Several things factor in the growth of your business. One such factor is your knowledge about the market and your competitors. Similarly when it comes to the ranking of your website in SERPs, employing an SEO Competitive Analysis can turn out to be a game-changer for your website’s popularity and ranking.
Don’t know how to do a competitive analysis for your business? No worries! We are here to help you do it in 5 easy steps. Let’s dive in!
Step 1: Keyword Research
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The very first thing that you need to determine is your niche and focus keyword. Know the goal of your business and website. What problem are you going to solve with your website?
Once you know the niche of your website, you need to know your focus keyword. While determining your focus keyword, make sure it’s not the company’s name until your company is too popular.
People are more likely to search for their problems and their solutions related to your niche. So, make sure that your focus keyword is something your target audience is likely to search for.
Now that you have your focus keyword, the next step is to determine related keywords that you can use for empowering the SEO of your website. There are a lot of tools on the internet that can help you with this.
Step 2: Identifying Competitors
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Alright, now you have all your keywords with you. Just do a few searches on the internet for those keywords and see which sites appear on the top of the search results page. Note them down.
Do these searches across various search engines and check whether the sites that appear on the top have the same niche as yours or not. The sites that have the same niche are your competitors.
Great! Now you know who your competitors are. Next, you have to go into their sites and see the type of content they produce.
When you know the steps your competitor takes for ranking higher on SERPs, it becomes easier to build a powerful SEO strategy.
Step 3: Industry Averages:
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Now that you know who your competitors are, you have to dig deeper into their profiles. Various tools across the internet can effectively help you in getting insights into their business profiles.
Some tools can also tell about the keywords they use and the amount of traffic they are getting. Some tools tell you the source of traffic for your competitor’s site as well!
Just take some help from such tools and know the industry averages. This will be immensely helpful in further planning for your website and content.
You can also download their backlink profile to know what kind of bloggers they take help from for the backlinking.
Step 4: Audit Social Media and Content
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Now it’s time to dig deeper into their content and social media profiles. First of all, follow them across various social media platforms to know the type of content they publish there.
The next thing to do is to analyze. Analyze the frequency in which they come up with new posts. Also, try to determine the patterns in which their content varies across the week, month, and year.
There are various questionnaires available on the internet that can help you with content and social media audits. Make sure to use a good and effective one to gain proper insights.
Step 5: Build Your SEO Strategy
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Now that you have all the necessary information about your competitors, it’s time for processing all the data to gain knowledge about industry trends and build a powerful strategy based on that.
Use their backlink profiles to know from where you can drive traffic to your website. Knowledge about their content strategy will help you in planning your content so that people like it the most.
Next, you’ll want to determine how many times you have to post on social media on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Having a good number of followers on social media can increase the chances of your page ranking higher on SERPs.
Conclusion
We all need to do competitive analysis at some point in our lives. Whether it’s for business or any other purpose, it’s great to have proper knowledge about the industry you are into and the kind of work you are expected to do. SEO Competitive Analysis can be easy when the right steps are taken at the right time.
