The availability of Internet promotion creates competition the business world has never had before.
To check your competitors and ensure you stay ahead, your business REQUIRES (yes, in caps) legit SEO tools that WORK and gather accurate data on your competitors.
After trying several SEO tools, I want to share my experience of how I researched my competitors.
How Is SEO Competitor Research Important?
SEO competitor analysis is necessary to
- Estimate the demand of potential buyers and see how many offers exist in parallel with yours.
- Pinpoint your competitors’ strategies, strengths, mistakes, and successes to adjust your action plan and get the top rankings.
This activity can only be done with SEO software today because
- The Internet is full of similar websites you cannot analyze manually properly.
- Those websites have hidden and not-so-obvious components.
- Automated SEO tools visualize gathered data, giving you a systematized report that is easy to interpret and draw conclusions from.
And that, in turn, gives you clear information about what your competitors do right or wrong.
Comparing your work to theirs and bringing enhancements makes your business website more visible and helpful for potential buyers.
I recommend doing that using Rank Tracker by SEO PowerSuite.
After testing this competitor analysis tool, I found that this software guarantees comprehensive and deep competitor analysis and creates well-systematized reports for you.
So, for me, this is the best option of all SEO tools for competitor analysis.
How To Do Competitor Research?
You can use my SEO competitor analysis routine as your checklist. I will walk you through the whole process!
Suppose you sell wedding dresses. So…
Step 1: Know Who Is In This Field With You
Your competition analysis in SEO starts with identifying who is racing for buyers’ attention against you.
Identify your competitors by Googling keywords that must lead to your website.
Keywords are not merely words — these are info demands users have to type into the search engine to find ANSWERS, products, and services that fill their needs.
Let our main key phrases be
- minimalist wedding dress
- buy wedding dresses
- wedding dress
- gown
- white dress.
When using Rank Tracker by SEO PowerSuite, you should open the app and click the “Competitor Research” button.
Enter keywords, and you will see something like this:
This time we have over eighty results. Let us go to the first one.
Our task is to analyze this store to see which strategies are used to make it the #1.
You can (and should) check other websites, but we want to get higher than the first to take its place.
I also recommend using Google Rank Tracker to see your competitors’ visibility in the search engine. That becomes especially important when you search for your competitors by geo!
Step 2: Analyze The Technical Side Of Their Website
The second step in competition analysis in SEO is to use a SEO audit software and insert the link to your competitor.
You will see their resources’ status codes, www/non-www versions, pages with redirect links, mobile optimization, and other parameters that influence your position greatly.
For example, here is the result from that SEO competitor of ours:
And they have some errors! They have one resource with a 4xx status code, nine pages with 302 redirects, eight pages with long redirect chains, a broken link, a long meta description for one of their pages, and some dynamic URLs that are not user-friendly.
Focusing on the technical component, I usually check all those parameters after seeing the result. In this case, we must…
- Ensure we do not have pages with more than five redirects (Google rarely indexes pages with over five redirects, as Google bots do not follow more than that)
- Get rid of unnecessary redirects because they slow down page speed (page loading speed is important because users are unwilling to wait for more than three seconds for the page to load)
- Change the 302 redirects to 301 because 302s and temporary, and search engines tend to index previous URLs
- Check if there are any broken links and eliminate them etc.
Also, look at the SEO competitor’s domain strength. Like here:
You want to see that your domain strength is at least 0.01 points better than theirs!
Basically, the list of their mistakes becomes your checklist for improvements.
Move on to the next step only after guaranteeing your site’s technical side is better than the competitor’s.
Discover how to use a website auditor to improve your SERP positions here!
Step 3: Check Backlinks
Use the SEO Spyglass competition checker to analyze your business competitor’s backlink strategy.
You will see how many do-follow/no-follow links and redirects they have, their linking domains, anchor texts, linked pages, penalty risks, etc. For example:
Scroll down to see more details, statistics, the geo of those backlinks, and other facts that can help you adjust your strategy.
For instance, this particular example mostly has backlinks from the US:
And no wonder that its monthly traffic is around 454,739,840 from the US.
Another detail you can analyze during competition analysis in SEO is the cloud of your competitor’s anchors for backlinks:
Analyzing that cloud lets you see which keywords are already used in big volumes for URLs, and you can find other high-volume low-KD keywords to make them your best anchors for the backlinks.
Or-r-r you can pinpoint spammy anchors and excessive anchor usage and do much better than that to get to a higher position.
Step 4: Keyword Competitor Analysis
Many guides yell “research keywords” and never properly explain how to conduct keyword competitor analysis. The following is my usual strategy you can also try!
When using an SEO checker for keyword competitor analysis, be attentive to the following metrics:
1.) Search volume
Search volumes are how often a word/phrase is searched daily, weekly, etc. The best keywords are those with a volume over 1K.
Yet, note that some keywords are searched more in specific regions. That is when this equation needs another thing, which is…
2.) Keyword length (complexity)
Key length means how complex a searched phrase is. Short keywords are usually simple and contain one or two words that work for general search.
For example, “bridal dress” is a short, aka simple keyword. It is not specific and does not have details to narrow a user’s search down.
Hence, users will get results that display all kinds of dresses.
“Buy blue bridal dress big size Oklahoma” is a much longer keyword that has an intention (buy), details (blue and big size), and a location (Oklahoma).
Such a keyword users type gives them fewer results, but they are specific. A long keyword + big volume is your best take, especially when it has an optimal…
3.) Keyword difficulty (abbreviated: KD)
Keyword difficulty in SEO means how challenging it is to rank well with that key phrase depending on how “popular” it is.
KDs over 80 usually make a key phrase useless in most cases. Strive to use phrases with 0-50 KD because those have the best chances for you to fill the niche with your offers.
4.) So, what is the best keyword, and how to work with it?
The equation looks like this:
High Volume + Low KD + 3-10 Long Keywords = The Best Keywords
Learn the six best ways of finding keywords here!
The 10/10 case during keyword competitor analysis is when you see that your competitors fail to find and use keys like this.
For example, you can see that the “big size bridal dress” fits right into the mentioned equation, and no competitors in your geo use it.
Your best take here is to make it your prioritized keyword for a blog post/landing page, which will give you a great boost.
BUT! Even the best keywords from an SEO competition checker will not help you if you fail to use them optimally.
The #1 rule here is never spam! Spammy texts are not indexed well because search engines strive to give users helpful answers, not mixes of phrases.
Use those keywords and their synonyms 3-5 times through the text, and that will be perfect. For longer texts (for example, a blog post), use those key phrases 4-7 times.
Step 5: Check Your Competitor’s Visuals
You have done so much work, and this last step is to ensure you outclass your competitors in EVERYTHING and get the #1 position.
I recommend checking their visuals because Google and other engines pinpoint this component too.
Plus, it makes your website look better and more aesthetically pleasing, which also influences buyers’ behavior with the power of emotions.
Look at competitors’ pictures, videos, and website design details. Your goal here is to check if your site has good resolution and quality visuals.
That is not the most important component, but it is still necessary.
Final Words
SEO competitor analysis is challenging, and YOU CAN NAIL IT. And SEO tools for competitor analysis will simplify your journey, allowing you to get more insights and analytical reports with important facts on those who are trying to surpass you.
Be attentive to their mistakes, do better than them, and stay confident!
I hope that my experience was helpful. And also, I hope to see your website above all the other SEO competitors. Best of luck!