SEO competitor analysis is crucial in optimizing your website for search engines. It allows you to understand what your competitors are doing to rank higher in search results and gives you insights into how you can improve your own website’s ranking.
SEMrush is a powerful tool that can help you conduct a thorough SEO competitor analysis. Here’s how you can do it:
Identify Your Primary Competitors
The first step in running an SEO competitive analysis is identifying your primary competitors in your industry or niche. You can use SEMrush to search for your primary keywords and note down the websites that rank in the top search results. You can also use SEMrush’s Domain vs Domain tool to compare your domain to your competitors’ domains and get a list of competitors.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Content Strategy
Analyze the types of content your competitors publish.
- Are they making videos?
- Infographics?
- Podcasts?
Analyze the traction each type of content sees.
For example, if your competitor has a YouTube channel and regularly publishes videos with only a few views each, they may not be optimizing that channel
In this case, you could start your own YouTube channel and publish high-quality, relevant videos. Check out this YouTube channel guide to learn more.
If Google is displaying video results for your top keywords, then your videos can appear in search results and generate more views and authority for your site.
With the Market Explorer tool, you can discover your competitors more broadly. Open the tool, select “Find Competitors,” enter your URL, and click “Research a market.”
Step 2: Analyze Your Competitors’ Organic Search Performance
Once you have identified your competitors, the next step is to analyze their organic search performance using SEMrush’s tools. Start with the Domain Overview tool, which overviews the domain’s organic search performance, backlinks, and top organic search keywords. This will give you a high-level view of your competitor’s SEO strategy.
Next, use the Organic Research tool to view your competitor’s top organic search keywords and their search volume, the organic search positions of those keywords, and the estimated traffic that those keywords generate. This will help you identify your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of their keyword targeting and content strategy.
You can also use the Keyword Gap tool to identify keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. This will help you identify content gaps and opportunities to improve your own content strategy.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines and improving user experience. Semrush’s Site Audit tool can help analyze the health of your technical SEO compared with your competitors. Set up projects in the tool for your and your competitors’ sites and run crawl-based audits. Once audits are complete, you’ll see an overview of the technical health of each website. Indicated with the Site Health metric.
This metric measures website technical health on a scale from 0 to 100. It takes into account technical SEO issues that could hinder your Google search performance. The higher the score, the fewer technical SEO issues. To improve your score, work to resolve errors and warnings listed in the report.
Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Backlinks
The next step is to analyze your competitors’ backlinks using SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics tool. This will help you understand your competitor’s link-building strategy and identify high-quality websites that link to your competitor’s website. You can also use the Backlink Gap tool to identify websites that link to your competitors but not to your website. This will help you identify link-building opportunities and improve your backlink profile.
Analyzing your competitor’s content strategy is also important for an SEO competitive analysis. You can use SEMrush’s Content Analyzer tool to analyze your competitor’s content, including the number of words, keywords, and social shares. This will give you insights into what type of content is performing well for your competitor.
The Topic Research tool is another useful tool that allows you to research topics related to your industry and analyze the content already ranking for those topics. This will help you identify content gaps and opportunities to improve your content strategy.
Step 5: Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Presence
Finally, it would help if you analyzed your competitor’s social media presence. SEMrush provides several tools to help you do this, including the Social Media Tracker tool, which allows you to track your competitor’s social media performance, including the number of followers, engagement rate, and top posts. You can also use the Social Media Poster tool to schedule and publish content on your social media channels.
The Brand Monitoring tool is also helpful for monitoring your brand’s online reputation and tracking mentions of your brand and your competitors.
Here’s a Quick Example Guide you can follow on the process of performing an SEO competitor analysis: Running an SEO Competitive Analysis Using Semrush
In conclusion, SEO competitor analysis is essential in optimizing your website for search engines. SEMrush provides a range of powerful tools to help you conduct a thorough competitor analysis, including your competitor’s website, content, and social media presence. Using these tools, you can gain valuable insights into what your competitors are doing to rank higher in search results and use that knowledge to improve your website’s ranking. Uncover competitor insights today.
Originally published in CaseyOrdona.com
