How To Analyze Your Competitor’s SEO?

By KeeverSEO Team

3 August 2023 . 2 min read

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Introduction

Ranking in Google was quite easy in the early days of the web. For example, you only needed to use your main keywords in the meta description, and your web page would rank for those keywords. Relevancy was not important in the good old days. But today, ranking in Google and the other major search engines has become a science – which you should learn from a lot of trial and error since Google and the other search engines won’t tell you how their ranking algorithms operate. Google keeps on refining its ranking algorithm based on the searcher’s behavior. In fact, search engines are becoming smarter each day.

The businesses that rank in the top positions of the SERPs are doing better than ever. That is why you need to try harder to get as closer to the top as possible to attract highly targeted traffic and sales. The more traffic you are going to get the higher your website ranks in Google and the other search engines. The more traffic you get, the more revenue your business will generate over time.

Step One: Find Your Core Keywords

Finding your core keywords is an important part of ranking your website higher in the search results. Perform your initial keyword research and find no less than 5 but no more than 10 keywords that are most relevant to your web page. They should have a higher search volume and lower competition.

Step Two: Find Semantically Related Keywords

Go to Google’s Keyword Planning Tool and find semantically related keywords to your core keywords.

Step Three: Place Keywords in Buckets Based on Search Volume

Group your keywords into three buckets based on their search volumes. Now you will end up with head terms, body terms, and longtail keywords. This will give you a basic idea of the kind of monthly search volume you will receive if you could rank your website in the top 5 positions of Google. For example, the number 1 spot in Google receives an average of 36% clicks.

Step Four: Optimize Your Site from Tail to Head

Focus your attention on the longtail keywords since they are highly relevant to your content and will give you the chance of building content for more competitive head terms. The more words in a phrase, the lower the search volume would be. But such keywords are easier to rank for. Low-hanging fruits are ideal for conversion purposes. That is why you need to target longtail keywords in the short term to build relevancy and authority for your business in order to target more competitive terms in the long run.

Step Five: Start Mining Data

Take one of your main keywords, and look at the top 10 web pages ranking in Google for the specific terms. You can use a scraping tool like SEOTools for Excel (Windows only) or SERPS Bookmarklet to collect important data from each of these sites:

Domain authority
URL
Page authority
Number of root domains that link to the page
Number of indexed links

Place all this information in a spreadsheet for easy tracking. Repeat the process for the other main keywords, and add the data to a new sheet in the workbook. Now you can track your ranking position over time compared to what the results were when you were just starting.

The higher the DA of a website, the harder it will be for you to compete against that site. You may eventually get there, but it will take a lot of time. DA increases with domain age, traffic, and high-quality content. If the top results on Google have 90+ DAs and your’s is only 20, you shouldn’t expect to rank on top of Google for the specific keywords. Though it isn’t impossible to rank, it may take a lot of hard work and time.

Step Six: Backlink Profile Analysis and BackLink Detox

SEMRush’s Backlink Audit Tool or Open Site Explorer is a great tool to analyze the types of links pointing to your competitor’s website. You need to do this for each ranking URL to get a better idea of the strength of your competition. It will let you know how the competition is building links, and whether they are using spam techniques for the purpose. You will also know how many links come from directories or link lists and how many links are broken. You should also have a good plan to remove toxic backlinks from your website. At Scott Keever SEO, our SEO experts know how to eliminate toxic links from your website since we have perfected the process for more than 7 years.

Step Seven: Developing Your Action Plan

With this data, you can easily identify opportunities to attract better backlinks than your competition. Outranking a website means you should have more and better backlinks than the website you plan to outrank. Buying 1,000 more backlinks than your competition is not the answer to this. You should earn backlinks from high-quality and relevant web pages. You may consider writing guests posts or linking to something useful on a competitor site, and asking them to link to you. On the other hand, you can approach sites with broken links and ask the webmaster to replace the link with a relevant and quality link from your site. There are many other kinds of things that you could do to build quality and relevant links to your site.

Seem Too Complicated?

If the process seems too complicated, don’t worry, that is where you need professional assistance. One of the first things we do for our clients is a competitive analysis of SEO. We don’t jump in without knowing exactly what we’re up against. We will definitely analyze your site and see what could be improved, but analyzing your competition gives us more opportunities to give you the edge that you need to improve your keywords rankings.