A bit of competition never hurts, right?
Well… it kind of does hurt if that competition is winning away your potential, or even existing, audience.
If you thought your SEO research starts and ends with your own website, you’d (unfortunately) be mistaken. In the SEO world you need to know what your competitors are up to too. So that you can keep being the winner that you are (or have the potential to be!)
What is SEO Competitor Analysis?
It’s all about learning what is working best for other people and building on that success. It’s scoping out the keywords, content and links of your competition to see what you could implement to your website to make sure your content is reaching more people than everyone else.
This sounds mean. And perhaps it goes against your values or mission. You don’t exist to ‘beat everyone else’... but if you truly believe that you’ve got something good to offer, that your content is authentic and you have something that will impact people’s lives for the better - then OF COURSE you want to be beating all your competitors. You need to win.
SEO competitor analysis will help you to see new opportunities, tactics and ideas that you might not have thought of before. It is a piece of research that will help you get more users (traffic is the jargon-y word) to your website.
How can you get your competitors' audiences and users to your website?
SEO competitor analysis can help you see who your competitors actually are. Show you what to be talking about on your site; what topics to cover, which images to use, what website users are interested in.
It can help you create a plan to be able to beat the competition.
In its simplest form, SEO competitive analysis works by seeing what works for your competition and tells you how to use this information to improve your own website SEO.
Where to start with competitive analysis
You probably think you know who your immediate competitors are. You might be a dog rescue charity. If there are other dog rescue charities in your area - they are your obvious competitors, right? But what if you also offer services like: education, animal welfare, selling pet products… you are then competing against online services who will be using the same keywords as you to attract users to their sites and rank highly for the same things you offer.
Who are your competitors?
Your highest SEO competition are the businesses/websites who appear on the first page of the searches for the keywords you are targeting. They might not even look like direct competition in ‘real life’ but if they are appearing on that first search page - they are your business competition.
So, that’s where you start. Identify your competitors.
Practical things you can do to analyse your SEO competitors
See what Keywords other organisations are using, are you missing out on some opportunities. Can you see any gaps in what they’ve misse?
How fast do your competitors' pages load? Slow loading pages aren’t rated highly by Google. Are you pages slower?
What about site structure? Do you have pages that need to be improved, are there things that annoy you on your competitors' sites that you can learn from for your website?
Have a look at their site on mobile and desktop - are the pages optimised for mobile? (meaning, do they look right and work properly when you’re viewing on your phone.)
Honestly, the list goes on and gets more technical the deeper you go. You can’t analyse a websites ‘behind the scenes data’ without an SEO tool. But while you weigh up if you want to be the best in your field and reach the most people possible (and want Wild SEO to help you out with some in depth SEO competitor analysis) you can make some quick wins…
Is all your content relevant and needed on your website?
Fix any broken links
Make sure your keywords are for the audiences you want to be reaching
Think about the users experience on your site - is it easy to find what you are looking for?
Small improvements made regularly are going to help you massively in the long run.
Keep monitoring your website, keep checking in on your competitors and always remember that search engines are adapting all the time. You need to be in it to win it!
Also remember - we’re here to help! Contact us now.