Marketing Psychology: 5 Tips to Win Hearts (+ Examples)
Marketing is all about human behavior, so it makes sense that having an understanding of psychology could improve the way we approach marketing initiatives....
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While focusing on your own brand’s mission is key, not keeping an eye on your competitors is a risky move. After all, if you can’t see how fast your competition is going, they’re more likely to lap you in the race.
That’s where a competitor analysis comes in. By learning how to analyze what your competition is doing, you can adjust your marketing campaign to beat them.
Let’s dig a little deeper into what competitor analysis for SEO is and how it can help you stay on top of your game.
It’s likely that you already have an excellent idea of who your business competitors are. But these are hardly the only companies you need to consider when fighting for the coveted top spots of Google search results. During your SEO campaign, you may be facing competitors who don’t belong in your niche.
For example, if you want to rank high for the “best flowers in LA,” you aren’t just competing with the local florists. You could be fighting against designers and review sites, making your climb to the top spot twice as tough.
The truth about SEO competitors is simple: They’re the companies that rank high for the keywords you’re targeting — even if they aren’t your business competitors.
While analyzing your competition, look for weaknesses or gaps you could fill. (Image via Unsplash)
Luckily, finding your competitors is easy. All you need to do is enter your keywords into the search field and see what pops up on the first few pages.
You want to analyze the competition so you can:
All’s fair in love, war, and SEO, so you shouldn’t feel guilty about finding inspiration in your competitors’ campaigns.
While analyzing your competition, look for weaknesses or gaps you could fill. If the competitor ranks high for the same keyword, find out where they make mistakes or seem to come up short. Improve your efforts in those sectors, and you could come out on top. Here’s how to do it.
To strengthen your keyword search, you need to figure out which keywords your competitors rank for. This can help you find keywords with high search volume that they aren’t using enough. It can also help you understand what works in your specific industry.
Doing all that is fairly easy, thanks to numerous tools that help you analyze another website and see which keywords it ranks for.
You can use these same tools on your website to see how good your keyword efforts are:
These programs also allow you to see how well your website ranks for some keywords compared to the competition. You could discover money keywords that you’ve overlooked.
Since content is the pillar of SEO, you need top-notch ideas. An excellent place to get them is to analyze what the competition is doing.
How do you figure out how well their content is working? Find out which content got the competitor the most links. Achieving high-quality backlinks is imperative to ranking high with search engines.
Some link checker tools to help you include:
Once you find the competitor’s top content, check it for flaws. Maybe the word count is too low, the info is outdated, or their imagery is low-quality.
Take advantage of the information you’ve gathered to create similar content, only better. Your goal is to come up with the content that offers significantly more value to the target audience.
You don’t always need to go deep into content analysis. By using the above tools, you can simply get inspiration for tweaking your content strategy.
Pro tip: While it’s natural to cover similar topics to your competition through content, don’t simply imitate. You don’t want to look like a mere copycat (or dip into plagiarism territory), so make sure the content you publish follows your brand’s own voice and tone.
Seeking out dead pages is a time-consuming yet highly effective way to take advantage of your competitor’s mistakes. This part of the competitor analysis involves finding dead pages on your competition’s website that other companies have linked to.
Once you find it, you can reach out to those who have linked to this content, show them the page isn’t working, and provide them with a link to your content instead. (If you already have a relevant article, great! If not, write one up and publish it, then send away.)
Links to dead pages can lower the website’s rankings. That’s why people are more than happy to replace them with live alternatives.
Analyzing your SEO competition can help you gain valuable insight into what works in your industry. (Image via Unsplash)
If your competition is ranking high for your favorite keywords, see if you can find some flaws in their website design. From there, you can focus on making your website better and nullifying your competition’s efforts. Things to pay attention during a competitor audit include:
You can crawl the entire site to find out how your competitors structure subfolders, use internal links, and take advantage of on-page SEO. These tools can help:
For local companies, a Google My Business page can be a highly important SEO tool. Ask yourself: What is our competition doing to look appealing on this page?
If any of these components are lacking, you can capitalize on mistakes and hone your Google My Business page accordingly. If they do a great job maintaining this page, see what you can do to mirror them.
Analyzing your SEO competition through a competitor analysis can help you gain valuable insight into what works in your industry. It’s win-win: You can see what they’re doing right and determine ways to follow suit, and you can also capitalize on their mistakes or areas where they fall short.
Looking at what your competition is doing isn’t just a smart trick: It’s an integral part of a solid search engine optimization strategy.
Want to learn more about analyzing your SEO competition? Let’s talk.
This article has been updated and was originally published in May 2020.
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