Regardless of your industry, you’ll have difficulty reaching your target audience online without some intentional SEO competitor research. The right search engine optimization practices could help your website grow organically through engaging, relevant content and strategic keyword usage. But you can’t outrank your competitors and achieve a top spot on Google’s search results pages unless you know who they are.
As a leading SEO company operating out of Spring Lake, NJ, Peppermonkey Media understands how to leverage research to analyze competing brands and gain some advantage. Below, we discuss the process and how to use it to help your brand boost its search engine ranking.
SEO Competitive Analysis Gains Ground For Branding
There is still intense competition online. An SEO competitor analysis is a process that assesses your competitor’s web pages’ optimization tactics, including keywords and backlinks. This vital information can help you enhance your site’s SEO strategy, ranking it higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you can get that right, your site is more likely to increase its click-throughs from potential customers.
It is certainly possible to create an SEO strategy without this information. However, the analysis will provide insight into how your industry’s top competitors get high SERP rankings. You’ll also learn where these sites lack specific optimization options so that you can implement them on your page.
Competitor Research Is More Important Than Ever
The research is essential for several reasons, especially for an increase in online visibility and a higher rank in your industry’s online rankings. Here are other benefits of solid competitor research:
Discover the Right Keywords To Get Ahead of the Competition
A keyword gap analysis will alert you to various search terms your competitors use that you do not. Using the right keywords is necessary when creating SEO content because they help search engine algorithms view your pages as relevant to online consumer queries.
Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
You can enhance your digital marketing efforts using the results of an SEO competitor analysis. The report’s data lets you create advertisement campaigns using accessible information.
Learn About Your Brand Mention
It’s imperative to know brand mention if you want your business website to be more visible to consumers online. An SEO competitor analysis will uncover what people who search for your goods and services online say about your brand across various channels. For instance, your brand’s name could appear in blogs, service reviews, and news articles.
If you’re not receiving many brand mentions, it means your company doesn’t have enough online visibility and isn’t attracting target audiences. You can solve this by improving your products and services to make them more attractive to consumers. But it might also be easier to grow your online presence with the data the research provides.
Perform an SEO Competitive Analysis in Five Easy Steps
Here are the essential steps in the SEO competitor research process.
1. Identify Your Competitors
It’s common for brands to assume they’re competing with certain businesses only to discover that they’ve overlooked a few, especially when an SEO attack is involved. We need a list of organic search competitors before we can analyze their performance. However, you don’t want to ignore competition that deals with a specific segment of your overall market.
Most people don’t realize that their biggest competitor could be a brand only slightly related to their industry or niche. For instance, a hardware store’s main competitors could be any businesses that sell tools and equipment, not only other hardware stores.
Identify your competition by assessing resources, time investment, and ranking, and stick to the competitors that have the most direct influence on your website’s traffic.
2. Evaluate Your Competitors’ Top Pages
Have you identified your business’s top competitors? Review their top pages to see which ones feature the most keywords or receive the most traffic. Don’t assume you know a brand’s most popular page; research is essential to a thorough competitive analysis.
3. Locate and Close Keyword Gaps
When reviewing keywords, note the phrases your pages rank that fall slightly behind your main competitor. Keyword gap tools will uncover the search terms your competition uses and ignores. Then, you can consider the following to close the keyword gap:
- Does the competition have better content for those terms?
- Does the competition have backlinks on those pages to boost their rank?
- How can you improve your pages to target those specific keywords?
Beyond closing keyword gaps, you can also improve your SEO by identifying keywords your competitor has recently lost. Start by assessing the terms with the highest search volume. Then, look at the pages featuring the keywords to see why they no longer rank (these may include spam, technical crawl problems, or irrelevant content).
4. Inspect Web Design and User Experience
The next step in SEO competitor research is evaluating your competitors websites. Review their web design. For example, different aspects of website design contribute to organic search engine rankings, including the following:
- Page security
- Site speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Attractiveness
- Ease of use
High-ranking websites are attractive, easy to navigate, secure, and relevant. The pages engage visitors, creating a great user experience. If your competitors’ lack these web design factors, you could improve your site to get ahead of them.
5. Review Backlink Profiles
According to Google, backlinks are one of the search engine’s top three factors for ranking web pages. However, over 66% of pages don’t have them. If your brand’s competitors incorporate credible backlinks on their websites, find out where they got them.
Backlinks help websites appear more credible to visitors. Use that information to improve your site. You might even become an industry authority!
Outperform the Competition With Peppermonkey Media
If you need a digital marketing agency to perform SEO analysis or competitor research and help improve your rankings, turn to Peppermonkey Media. Our marketing experts have over 18 collective years of experience managing millions in digital marketing budgets to help small businesses grow. We specialize in PPC, web design, SEO, and more.
Make SEO competitor research easy—request a digital marketing consultation with Peppermonkey Media at (888) 231-9764 today or connect with us online.
