If you’ve been on the Internet for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen some pretty cool content. You may have even enjoyed it! But what about that other stuff? The stuff that isn’t as good but still gets a lot of traffic or shares. What’s going on there? How do these sites get ranked so high in Google? And how can you improve your own site’s ranking so that people find your content more easily? These are questions we’ll try to answer today:
Conduct a Site Audit
The first step in doing an SEO competitive analysis is conducting a site audit, which involves evaluating your current website’s on-page SEO and comparing it to other sites in your industry. This will allow you to identify any opportunities for improvement or new strategies that could help boost rankings on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!
You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush for this purpose as well as Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool (free). Both of these tools are great resources if you want more details about how certain keywords perform on other websites so they can be compared against yours too!
Review On-Page SEO
Next, you’ll want to review the on-page SEO of your competitors.
- Check the title tags. Search engines use these as a way of understanding what your page is about, so it’s important that they’re optimized with relevant keywords and phrases. Search engine crawlers can’t actually read them, but they do take note of the content and make recommendations based on what they find in each page’s contents.*
- Check meta descriptions. These are another way search engines determine what pages are about—and even if it’s not obvious at first glance (meta descriptions can be long), keep an eye out for any typos or grammatical errors.*
- Check meta keywords: The words used here can help inform searchers about who might find this site useful; if there aren’t any at all then try adding some more specific ones! This section should be descriptive enough so people know exactly why someone would want/need access.*
- Check URL structure: Make sure that all URLs point directly back towards where they came from so that users don’t get lost when navigating through different parts of your site quickly without knowing exactly where things begin anew (which would definitely happen if someone had recently visited another page without knowing where else nearby could lead).
Analyze Top Pages
The third step is to analyze your top pages, landing pages and referring domains.
- What are the top pages? If you haven’t done this yet, go back to the previous section and look at what you’ve done so far. You can use Ahrefs’ Top Pages report for this purpose.
- What are the top keywords? This will help you determine what kind of content people are searching for when they visit your site (and therefore should be written about). You can use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to find out more about these terms by entering them into their search bar along with “keyword research.”
- What is on each page? Are there any specific sections that get more traffic than others? For example, if one part of my site gets twice as many visits per month as another section but only has half as much content in it (it’s just an example), then I’d probably want someone else writing more articles in that section because I don’t want too much duplication across all areas on my site–that would waste time!
Compare Link Profiles
Link building is a key part of SEO and it’s important to understand how your competitors are building links. Look at the anchor text used by your competitors, as well as the number of links they have in their profiles. You should also check out all their referring domains since this can help you identify which sites might be connected with them or relevant to the industry you’re in.
Evaluate Social Media Presence and Activity
To measure the social media presence of your competitors, you’ll want to check their website (if it’s available), as well as their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. You can also see how many followers they have on each platform.
To measure the social media activity of your competitors, look at the number of posts per week; how many likes/shares do they receive? How often do people comment on their posts? What types of content do they post most often: text posts vs image-heavy images?
To determine whether or not your competitor’s efforts are successful in acquiring new customers through social media marketing campaigns against yours:
- Compare which platforms have more followers than others (e.g., Facebook > Instagram). Is there any discrepancy between these two numbers? If so, why would this be happening? What could be done differently by both companies so that one company does not get left behind by its competitor in terms of growth potentials across all three platforms simultaneously.”
Follow these steps to improve your SEO ranking
- Understand your competitors.
- Understand your website.
- Understand your audience.
- Understand your goals and budget.
Once you’ve done this, you can start to plan out how to improve the SEO ranking for each of these three areas:
SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. We’ve outlined a few ways to simplify your analysis, but there are always more factors at play than we can possibly consider here. The best thing to do is to follow these steps for an SEO competitive audit, then sit back and wait for the results! Good luck with your project—and please share any insights or tips you have about performing competitive analyses with us in the comments section below.