The analysis of the SEO competition is one of the first things that you should analyze before getting started when it comes to gaining online visibility.
Now, does the SEO competition exist?
When we start a project, and we are newbies, we usually think that we have no competitors because no one offers the same as we offer.
In general, this happens because we do not have a real image of the environment.
The competitors: neither angels nor demons.
It is important to know the SEO competition so that they lower our spirits because if they do not offer something, it may be because the client does not want or value it.
After all, they have been in the market for some time and will have had time to validate certain things.
And in addition to lowering our ego, it is important to analyze it to take references of what works, what has not worked for them, and, what is more important, what our SEO competition is not doing and where we can open a gap.
We frequently see situations of the type “I have come to talk about my book”, with brands in which they only speak about their brand, their product, and their service without paying a minimum of attention to their users, their community, and your potential customers.
What is an SEO competitive analysis?
An analysis of the SEO competition consists of an analysis of the initial situation in which our companies find themselves and analyzing the main competitors to detect those areas in which they are strong and work and those areas where they are not so strong. In this way, we can benchmark what works for you and establish differentiating strategies that help us set ourselves apart from our SEO competitor analysis.
Is it important to do a study of our competitors?
It is not important to analyze our competitors, it is very important to spend time knowing what they are doing and where they are going.
How can you perceive those spaces in which the rest of the players are distracted? analyzing a lot.
If you analyze your competitors, in the end, you end up finding different areas of things that are not being done and that you can do because it is one of your strengths.
This, in addition to the analysis, if you accompany it with training and reading… you will have endless resources to establish SEO strategies that benefit you.
Does the competition exist? SEO competition is clearly yes
We must differentiate between competition in terms of service and SEO competition.
What is Service Competition?
The service competition is made up of those companies that offer a service similar to ours, they do not have to have worked on SEO or have a digital marketing strategy. It is our sector competence
What is SEO competition?
SEO competition is attacking keywords similar to the ones I want to rank. They do not have to offer services similar to ours, they may not even offer services. In any case, it is occupying a space in the search results that we want for ourselves.
Despite this, I believe that SEO competition exists although there is a space for everyone. It is a matter of differentiation and if instead of talking about services we talk in terms of brand, competition as such is something that is not so obvious.
I am going to tell you why I think that the SEO competition does not exist:
- If you are similar to your competitors and you limit yourself to replicating what they do, you are just like them and thus you will neither grow nor stand out.
- Choosing between two practically identical things is not choosing.
- The SEO competition is the parents and how it is usually said «each one belongs to his father and his mother» If that traditional saying refers to our individuality, why not extrapolate it to the communication management of our brand/company?
Thanks to the analysis of the SEO competition we will be able to determine both the actions that we are going to develop in web positioning and put on the table that little point of differentiation that identifies your brand.
How to do an SEO Analysis of the competition to find your niche in the market
If we want to benefit from the competitors to know who my competitors are, we must be clear about who is NOT our competitors:
- The profiles and companies that I aspire to resemble, even if we are in the same sector
- Those who have been in the market for a long time when I arrive
- Those who, despite being competitors, do not work on online positioning.
Competitors are those that offer a service similar to mine, that has been in the market for approximately the same time as me, and that attack the same target.
How to choose our SEO competitors: Direct and indirect competitors
No one has ever done anything remarkable by copying competitors.
The choice of competitors has to be oriented on two aspects: analyze companies with a good digital presence to implement tactics within our positioning strategy. They do not have to be in our sector but they may be developing actions that we can extrapolate to our sector.
It is important to note that there are two types of SEO competition:
- Direct competition: those who offer the same service as you
- Indirect competition: those who offer a substitute product to yours.
For example coffee and tea.
Or if we take care of offering SEO services arguing the ability to sell more online, indirect SEO competition will be all those who have a similar commercial message: community managers, web designers, and traffickers.
Steps to choosing your SEO competitors:
Before continuing, it is worth remembering that two fundamental aspects affect the positioning of a website, in a very summarized way, and that it will help us to determine and organize SEO strengths and weaknesses concerning our SEO competition.
- Seo On-Page
- WPO
- Relevance
- Tracking and indexing
- SEO Off-page
- Popularity (quotes, mentions, and links)
- Given equal conditions, subtleties can be broken.
We are going to search for our main product or service in different ways to see who appears on the results page.
We analyze the SERPs sheet to see what it throws at us
We are looking for “private English classes”:
We found many ads
We find pages of academies in another town, local pack
We find organic results…
We can also use tools to see our direct competitors and check which are the competitors with whom we have the most kW in common.
To analyze it I have used SEranking (although you can use the SEO tool that you like the most). within the investigation of the competition in a general view, we have some cards that indicate the main organic competitors
If we see the complete report, it will show us a list of the competitors with which they have the most words in common, the words for which the analyzed domain does not rank…
As we can see, these lists of competitors that it generates for us automatically do not always correspond to our real competitors.
If, for example, we have not worked on web positioning and we have written the content without analyzing keywords, we may be positioning for terms that have little or nothing to do with our sector.
However, it is worth taking a look at this list.
- After having searched several times, there will be some that are repeated and they are the ones that you must include in your list of competitors.
- After making a list and introducing the relevant data to be able to compare data and glimpse strengths and weaknesses where we can concentrate efforts.
Metrics that we must take into account when we analyze the SEO competition
It is important to take into account a series of data, including some quantitative data that helps us to homogenize the evaluation of our SEO analysis of the competition. In this way we will be able, among other things, to prioritize the keyword that we want to attack, getting an idea of if we have the possibility of positioning for that keyword.
Those numerical metrics that we must collect are the following:
- Domain Authority: This is a metric that tells us how relevant the domain we are analyzing is. What strength do you have? This metric varies from one analysis tool to another, so you must choose one to measure it, always use the same one
- Page Authority: tells us how popular a page is within a website. Each page that makes up a website has a different page authority and shows us how “interesting” this page is for users. It is interesting to take this metric into account when we want to position a particular keyword
- Estimated traffic: The tools make us an estimate of the traffic that the different websites have. They always do it based on the database that each tool has and when you want to track your competitors you must always do it with the same tool.
- Backlinks: they are the outgoing links, thanks to them the page authority grows.
- Several referring domains: it shows us the number of different domains from which the website is linked.
- Number of positioned words: number of words from which it positions
In addition to analyzing quantitative data, we must also analyze qualitative aspects: competitor’s style, tone of their communication, followers, impact on their community…
Factors to take into account in the SEO analysis of our competition
To carry out an SEO analysis of the competition, we must take into account a series of factors that we sometimes overlook. As it is to take into account Google search engine results since on many occasions we pay too much attention to the data that SEO tools give us without further questioning.
Google is going to be the first stage of our analysis of the competitors, we will start looking for our main terms taking into account the different phases that a user goes through throughout the entire purchase process.
We have to pay special attention to our relevant searches related to our service (SEO consultant, criminal lawyer, English classes…)
Another important aspect to take into account is the age of the domain because if our competitors have a domain older than ours, their position will be more advantageous as it will be easier for them to position more generic terms.
The second step to continue analyzing our competitors is to use SEO tools that allow us to obtain this data.
It is important that when preparing our excel including our data to be able to determine our position in the market.
To do this, you can use the SEO tool that you feel most comfortable with, they all work in a very similar way.
We only have to enter the domain and select the country where we want to analyze its positioning and see the analysis.
Domain Trust and Page Trust are internal metrics developed by Seranking in this case.
From here, it will be useful for us to establish positioning strategies for referring domains and keywords.
It will also give us information about the ads if there are any, and the keywords that it attacks in those ads.
With this, we can establish a comparative table with our competitors that we can update to see the effectiveness of our actions.
Also, one of the things that are interesting to look at when analyzing the competition is that of the best pages: the pages of your site and their traffic generation.
In this way, we will detect which are the pages that receive the most traffic. The interesting thing is to identify the “best pages” of our competitors and which are the most popular pages among our competitors and replicate and improve them on our site.
Analyzing our competitors will allow us to get an idea of the content that is working and thus be able to replicate those tactics that work within our strategy.
Once we have analyzed the search traffic of our competitors, we are going to do a keyword analysis of several competitors simultaneously
With this, in a very visual way, we get an idea of what the strengths of our situation are
In addition, we can see the words for which both websites are positioned:
And we can create filters on the words that they have in common, those that are missing from the analyzed domain, or those that only the analyzed domain has and the rest do not.
Especially relevant keywords that are present in our competitors but not in our domain. That is where our growth potential lies
With this, we find a good base of words that we can attack since we are not taking them into account now.
The study of keywords is the pillar on which a quality SEO strategy is based, in addition:
- Allows for detect market niches
- Help create relevant content for your audience
- It makes it easier for us to interpret search intent
We must always take into account the type of keywords that interest us:
- High search volume and easy or relatively easy positioning difficulty
- Long-tail strategy
Off-page SEO analysis of competitors
One of the SEO factors that are decisive to achieving a good positioning is to do a good link building, for this we must know how our competitors are working with SEO off-page.
Once we have analyzed the traffic and the keywords of our competitors, we now have to track the off-page SEO of our competitor and for this, we are going to use another tool within SERanking, which is the backlink explorer.
When we analyze the backlinks, it shows us a dashboard with relevant information on the link profile of our competitors.
- Referring domains: are the different domains from which it is linked
- Backlinks: shows us the number of links you have in total.
- Both the referring domains and the backlinks show us the proportion of links that point to the main or home page and those that point to internal pages within our competitor’s website.
- Another metric it teaches us is the ratio of following vs. no-follow links. The following links are the ones that transmit authority and the ones that we are interested in having to improve our positioning ratios. In this case, we see that 99% of the links that point to the web are followed.
The following graph shows us the evolution of the domains that point to the analyzed web, we see that it is at a standstill: it does not grow and it does not decrease. It’s been a while without getting links.
The same goes for the link profile graph…
We can also see at a glance the domain profile that has been gained or lost in a given time, so we can take advantage of the links that have been lost and try to locate our website there.
Same with links.
All this in a graphic way but we also have a very complete list in which we can see concretely the types of links that the web has.
We can find out if the link is text or image if it is a follow or no follow, and the metrics related to domain and page credibility or the Alexa ranking position it occupies and thus get an idea of whether they are quality links or not.
Another key point that we can analyze within the study of our competitors is the anchor text, that is, the text that goes with the link.
At this point we see that all the anchors are branded, seeing this we see that we can enrich our SEO by working on our anchor text
Web page loading speed
Loading speed is becoming more and more important and users are in a hurry, we want websites to load quickly, and taking into account that Google gives more and more importance to loading speed and user experience, we must take this into account. bill.
The loading speed is the equivalent of entering a store and being served with agility and good work
What can we do with so much data from our competitors?
At this point, we already have an idea of what our competitors are doing. It is important, as we said at the beginning, not to focus only on a single competitor and to have a list of at least 5 realistic competitors.
I also like to take a look at other reference blogs from other sectors because you can see positioning or marketing strategies that you can extrapolate to your sector giving it a breath of fresh air.
With all this data we can begin to outline what a strategic marketing plan is going to be.
In minute 6 (approx) you can see how to make a map of stakeholders and from minute 20 you can see how to do competition analysis.
Innovating is not about inventing the wheel, it is more a question of doing differently what has always been done in the same way.
Conclusions on the SEO competition analysis
If you have come this far and have invested time in carrying out this analysis, you will have already realized where those spaces are and where your brand can position itself.
The spaces that Simeone called on the soccer field are the equivalent of the space in which you are located on the map of stakeholders.
What is clear is that you can put a lot of stress on yourself, that you can do a very good SEO job and have a very elaborate marketing strategy…it doesn’t matter because if you don’t analyze the competition if you don’t know why they are where they are and you ask yourself the way to find your how you’ll be shooting blind
In addition, doing an SEO analysis of your competition, in addition to making clear weaknesses and strengths, will help you generate many ideas that you can implement.
Do you analyze your competition?