How to Know and Analyze Competitor in SEO

Here are some simple steps to perform and you can do to analyze your SEO competition.

1. Identify Who are Your Competitors

If you don't know who they are. In some cases identifying your competitors is very easy - First, research keywords, if you haven’t already, and prepare a list of your most powerful keywords .

Next, check which sites are ranking well for each of your top keywords. A simple way to find your competitors is to go to Google and search for your top keywords.

For example, if you’re selling printers. A quick search on Google will show you the top sites competing for the keyword “buy printers online”:

You can also use a tool like SEMrush to get your list of competitors for each keyword:

2. Visit Competitors Site and Analyze their on-page Strategy

After you have a list of your competitors ‐ Analyse your competitors’ sites in detail to see how they’re optimizing their web pages. You should be watching if their sites are designed professionally, if they have much content, what the quality of their content is, Title tags, URLs structure, Meta descriptions, Header tags (H1, H2, H3 etc), Content relevancy with targeted keywords.

Before you continue make sure you read this guide on on-page SEO basics.

You can also use a tool like SEOchat’s Page Comparison tool and Web page SEO analysis tool. and Keyword Desnity Cloud.

3. Analyze Their Backlinks

If you see that your competitors have backlinks from popular sites you didn't know about, contact the webmaster of the popular site to see if you can get backlinks from them, too. 

In this step you will get some insights into how your competitors are building their backlinks, including:

• How many links they have
• Which sites they’re coming from
• Which of their web pages are receiving most links
• What types of anchor text they’re using

The great tools you can use: Moz’s Open Site Explorer & Backlink Anchor Text Analysis and Backlink Summary.

Click on “Compare Pages” in the search box and add top competitors:

Click “Compare” and you’ll be taken to the results of the comparison:

The default tab is “Compare Link Metrics” which shows you great insights into your competitors’:

• Total Links – The total number of links pointing to their sites, including internal links (links between your own pages) and external links (coming from other sites)
• Total External Links – The total number of links from other websites.
• Followed Linking Root Domains – This shows you how many unique websites (“linking root domains”) have links that Google counts for a site (follow links).

4. Analyze Other SEO  Factors

Keywords and backlinks are important but they aren't everything. You need also to check your competitors' Page Ranks in Google and how they perform in Yahoo and Bing. You should also look at the number of indexed pages the sites of your competitors have with search engines.

• Track competitors’ indexed pages - Use the command site:www.yourcompetitor.com to check how many pages are indexed because if you have a website of 15 pages, you are likely to get outranked by your competitor who has 3000 indexed pages.

• Check Age of the domain - You can use the tool: – Webconfs Domain Age Tool

•  Check the Domain Authority: – Seomoz Domain Authority is one of the ways to check how authoritative and powerful a website is, on search engines. A website with DA 70 is treated very well. For more information visit: -Seomoz Domain Authority

• Check out their Link profile: – This is a crucial and critical task and you need to figure out these questions:- Tools you can use: OpensiteExplorer, Ahref, Seokicks.de, majestic SEO, link research tool, backlinkwatch and many more.

• Set up Google alert with their brand name in  keyword:- Google alert is a powerful tool that sends you updates for the keywords which you create an alert for. For example, if you created an alert for your competitor’s name or domain name and your competitor gets press coverage, then you will receive an update of the URL that can help you a lot. For more information: The Ninja’s Guide to Google Alerts
• Check page load speed, content length and Alexa Ranking
•  Do they have a blog?
•  How many visitors your competitor has?:- Use tools like compete.com, Quantcast, statscrop.com, Alexa.
• Target weak Competitors:- What if your competitor has a PR-6 website with thousand of high quality links and extremely high Domain Authority? Now it’s better to concentrate on your weak visitors having low PR and backlinks because of the fact that the result will be much faster.
• Scan their social accounts and monitor mentions   

5. How to beat the competition:- 

The only way you can beat your competitors is by gathering as much information as you can about them. Find out what they’re doing right and how they’re attracting customers, and then use this valuable information to overtake them.

When you’ve completed your SEO competitor analysis:

• Update your list of top competitors
• Update your list of keywords
• Use those promising new keywords you’ve discovered to create new pages on your site

Finally, don’t forget to revisit your SEO competitive analysis once every couple of months so you’re always up-to-date with what your competition is up to.

How do you stay abreast of your competitors’ SEO strategies?