google is just being kind to them without any relevant reason.

But for your information, your competitors are achieving high ranking than your website is naturally because of some solid reason and that reason is identifiable. They have not been put there for you, in fact, you have to put in little bit efforts to find them out. This blog will give you a clear insight about how should you start and from where you should start exactly to get ahead of your competitors. 

If you are an entrepreneur, you are anyway going to find it very useful to promote your own website, who find it really challenging to invest time in analyzing the competition. But it is never too late to make a fresh start. If you have just started out an SEO then it is undoubtedly for you. This post is very effective for the professional SEO consultants who are looking to know about the framework to start their work with their new clients. In an easy language, everyone out there will find it extreme useful who want to make their business stand on top 5 or 10th position among the search results. 

Analyzing your competitors is the thing which comes at a later stage, you still need a thing to get settled. Before you start carrying out activities to understand the strength and weaknesses of your competitors, it is much significant for you and your business to put in efforts in the right direction to search for the things about who are your main competitors in the world of SEO.

Top thing that people get wrong while researching about their competition

You might find it very simple but in a way or another, you already have an idea about who are the one which has won the game in your niche. If you feel so, then you probably are not the arrival of the fact; it is not always necessary that your business rivals are your competitors for SEO. Always remember the thing that your SEO competitors are different from that of your business rivals.

Let's think of this situation in another way. You probably have worked on SEO PowerSuite. The major thing that we do at the SEO PowerSuite is the toolkit for SEO. you might have already know that it includes 4 tools which allow you to focus individual factors of an SEO. This simply means that the companies to which we are competing are those which produces the SEO software. 

But this is not as easy as it is appearing. The reason being the for different products in an SEO PowerSuite performs the separate tasks. For every product, you have the different list of competitors and these lists never include the same components in each other. Our blog is one of the most helpful approaches to interacting with you and we always look forward to providing you with the most engaging and interesting content to you to win your hearts. 

Let's take an example of this blog. If we want to post this blog so that we can achieve good ranking for “SEO competitive analysis” then of course, we want people to search for such kind of content and find it valuable along with the source of information to learn things related to SEO PowerSuite, also to subscribe to our channel to stay updated and stick around our blog for a long time.

In fact, When I type “SEO competitive analysis”, I also see related results from many business competitors who are also dealing with the SEO PowerSuite. Many results that appeared on the top list is basically from the publishers, such as 10seos, Forbes, Search Engine Land and much more. In fact, it also includes many results which are not of much use. Although they are not your business competitors since they belong to some different niche but still they are your SEO competitors for the blogs. 

Make sure to pay attention to your competitors those who belongs to that blue circle and not the green one or the intersection part. Focus on entire people belongs to blue region community. 

Now after understanding these things, let's roll on further.

1. Identify your main competitors of SEO

No matter if you have just started with the or doing it from a while ago, you already have gathered the main keywords to target for your SEO campaigns till now. Copy them and make sure that 20 to 30 keywords cover them up all and head towards the Rank Tracker tool of the SEO PowerSuite. 

BONUS TIP: Read the example that we have just explained above? If you are also following the same business model like that, like your site have been focusing on the specific products or services and embedded a blog which has been targeted different keywords, then it is much beneficial to create a different project for every keywords which are related to a product and another one which focuses only on those keywords that includes the content part.

1. Create a project for your site in a Rank Tracker and make sure to paste all those keywords out there that you had copied before. After that, choose that Search Engine that you wants to target and wait for a while till the Rank Tracker analyze the ranking of your site for those keywords that you have just targeted. 

2.  Click on the Preferences option, and hit on Competitors then select Suggest. Rank Tracker will automatically pull those keywords that you wishes to target by copying it to conduct the competitor’s research on those keywords. After that click on Next Button.

3. Pick a search engine that you want to get the data of your competitors and again hit Next button.

4.  Rank Tracker will provide you with the list of top 30 keywords that you had selected and gather them all as a list which has been used by the people more frequently. Then you will see a list of 30 keywords which has been sorted which includes higher visibility among the search results. Mark those competitors that you want to add to your project and then simply click on the Finish option. 

Remember that if you are using the free version of the Rank Tracker, you will be able to add only a single competitor for every separate project. If you use Professional version, then you will be able to add 5 competitors and if you want to add 20 competitors then you will have to use the Enterprise version of the Rank Tracker. 

That's how you will be able to track your competitors because whenever you check the ranking of your site, you will be able to see the ranking of your competitors as well along with your own ranking. This will allow you to track any changes that could affect your online visibility and the performance of your site with respect to others.

2. Assess the SEO strength of your competitors

Before you begin to analyze any specific SEO of your competitors, such as link building, on-page optimization or quality content, it is always great to get a fair knowledge about the strength of their SEO and calculate the amount of time you need to get ahead of your competitors.

Rank Tracker allows you to do this on two level. First off, evaluate the overall domain strength of the site of your competitors and then check your site how it is compared to yours. After that, move on to analyze the SEO about the keyword page level.

1. In your project of Rank Tracker, switch to the module of the Domain Strength. Check how the Domain Strength of your site has been compared to with that of your competitors. And analyze which competitors are much strong than that of the other ones. 

Domain Strength is the basically the estimation and evaluation of the SEO PowerSuite to determine the overall search engine authority of a domain. 

2. To get what contributes to the value of Domain Strength of a site, scroll down and evaluate how InLink Rank of the domain, Alexa, domain age, indexation stats, backlink details, and social media signals compares. Mark those areas where you feel that your competitors are performing better than you and then pay attention to these areas. 

Now, let's begin to evaluate the PageRank of your competitor which are standing on the position for your targeted keywords. The easy way to do this is to look at the Rank Tracker in a detailed keyword difficulty analysis option, like:

1. When you open your Rank Tracker project, click on the Keyword Map dashboard and click on the All Keyword Option. Highlight all those keywords which are appearing in your view and then click on the Update Keyword Difficulty option.

2. When you are done with analyzing, hit on any of your target keywords. There a detailed breakdown will appear which will give you an analysis about the top 10 page ranking along with the Difficult Score. This score will give you an insight into how powerful the SEO of every page is with reference to that of the keyword and how much challenging it is for you to outrank. It will highlight those site that you had just added into your project competitors and they are in a top 10 result.

3. Check out the detailed SEO analysis of every site to locate the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors and know how much time and efforts will it take to get ahead of your competitors. Go through the following stats carefully:

• InLink Rank is a PageRank alternative of the SEO PowerSuite. It also evaluates the ‘ranking power’ of every page depending on the number and quality of the backlinks. The more rank, the better backlink profile it holds.

• Domain InLink Rank will give you an insight about the ranking power of the domain. 

• Sites linking to page and Sites linking to domain works exactly what their names show. The amount of domain which is linking to the specific page or website.

• On-page optimization score performs the calculation for the SEO PowerSuite, which allows you to know how well every page is being optimized with reference to each target keyword. 

• Alexa Rank is a tool provided by Alexa, which allows you to know about the traffic of your site. The less value, the high traffic that website gets.

• The Social signal indicates the total amount of shares on social media platform, especially on Facebook and Google+.

• Domain Age allows you to know how long does the domain was registered. 

Spot those competitors that include the lowest difficulty scores. More are the chances that the focusing on these factors will allow you to achieve higher ranking among Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). 

3. Look for the backlinks of your competitors

Backlinks are one of the easiest ways to make the Search Engines believe about the authority of the site. In the competitive analysis, backlinks research is considered as one of the most important phases since it allows you to develop the link strategies properly, evaluate the time needed to build a strong link profile and mark the valuable link opportunity at the website of your competitors. You can also make use of the SEO SpyGlass offered by the SEO PowerSuite to analyze this part of SEO. 

1. Head towards the SEO SpyGlass and build a project for your site.

2. On the Domain Comparison module, you will see an option Add module, just click on it. A window will pop up, you have to enter the URL of your competitor’s website which you have located with the help of Rank Tracker in the above steps. You are only allowed to add 2 competitors if you are using the free version. However, you will be able to add 5 competitors using the SpyGlass Professional and if you want to add 20 competitors then you will have to use the Enterprise version.

Now you will be able to see the detailed comparison of the link profile of your competitors. in the end of a page, you can also analyze the overall rating and check what's the factor which makes your competitors stronger than you. Jot down all those factors because you will have to work on those factors first.

In the recent example, you might want to pay attention to the total amount of backlinks and linking domain in your link profile, along with enhancing your InLink Rank!

By knowing the clear comparison in front of you with your competitors, you will automatically get an insight about directing your link building strategies. Make sure to provide a long-term commitment because building a link is a time-consuming process and needs lots of time and efforts to stand out of the competitors uniquely. 

3. On the Link Intersection option of the dashboard, you need to switch to the potential backlink domains. What you has got is the filtered view that has been linked to the site of your competitors and not on your site. Hit on the header of the column which states the Project option, you will get the sorted list of the view of various sites that refer the domain links to. 

This allows you to uncover the valuable opportunities for building link for your site. Those domains which are linking to the site of your competitor are the essential resources which can act helpful to get a link on your site too! On the top right corner of your screen, you will see a download button, click on that download button allow you to export this list and thus, stand out of the competition effectively.

4. Locate the on-page strategies of your competitors

On-page SEO is as easy and quick as similar to that of backlinks. It allows you to actually renovate your landing page by getting an insight into your competitors by analyzing their page carefully. This quick change allows you to experience the better result in a quick span of time. 

For that purpose, you can use the Website Auditor tool of the SEO PowerSuite, that is the Content Module!

This will provide you with the in-depth information you need so as to optimize any of the web pages for keywords that you are targeting depending on those pages that have already achieved the higher ranking among search result. In addition to that, it will also provide you the further recommendation as a way to enhance the content by making it more comprehensive and most importantly, in a way that users find it more relevant.

1. Create a project for your site by running the Website Auditor.

2. On the Content Analysis module, you have to choose a landing page that you are going to optimize. Make sure to enter your target keywords and the search engine that you are targeting. In case if you are not much aware of how you should start, consider, to begin with, the home page first. 

3. Allow the website auditor to finish the analysis. Wait for a while and let it do the analysis, look at the essential content optimization aspects for any error or warning, that you can locate on the left side.

4. If you found any of the error or warning messages, select it and then move towards the tab of your competitors. Make a view on it that how your competitors are managing that specific factor of SEO. if you found a tangible difference among the keywords used by different competitors and you are confused about which on-page strategy you should select, use the competitor avg as the reference one.

5. You can also make some semantic SEO so as to go far from the conventional usage of the keywords, go to the TD-IDF dashboard of the Website Auditor. There you will get the relevant terms which have already been sorted in terms of their usage. You will also notice the Recommendation column, which provides you suggestions for every phrase that has been located on that page of more than 5 competitors.

The above four steps will give a fair insight about who your main business rivals are and which kind of SEO tactics your competitors are implementing, including both off-page and on-page. You need to understand it clearly that how your competitors are able to manage the higher ranking than you and what measures you should take to change that. But before moving forward, you still need to implement one more step…

5. Track the performance of your competitors beyond search engines

Tracking what actions your competitors are taking everywhere online is a great option for so many reasons. No matter if you are doing the social media marketing actively or not, this will allow you to know exactly which kind of content is liked mostly by your audience which could enhance the user engagement of your site. This will provide you with the in-depth knowledge about what are the factors available on your site that your target audience is liking or disliking and helps you to know which strategy is working well and which is woking least in your niche. 

Why make mistake to learn? 

Always remember that there are so many ways available which will allow you to increase your ranking by getting a view of the behavior of your users which are visiting your site. Therefore, SEO is another reason to increase the user engagement of your site. You can also use online monitoring tool for this purpose, and we consider to use Awario.

1. Awario allows you to make a separate alert to let you know about everything related to your competitors. You simply need to pick the brand or company to make an alert and specify the brand name of the competitor. Also, if you find it relevant, you can also include the product name. 

2. Soon the Awario will start to gather the first mentions about your competitors. You can easily filter the result according to the date on the top of your feed. Check out which kind of content your competitors are posting and which post works the best. 

3. Once you are done with creating alert for your competitors, you can begin to use the section of Alert Comparison. You can choose three alerts to make a comparison. You can notice there an in-depth description of your competition along with the details that how people are being talked about them and how frequently and also, how those mentions have been distributed on the social media platforms. 

Final Words: Make sure to track those rankings

Now since you know clearly about the strength, weaknesses as well as tactics your competitors are going to implement, understand and formulate a proper strategy about what you will focus and how will your outrank them. Now you are working on those factors, make sure to monitor the ranking of your competitors so that you can get a knowledge how effectively your efforts are producing results. You can also manage your ranking checks on a Rank Tracker by running an autopilot. This will allow you to sit back and relax because you don't have to do it manually now. Click on the Preference and then Scheduler so that you can schedule the task to track and how frequently you wants to track it. 

These are few of the best suggestions for researching and analyzing your SEO competition. Would you like to share any suggestion to help in growing the current position? We are looking forward to having your thoughts and questions in the comment section below!