How to Analyze Your SEO Competitors

Do you want to know how to analyze your SEO competitors? If yes, check here 8 tips on how to analyze your SEO competitors.

Have you always had the feeling that no matter what you do, you are not doing well with search engines? While it is quite practical that you are doing things wrong, one other practical reason for your poor SEO performance is that your competition is truly very hard.

If you are in an extremely competitive niche, then your competition can be really crushing and you just can’t afford to maintain an eye on them.

Well, even if your niche isn’t that competitive, you will only be successful if you know how to analyze your competitors’ success and failure. And you should learn some best SEO tips to rank higher. So today I am going to share some best steps you can do to analyze your SEO competitors.

How to Analyze Your SEO Competitors

1. Find Who Your SEO Competitors Are

You can’t analyze your competitors if you don’t recognize who they are. In some cases recognize your competitors is very easy. For example, if you have an offline business as well as you know your competitors there, just make sure their sites and you are done.

However, in other cases, recognize your competition isn’t that easy. Your competitors could be blog or sites in your niche, blog or websites that rank well for your major keywords, or straight competitors for your long-tail keywords, and so on.

The list of your competitors might be an appealing long one and obviously, you can’t watch all of them. Perform a search among Google about your target keywords also make a list of the sites or companies that pop high in the search results. You can think about these to be your main competitors.

2. Visit Your Competitors’ Blog or Sites and Analyze Them

This is the best method to analyze your SEO competitors. After you have a list of your competitors – or at least the major ones. The next step is to visit their blog and website and analyze them. You should be watching if their blog or websites are designed professionally, if they have many articles, what the quality of their article is, whether they use static as well as dynamic URLs, etc. This basic blog or website inspection can give you a lot of information about how professional your competition’s Web existence is, therefore how likely or unlikely it is search engines to love them.

3. Examine the Keywords Your Competitors Use

Keywords have forever been the most important aspect of SEO success. This is why you can suppose that if your competitors are using keywords appropriately, their blog or website will rank well in search engines.

You might have some intricacy identifying the keywords your competition uses for the reason that what you think to be top keywords for your niche, may not be on their list at all. If you don’t identify which keywords they use, try inspection if they use your keywords – this is more than nothing.

Alternatively, you can use the Website Keyword Suggestion tools to check which keywords are supposed to do well for their blog or website. While doing the make sure, you might find lots of useful keywords you have skipped and start optimizing your blog or website for them.

You should also make sure the keyword density of your competitors’ keywords. The Keyword Density Cloud tool will facilitate you get a suggestion. Also, don’t forget to make sure the location of the keywords – i.e. are there keywords in the headings, Meta tags, image tags, page URLs, etc.

4. Check the Competition’s Backlinks

Backlinks are the additional backbone of good SEO rankings. This is why you require to thoroughly examine the backlinks of the competition. Look for their number along with origin, anchor text, etc. and you will get a hint of how your competition is doing on this front. Very often you might acquire some backlink ideas for you – i.e. if you see that your competitors have backlinks from admired sites you didn’t know about, contact the webmaster of the admired site to see if you can get backlinks from them, too. The tools you can use are free as well as some of the best are Backlink Anchor Text Analysis and Backlink Summary.

6. Check Other SEO Factors

Keywords, as well as backlinks, are important but they aren’t all. In order to get a thorough suggestion of how your competition is ranking, you require also checking your competitors’ Page Ranks in Google also how they perform in Yahoo as well as Bing. You should also look at the number of indexed pages the blog or websites of your competitors have with search engines.

7. Calculate Your Competition’s Presence on Social Media

Social media tend to drive lots of traffic to a blog or website. This is why you can’t skip a make sure how your competitors are doing on social media. Unfortunately, this makes sure is tough to perform. Social bookmarking sites are one of the types of social media as well as you can start your research from them. Have a look at several of the major social bookmarking sites to see if your SEO competitors have posted there along with how popular these posts are.

Twitter and Facebook are two other enormous resources of traffic. You can browse to see if your major competitors have profiles at these websites but unless you make friends with them, you will never know what accurately they post. Still, if their profiles have publicly available sections, this gives an initiative of what they do on Twitter and Facebook.

8. Examine How Your Competitors Are Using PPC Ads

Lots of businesses have figured out that using PPC to drive quality traffic is cheaper and abler than optimizing to rank well in natural search results. Google Adwords is the preferred alternative for PPC but there are also other networks lots of webmasters will use. One of the best tools, although it is limited to Google Adwords only, is the Analyze Competition tool by Google. It allows comparing how your PPC is doing in similarity to your competitors’ campaigns.

Monitoring your competition is a never-ending task. All the tricks listed in this article are quite a time consuming but if you don’t want to be left clueless about the world around you. You do require taking the time to perform the analysis. Still, if you see you can’t beat the competition, you will surely learn from them and this will help you be more efficient in your own SEO hard work.