Competitor Analysis for SEO

In today’s world where there are thousands of businesses thriving, every business big or small has to face competition. Competition is steep irrespective of type, kind and scale of business. If you are an offline business, it is comparatively easier to identify your competitors. But this is a challenge if you are competing in the online space where competitors are present in more ways than one.

It is easy to find numerous websites dealing in same kind of services or products but it is misleading to think that only those websites are your competitors. In fact online competition assumes entirely different proportions and identifying and combating online competition is a different ball game altogether.

Competitor analysis is a crucial stage for effective SEO because of its influence on the overall online marketing strategy. This study can be complex and challenging but not with our team of experienced professionals who have the top rung expertise to hand out successful SEO. There are several steps in this process. Let us explain how we undertake the exercise for our clients to make it easy for them to understand.

As part of this stage it is important to be aware of the fact that online competition is not restricted to mere presence of similar websites. In online space your business competitors are not your only rival, in fact your contenders are all the ones those rank higher than you in search engines for similar keywords.

Identify client’s keywords: As the first step in this process, we start by identifying keywords for our clients depending on the business. Apart from primary keywords, we also work to find out related words and phrases that may be crucial to searches and could play an important role in achieving higher rankings. Knowing our keywords well is vital for strategic implementation of SEO.

• Identify competitors and their keywords: Though you may be fairly aware of whom exactly your competitors are, here we need to delve deeper to discover online competition. The next step in our logical sequence of actions is searching and identifying competitor’s keywords, especially those that are highly ranked.

• Validate competitors list: After we have created a list of competitors, our next step before we proceed is to validate them. This means that we verify their authenticity and try to gauge the extent of competition that they actually pose in the online space. We filter our list primarily on the basis of relevant keywords.

• Discover potential competitors: It is also important to find out beforehand the sources that could pose stiff competition in future though they may not be posing any direct threat currently. We do this by picking out websites through identification of similar keywords.

• Analysis of competitor’s keywords: Subsequent to finding keywords, we go on to analyze competitor’s keywords so that their success formula can be interpreted and help us in creating a better strategy to combat them. If not identical, we try to emulate similar successful elements in our implementations. Here we try to identify, understand and analyze keywords that have helped them attain high rankings in search engines.

• Compare keyword list: At this stage we have a complete comprehensive list of keywords. We compare our client’s shortlisted words with those of the competitors. This exercise helps us to add ones that we could have missed out on and delete the ones that seem unimportant or list them as secondary.

• Study competitor’s website: After we have identified present as well as potential competitors, we visit each site to decipher how they are structured, designed, quality of content, static or dynamic URLs, etc. and every other aspect. This gives us an idea about their secret to achieve high rankings.
  We also use tools if necessary to find keywords that we may have missed out and check the keyword density.

• Check competitor’s backlinks: Backlinks are crucial in SEO. So as a part of our competitor analysis, we also scrutinize their backlinks, their number, origin, anchor text, etc. This gives us additional ideas about different sources and sites.

• Evaluate other SEO factors: SEO has several aspects to it and every website follows its own unique strategy to stay ahead of competition and rank higher than their rivals. So we also analyze quality of content, page ranks on different search engines, number of indexed pages, metatags, on-page and off-page SEO, etc. and every other SEO factor.

Assess competitor’s social media presence and strategy: Social media has emerged as a very significant online marketing tool and has pervaded every walk of life. Active presence on social media has become imminent for online success. Hence we also examine this aspect of all competitors so that we can formulate strategies to beat competition.

Monitoring competitor’s activities is actually a perpetual task. However, we use these tactics to help us create effective SEO techniques for our clients helping them stay ahead of the race with updated knowledge and necessary implementations.