A Guide to Analyzing Your Competitor’s SEO Strategy

Aim: To provide you with a step-by-step guide on how you should analyze the SEO strategy of your competitors.

Optimal Outcome: To come up with an SEO strategy that works well within your business industry and gain an understanding of your competitors' strategies that worked for their company so you can take opportunities by utilizing it as your own.

What do you need to start: To follow this SOP, you need to use SEO tools such as, but not limited to, Google Search Console and Ahrefs.

Why is this SOP Important: Analyzing your competitors' SEO strategies is essential to grow a business' brand recognition. Knowing the SEO strategy that was utilized by your competitors would allow you to outrank them in search rankings and possibly dominate your industry. You can also see your business' weaknesses through SEO analysis, as it reveals the topics and strategies that do not work for you.

When and Where to execute: Before creating an SEO plan for your business, you must learn to check and analyze other businesses in the industry first. Especially on those companies who are popular in the field, they can help you with eliminating SEO strategies that are not effective.

Who Should Be Doing This: This task should be done by the search engine optimization (SEO) specialist in your company.

SEO Analysis

Search engine optimization (SEO) analysis refers to the identification of problems and strengths of a website that furtherly affects its search ranking and web traffic. Aside from analyzing its content, you can also use some SEO tools to identify whether the online contents of the businesses score high ranking or not. To improve a website, SEO analysis is done routinely to determine the aspects of the website that may not work the same anymore and how to improve those aspects to catch up with the competitors in the field.

Execution

Resources/Tools & Set up

• Ahrefs Site Explorer

• Moz’s Site Explorer

• Google Maps and Search

• BuzzSumo

Analyzing Your Competitor’s Strategy

• Identify your key competitors in the industry that you are in.

To identify your competitors in the field that your business is operating, you need to search your keyword on a search engine and see the list of competitors that rank higher than you in the SEO ranking. You can easily use Google or Ahrefs Site Explorer. This keyword search is advisable for businesses with a specific industry, but for blogging sites, there would be too many keywords to exist. This is where Ahrefs Site Explorer comes in helpful using the following steps:

1. Enter your domain link on the search bar.

2. Click Organic search.

3. On the right of the Intersection graph, you can see the Competing Domains. These are the domains that Ahrefs find to be relevant in your domain, hence, considering them as your competitors.

• Check their target keywords.

Keyword research is a crucial aspect of SEO because the exactness of the keyword that you are utilizing in your website would yield positive results on your website ranking. You need to balance out the keywords that you would adopt because high-ranking keywords may also mean more competition. To analyze your competitors’ keywords, you can also use Ahrefs Site Explorer. To utilize this:

1. Enter the domain of your competitor that you want to examine.

2. Under Organic Search, click Organic Keyword to determine the activity of your competitors’ keywords.

3. You can see the Position, Volume, CPC, and Website Traffic that these keywords have contributed to their website.

4. Analyze and adopt the keywords that you think might be helpful for your own store website to increase your place in rankings.

You can use these keywords repetitively and strategically through your posts and other content that you can produce in your marketing platforms.

• Analyze their top performing pages and contents.

Another contributing factor to a website’s SEO is its popular pages. Some of the articles, blog posts, and other contents have high ranking in terms of keywords and increasing website traffic. To discover the top performing pages of your competitors, you can use an online tool such as Ahrefs or Moz’s Site Explorer to analyze these pages and Buzzsumo to analyze the contents.

Using Moz’s Site Explorer

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. Click on the Top Pages tab.

3. After clicking the tab, you will see the Page title & URL, Page Authority, Linking Root Domains, Inbound Links, and etc.

4. Depending on the aspect that you want to focus on, the information included in the report will be helpful in analyzing the SEO of your competitor’s website.

Using Ahrefs Site Explorer

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. Beside the search bar, you need to set the mode to Prefix by clicking the dropdown menu.

3. Then, click the Top pages above Top subfolders.

4. The results should be ranked by their website Traffic, Value, Keywords, and the Page URL must be listed.

Using Buzzsumo (for Top contents)

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. You can change the scope of the Top contents by Filtering the date or Sort by Total Engagements, Number of Links, Social Media Shares, and etc.

3. In sorting it, you can choose the publicity that you want to create for your business, either for search engine rankings or social media aspects.

• Study their backlinks.

Backlinks are also known as inbound links. These links determine the search engine ranking of a website, depending on the quality and quantity of the backlinks that they have. To outrank your competitors, it is important to outrank their backlinks too. To do this, you need to learn that high quality backlinks are a priority. By the utilization of Semrush’s Backlink Analytics, you can study the crucial backlinks of your competitors. Follow these steps:

1. After navigating to Semrush’s Backlink Analytics, you must enter the domain link of your competitor.

2. Click Analyze.

3. In the Overview tab, you will immediately see the total number of backlinks, referring domains, monthly visits, keywords, and etc.

4. Switch to the Backlinks tab.

5. You can search Source pages among these backlinks to make the task easier, but you need to analyze each backlink whether they are Google-recommended or if they have high website traffic as well. After choosing backlinks, you can outreach to them and follow the process of link-building.

• Revise their broken pages.

Broken pages are links that worked in the past, but are not working currently. Although these pages do not work, it does not mean that the content is not working for the public, it might just need a little revision. You can utilize Ahrefs Site Explorer to investigate this matter so that you can create similarly better content about it.

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. Click Best by links and click the dropdown menu to filter the links to 404 not found. This filter allows you to see broken pages and their content.

3. To sort this information, sort the link in Referring domains (high to low).

4. You can now see and analyze the broken pages’ contents to revise it in accordance with your business.

• Review their social media platforms.

Having an excellent brand reputation comes from successful marketing and content from social media platforms. By using BuzzSumo, you can analyze the content of your competitors and which of them has high engagement and views.

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. You can sort it out by Total Engagements.

3. On the right side, you can see all of the listed social media sites and their Total engagements.

• Analyze the performance of each content type.

Identify the performance of different content types that your competitors utilize in their website pages. Some of the content types available for websites would be infographic, poster, videos, images, podcasts, and blog posts. If video and image contents have more website views than blog posts, then it might be wise to switch your content type to graphics.

• Determine their most linked contents.

A website’s most linked contents leads to increase in the website traffic. The process of obtaining a website’s most linked contents is similar to the broken pages, only that you analyze working pages this time.

1. Enter the domain of your competitor to see its performances.

2. Click Best by links and click the dropdown menu to filter the links to HTTP code. This filter allows you to see working content pages.

3. To sort this information, sort the link in Referring domains (high to low).

4. You can click the results indicated under Referring domains to see websites who link to the competitors specific content that you see.

Conclusion

You’re done! Always remember that analyzing your competitors' SEO strategies will help you establish your own business and improve it towards success. Website traffic, backlinks, contents, and the website's top pages contribute meaningfully to the search engine ranking of your competitors' website so it is preferred to look into these things.

• There are a lot of existing online tools in the search pages that allow you to be productive and generate reports that are necessary for analyzing the SEO of a website. Most popular softwares in this field are Semrush, Ahrefs, and BuzzSumo.

• As important as the most linked contents, broken pages also have a contributing factor to analyzing the SEO strategy because it supplies the weak points that your competitors have made in the past. It may be a content that was not well accepted by the public, or it may just be a little off with the keywords.

• You can use your competitors' successes to enhance your own website. In terms of link-building, you can outreach with multiple link owners to collaborate and give your websites more prominence.

• Analyzing their social media presence also has an impact on their website's visibility online, because people would trust the reviews that they can see through these platforms. As much as possible, it is advisable to be active on all sites.