In SEO, a competitor analysis is one of the most important steps you must take before setting your SEO strategy.
This analysis looks deeper into your competition's links, keywords, content, and on-site SEO to find out what makes it tick.
By performing a competitor analysis, you know where you are, and what you must do to move forward.
If you don't do a competition analysis as part of your initial SEO discovery process, your SEO strategy will likely not yield the returns you are expecting.
You are flying blind and trying to hit a blank target with an arrow.
Your competition analysis will tell you the following things:
- The techniques that really work in your industry.
- Which keywords your competition is going after.
- What your competition is doing for links.
- What your competition is doing for content.
- What they are doing for on-page SEO.
- The weaknesses in your competition's SEO strategy.
- How you should implement SEO tasks moving forward.
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What you must do to beat those competitors.
To perform an effective competitor analysis, you should analyze the three areas that matter most to moving the needle: technical SEO, content, and links.
You Must Assess What Really Works in the Industry
In order to beat the competition you are up against, you must assess things that are really working in your industry.
What does this really mean?
Your competition, in order to achieve the top spot on Google, is going to implement a robust SEO strategy to take the top spot. They will have links, content, and a crawlable website.
In most cases, however, one or more of these instances may have weaknesses in the implementation.
And this is what you are after: to figure out what your competition's weaknesses are and how to leverage them so your website reaches its full potential in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Your goal must also be to assess what's really working in your industry.
For example: as a business owner, you may think you want to beat the store down the street that is selling the same blue widgets you are.
But, you are limiting yourself.
If you place such a limit on a single competitor, you will miss the forest for the trees and wonder why your SEO strategy isn't as robust as you were thinking it was when you started.
The store down the street has an even narrower mindset than you.
They want to beat their uncle Sal who has a store specializing in red widgets.
While red widgets are a far cry from blue widgets, they are still somewhat related.
See the flaw in this strategy?
Taking a myopic approach such as this will only lead to you beating a competitor you want to beat, who has an even narrower strategy than you do.
Instead, you must focus on the broader market, find the keywords that are driving traffic to your competitor's websites, and analyze what they are doing to achieve the top position in the SERPs.
Changing your focus to the broader approach will only serve to create an even better net for you to catch that traffic that will change your overall SEO outlook.
And only changing to the broader approach will really give you insight into what really works for your industry, while using these techniques to adapt properly to more than what you initially envisioned, even if that changes due to your competitor analysis.
This is also why creating an in-depth competitor analysis is a critical component of any SEO strategy. This depth is what will help you decide every SEO point moving forward.
A Competitor Analysis Is Not Guessing
Let's make one thing clear: performing an analysis of your competitors is not playing a guessing game.
Instead, this analysis is based on tried and true factors in SEO.
These factors are what will make or break your success when you analyze them properly.
With a proper competitor analysis, these factors can be tweaked and refined even further to achieve the rankings you are after.
But, if your competitor analysis leaves out critical factors, you may be prone to making an educated guess.
This is something you want to avoid entirely.
Guessing is fine if you're not aiming to make your client any money with your analysis. But, beware of making guesses based on past experience when you do these analyses.
As you look into competitor analyses, you may run into several terms.
These include keyword gap and content gap analyses.
Friday, September 17, 2021
