Knowing the strategies your competitors are using can help you improve your own marketing efforts. If you’re familiar with their content, social media presence, and SEO tactics, it will be easier to understand what they are doing right. And, where they might be falling short. Today we’ll walk through 8 key steps for conducting an SEO competitor audit. This will help you better position yourself against the competition. This blog post is intended for marketers who want to learn how to conduct a thorough analysis of their main competitors. As a result, identifying areas where they’re succeeding and places where they could improve.
A proper competitor audit lets you see how much work needs to be done in order achieve success online. In addition, helping you avoid some common pitfalls that may affect your overall performance.
Step 1: Finding Your Top Competitors
In order to get started with your SEO competitor audit, you must first find out who they are. You probably have a good idea of who some potential competitors in the industry may be from past experience or reputation alone. Therefore, take inventory on all of them! Next, take a look at how potential customers might search for our service and any keywords they may use. Google Keyword Planner is a resource tool will give you details like search volume and how competitive the keyword is. From there you can decide which keywords will deliver the best ROI. They are the ones that you should look to target.
Your SEO competitors can come from anywhere. And, they may even be a direct competitor. It isn’t only businesses in your own niche that would have an interest to outrank you on Google for certain keywords. Any site or page ranking for those same terms is also making it their goal as well!
Step 2: Keyword Evaluation
The 3 sections to an effective SEO competitor keyword evaluation are finding the difficulty involved in challenging competitors. In addition, checking how popular a certain keyword is and its industry-based competition levels.
Secondly, you will want to identify keywords your competitors are ranking for. However, you are not. This is known as “keyword gap analysis”. This allows you to compare your keyword rankings to another domain’s rankings. In addition, it will help you discover opportunities you may be missing. This information will let you create a keyword list that your competitor is targeting and determine their strategy.
The process of identifying useful keywords that both your and your competitors have overlooked is the third section to your keyword audit. Furthermore, these keywords will be easier to rank for but may still deliver notable results when it comes to organic traffic. That makes them very interesting from an ROI point of view.
Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors Content
One of the first steps in conducting your SEO competitor audit is determining what they are blogging about. This will help you establish keywords and knowing which ones perform well on their website. As well as, formats that may be preferred by readers. Competitors’ sites could just have three or four articles responsible for most traffic while others underperform significantly.
In order to ensure that Google considers your content as being of high-quality, it’s important for you to think about how relevant this information is. In addition, readers will appreciate comprehensive answers from a site or company in their niche which they can’t get elsewhere. Lengthy articles are better than short ones since these provide more detailed information relative towards reader intent.
This stage of your SEO competitor analysis requires more work on you part. You can’t use an SEO tool, like SEMrush or Moz Pro to mine data and come up with conclusions because they’re not subjective enough for this kind of research. To conduct a good study we need human judgments so people who know what’s best will review the content from other sites. In addition, compare it against our own. Therefore, giving us valuable insights into where improvement should take place next.
A successful content audit needs to be backed by clearly defined goals that will measure and score the website. These measurements are dependent on what you want from your assessment. However, some elements may include depth of content, consistency across pages or posts in a blog.
Step 4: Competitor On-Site Optimization
There are many competitive audit tools on the market that will help you with the research. For example, SEMRush, AHRefs, and Moz are key players for SEO tools. They will give you a plethora of new information to work with. These tools will show how often your competitors are publishing content. In addition, what types of content they’re publishing, and the keywords being targeted.
The areas you will want to make note of include the metadata of the site. Also, how the headlines are setup. This will include title length, and keywords in the title. Discovering your competitor’s interlinking strategies is another thing to watch. This is where a blog article links to other articles on their site while being related to the current blog. As a result, the reader can click and be redirected to other relevant articles within the site. Following this strategy is great for on-site optimization.
Step 5: Identifying SEO Backlinks
To accomplish a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking, your competitors must have a backlink profile. What is most valuable to learn is where your competitors are getting links from. However, there is no way to get this information manually. Therefore, you will need to rely on an SEO competitor audit tool. Identifying new backlink opportunities for your website is important. In addition, you will want to compare any backlinks currently on your site. And, benchmark them against your competitors.
Through analyzing the backlink portfolio of your competitors, you can see what strategies they used to rank on page one. In addition, you could then use that information and incorporate it into improving your own site’s rankings by earning more quality links from other relevant sources of traffic.
Step 6: Social Media Audit
Now that you have a good understanding of who your competition is and their backlink profile, it’s time to take an interest in social media. How SEOs can reap benefits from this relationship between the two industries still remains unclear. However, there does seem to be some correlation where content creation on one platform will lead people more inclined towards another. In turn, helping improve SERP rankings by association. It would also help if we knew how often they updated or engaged with followers/fans. In addition, total number of active followers and engagements.
Evaluate their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube accounts. This will help you determine how active you need to be in terms of sharing content. And, this will help you identify your first targets in terms of follower acquisition and engagement ratio. As a result, this information will help you modify your social media activities which can help you engage and improve customer relations.
Step 7: Review Site Structure & User Experience
Google’s core web vitals report is one of the latest factors in SEO. It measures and evaluates the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of websites. When done properly it can boost your SERP rankings. You’ll want to analyze your competitor’s technical SEO elements to ensure your site is in the same lane.
A clean site structure allows for easy crawling by search engines, which can improve your rankings. Therefore, a good website has a simple and uncluttered design that does not distract from the content on each page. Page depth should be limited at four clicks away so it’s easier than possible to access important information.
Google’s been focusing on improving user experience. Therefore, it is imperative that your website in line with your competitors when it comes to technical SEO. Website speed is another key factor. For instance, if your website is slower than your competitors’, unresponsive, or hard to navigate, you will need to correct this immediately.
Mobile optimization is still an important design and SEO issue. Google’s mobile-first indexing policy is a main indicator that all business websites must be mobile friendly. You can use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your competitors’ websites are mobile-friendly.
Step 8: Monitor Paid Ad Campaigns
Although SEO and paid ads do not correlate together for ranking, it is always good to monitor competitor ad spends. It’s possible that your competitors are outspending you by using paid traffic campaigns to generate conversions and sales. This could help your SEO strategy by identifying keywords they may be bidding for and using it in your website’s content.
