What is Competitor Research?
Competitor analysis in SEO is the process of evaluating your competitors’ rankings, visibility, and performance on search engine results pages (SERPs). Essentially, it helps you understand how your competitors achieved their rankings and how well their content is performing.
Bloggers also review various signals, metrics, and ranking factors in their competitors’ content, including their backlink profile, target parole chiave, and search result rankings. Bloggers also generally review the competitor’s content creation and link building strategia.
This helps you to identify gaps, opportunities, and techniques to refine your own content and link building efforts, and ultimately improve your rankings on search engine results pages.
Importance of Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis gives bloggers valuable insights into the SEO techniques working for other bloggers in their niche. This allows them to identify gaps and opportunities they can leverage to improve their rankings on search results pages.
For instance, a blogger can uncover multiple information about their competitor, including the source of their backlinks and the type of content that earned them those links. The blogger can then use this information to decide on an appropriate content creation and link-building technique to use on their site.
Overall, competitor analysis lets bloggers know what works and what doesn’t. This allows the blogger to adopt proven ranking methods while saving them the time and effort they would have invested in creating ineffective content creation or link building techniques.
How to Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis
You will need SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to analyze your competitors. The specific process of doing that will differ, depending on the tool. However, you will want to begin by identifying your top competitors.
To get started, use the tool to uncover the webpages and sites that rank for your target keywords. You may also enter the sites and pages manually. However, make sure to include your direct and indirect competitors.
Your direct competitors are those that target the same audience and have products or services similar to yours. For example, if you sell an online yoga course, your direct competitors are other bloggers and businesses that sell yoga courses or have very similar courses.
Your indirect competitors, on the other hand, target the same keyword as you do but offer a different product or service. For example, an athletic apparel brand that occasionally publishes yoga-related content will compete for similar keywords but is not selling a yoga course like you.
Once done, you can proceed to review these sites for various metrics, signals, and ranking factors. The specific data you will look for will vary depending on what you are looking for.
For example, if you wanted to review your competitor’s top-ranking content, you would use the SEO tool to uncover the highest-ranking content on their site. Once done, you will review the content for various metrics, including:
- The content’s format
- The keywords the content ranks for
- Il content hub to which the content belongs
- Il internal links in the content
- Il outbound links in the content
- Il inbound links (backlinks) that point to the content
- Il anchor texts used by the inbound, outbound, and internal links
- The page’s technical SEO (page speed, mobile-friendliness, and Segnali Web fondamentali)
- The types and number of media included in the content
- The content’s URL structure
When to Perform Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is broad, so the specific data you review will differ, depending on what you want to uncover. Specifically, here are some scenarios where you will perform competitor analysis and the metrics and signals you will look out for.
1 Before Launching a New Website or Blog
Before launching your site or blog, perform competitor analysis to identify your direct and indirect competitors. Review the sort of content they publish, their content structure, and the keywords they target.
You should also pay attention to their site authority, traffic, and backlink profile. This allows you to understand the niche’s competitiveness. It also helps you to set realistic goals for your content.
2 Before Creating a New Content Hub
UN pillar page is a webpage that covers major aspects of a topic. It then links to cluster pages that cover specific parts of that topic in detail. A pillar page and its supporting cluster pages make up a content hub (also called a topic cluster).
Many bloggers use content hubs as their go-to content strategy. This makes them a great way to uncover your competitor’s content strategy, keyword clustering strategy, and top-ranking content.
3 During a Site or Page Redesign
Before redesigning your site, review the competition to understand their site structure, content structure, and UX (user experience) design. You should also pay attention to their site’s page speed and mobile friendliness.
This allows you to understand the user experience of users who visit your competitor’s site and guides you on what they expect from your site.
4 When Organic Traffic Drops
When you notice a sudden drop in your organic traffic, review the sites in your niche. This can give you insights into the cause of the drop.
For example, a drop due to a Google algorithm update will typically affect sites in the same niche or sites that use the same content creation and link building techniques.
Meanwhile, a drop in your site alone can indicate your competitor is improving their SEO, using new SEO techniques, or that you are using outdated and ineffective SEO or content creation techniques.
5 When Competitors Outperform You in SERPs
Review the content creation and backlinking strategy of competitors that outrank you. Specifically, you want to check their content for quality and user experience, as well as the keywords they optimized it for.
You should then compare that data to yours. This will allow you to identify your weaknesses and potential ranking opportunities.