SEO competitor analysis: how to do it

When developing an SEO optimization strategy, it is extremely important to conduct an in-depth competitor analysis. This will help you identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as outline ways to improve your site's ranking.

Setting a goal

Before starting an SEO analysis, it is important to clearly define your goals. What do we want to know and what data will help us advance?

How can our site improve compared to our competitors? SEO involves a comprehensive approach, and it is important to consider the many factors that can influence the effectiveness of promotion.
What strategies are competitors using? The successful techniques they use can be transferred to our website.
What strategies are competitors not using? This can reveal which promotional methods work in our niche and which should be avoided.

Determining your competitors

We need to identify direct competitors - sites that offer similar products or services and target the same audience. There are several ways to find such competitors:

If the site belongs to the client, check with him who the competitors are. They can point you to the most important resources in your industry.
We analyze search queries. We use the search bar, entering key phrases to identify sites similar in topic. We discard aggregators and information resources.
We use special services for analysis. For example, various analytical tools will help us understand which sites compete with us for key phrases.

What factors are we analyzing?

Domain age

We use services to analyze a domain to find out its age. If the site is new, this should be taken into account and emphasis should be placed on other ranking factors.

Attendance

We analyze competitors' traffic and its sources. This helps you understand where your traffic is coming from and which channels work best.

Semantic core

We look at the keywords for which competitors' sites are ranked. This will give you an understanding of which phrases can be added to your promotion strategy and which should be excluded.

Site structure

We analyze how competitors' pages are structured. Are they using pages for low-volume queries? How is the navigation and structure of the site organized? This data will help you form your own effective structure.

Content

Content plays a key role in SEO. We evaluate the quality of texts, images, H1, H2, H3 headings, as well as meta tags. We pay attention to the presence of videos, reviews and other elements that can improve the user experience.

Link strategy

We use analytical tools to evaluate the link mass of competitors. It is important to determine whether they are receiving natural or spam links. This will help you develop your strategy.

Relinking

We check how competitors use internal linking. What pages do they link together, and what strategies do they use to increase page visibility?

Download speed

We check how quickly a competitor’s website loads. We use tools to analyze the loading speed of both mobile and desktop versions of the site. Speed is an important factor for SEO.

Summing up

To systematize the collected information, we recommend creating a table with the results of the analysis of each parameter. This will help you structure the data and, based on the information received, build an effective SEO optimization strategy.

How to learn

SEO optimization is a broad field that requires knowledge in different areas. If you want to learn SEO and improve your skills, it's worth taking specialized training.

Sign up for a course on technical website audit and learn how to work with analytics tools, properly configure indexing and avoid search engine sanctions.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" for any question by email info@seo.computer.

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