What Is Competitive Analysis?

Aaron Haynes
Oct 30, 2021

Hand off the toughest tasks in SEO, PPC, and content without compromising quality

Explore Services
Quick navigation

Consider the following real-world example: Imagine you operate a grocery store — one of three competing stores in town. Your customers are pleased, but you know they shop elsewhere because they can’t get everything in one place.

So you decide to take a road trip in order to gather competitive intelligence. You go to the other stores to learn about the popular items they sell. By providing these items — or even better ones — you enable your customers to make fewer trips, resulting in more business.

This article will explain what competitive analysis is, why it is important, why competitor analysis is important for SEO, how to beat an SEO competitor, and if SEO is competitive.

Let’s get started.

What Is Competitive Analysis?

SEO competitive analysis entails researching your SEO competitors’ links, keywords, content, and other elements in order to reverse-engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.

Instead of guessing which keywords to target, what content to create, or which links to build, you can look at what’s already working for others and build on their success.

Simply put, it is an SEO comparison of two competing websites in the same industry or business.

Competitor analysis SEO can include:

Because you don’t have to start your research from scratch, SEO competitive analysis is effective and efficient. You can observe what your competitors are doing and incorporate it into your own SEO efforts.

Most marketers use an SEO competitor analysis tool to streamline the process and collect massive amounts of data with minimal effort. These tools can also be used to create competitor analysis SEO reports. Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are a few examples of SEO competitor analysis tools.

Marketers learn how to conduct competitor analysis SEO to maintain their rankings and remain competitive in their industry.

Making use of a keyword research tool such as Twinword Ideas. It includes a keyword statistics column called “SEO Competition.” What exactly is it? SEO Competition or Organic Competition (also known as Keyword Difficulty) is a score that indicates how difficult it will be for your website to rank high on search engine result pages (SERP) for that specific keyword.

There are numerous factors that influence whether or not your website appears on the first page of a search engine results page. Some factors to consider include your site’s popularity (backlinks), the trustworthiness of your domain name (domain authority), and the quality of your content. SEO Competition gives you a quick estimate of how difficult it will be for your website to compete for that keyword.

Why Is Competitive Analysis Important?

Helps you to understand where you rank in relation to competitors

With competitive analysis, you will take a step back and examine the overall market area, where you stand, who your competitors are, and how the search landscape looks for crucial keywords.

Even if you are already at the top of the search results for all of your most important keywords, there will always be another site attempting to overtake your rankings and capitalizing on your own site’s weaknesses. Moving up one SERP position increases CTR by 30.8 %, according to CodeinWP.

Roadmap for success

Competitive analysis can serve as a road map for what you need to do to improve your search rankings and the user experience for your site’s visitors. You will always discover aspects of your competitors’ websites that are superior to your own, such as higher search rankings.

You may also discover that they excel at certain aspects of search results, such as dominating all featured snippets or having a massive number of pages that appear in people’s search queries. Search results with a unique meta description, for example, receive 6% more clicks than those without.

Even if you are ranking number one for what you think is your most important keywords, if they dominate in featured snippets, you are missing out on a considerable amount of potential traffic.

Opportunity to study competitors strength

A thorough analysis will allow you to examine what your competitors are doing on a page-by-page basis.

Perhaps you will discover that they have a blog that is doing well with how to type articles that receive a lot of shares and links, something that your site lacks. Alternatively, you may discover that one competitor is gaining a lot of traffic from videos they create and share, whereas your site is lacking in that area. According to statistics, a well-optimized video is 52 times more likely than a text article to appear on the first page of search results.

Competitive Analysis FAQ

Why is competitor analysis important for SEO?

You may wonder why competitive analysis for SEO is important for your business as you learn more about it. Competitive analysis is beneficial to your business for a variety of reasons, including:

  • It specifies what you do well: There will be things you do better than your competitors. When you’ve identified those aspects, you can concentrate on them and continue to improve them in order to keep a step ahead of your competitors.
  • It identifies gaps in your campaign: There is no such thing as a perfect SEO campaign strategy. You can learn what your competitors are doing that you aren’t by looking at their SEO strategy. It assists you in discovering new strategies to help your business grow.
  • Competitors expose you to new strategies and tactics, which helps you connect with your audience. It’s an excellent opportunity to assist you in adopting tactics that will help you improve customer connection and retention.

A competitive analysis will aid your company’s growth. You’ll implement new strategies to help you reach more valuable leads for your company.

How do you beat an SEO competitor?

Search engine optimization (SEO) rules are constantly changing. To rank higher than your competitors, you must constantly improve your website and monitor your competitors’ SEO practices. Here are some pointers to help you improve your SEO rankings:

1. Creating high-value content

Creating relevant, useful, and keyword-rich blog posts, articles, web pages, white papers, videos, and other website content benefits both site visitors and search engines and their indexing programs. High-value content may also increase the number of backlinks pointing to your website, which will improve your SEO.

2. Conduct Keyword Analysis

Keywords are the cornerstone of search engine optimization. Make certain that the keywords you’re targeting are generating the most traffic possible. Using keyword analysis tools like Google Analytics or Google’s Webmaster Tools will provide you with valuable traffic data and metrics for various search queries, as well as insight into which keywords are worth fighting for. Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool will assist you in identifying the best keywords to target (those with the most traffic and the least amount of competition).

3. Keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks

The more links to your website’s pages you have, the better. The quality of the links, on the other hand, is critical. Monitoring your competitors’ backlink profiles can help you identify potential partners or sites that may link to your website, as well as new linking strategies they may be employing. Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer (both offer free and paid plans) are excellent tools for generating backlink profiles for your competitors.

4. Keep an eye on your competitors’ SEO efforts

Examine your competitors’ SEO activities on their websites on a regular basis to see if there are any new opportunities or gaps in your SEO strategy. Examine your competitors’ title tag structure, page URL names, keyword use in headings, in-page links, and other SEO activity in particular.

Using tools like MOZ or Traffic Travis can help to make this process easier.

5. Keep up with SEO news

SEO rules are constantly changing. Keeping up with the latest SEO technique or trend can give you a significant competitive advantage in your rankings. Make time to read SEO news sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO, or SEO-News.com on a regular basis. If a tried-and-true technique emerges, put it to use right away on your site.

Is SEO competitive?

It’s common for business owners to wonder whether search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) strategies will still be effective in 2022.

The reality is that SEO is still competitive and important in 2022, despite the fact that many of the practices and methods have changed. For example, Google’s 2019 BERT update inspired SEO professionals to prioritize content optimization based on search intent rather than keywords. Many businesses still require SEO, but they must adapt to the changing landscape.

Don’t forget: check out the other definitions (over 200) in our growing SEO glossary.

Getting Started with Competitive Analysis

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of competitive analysis.

A competitive analysis will assist you in developing a more advanced SEO strategy for your company. You will learn how to improve your campaign so that it outperforms your competitors. Loganix will assist you in conducting a competitive analysis for your SEO campaign and implementing growth strategies.

Are you ready to get started with us?

Reach out to us today if you want to stay ahead of your competition with your SEO campaign.

We look forward to taking your company to new heights and assisting you in making your website SEO-friendly!

Hand off the toughest tasks in SEO, PPC, and content without compromising quality

Explore Services

Written by Aaron Haynes on October 30, 2021

CEO and partner at Loganix, I believe in taking what you do best and sharing it with the world in the most transparent and powerful way possible. If I am not running the business, I am neck deep in client SEO.