Running a successful business means getting ahead of the competition whenever possible. To become a leader in your industry, it’s essential that you understand your competitors and how they run their operations. If you can provide customers with features, services, and products that your competition is unable to provide, you may be able to grow your customer base and bolster the success that your business is currently having. In order to learn more about a competitor, it’s highly recommended that you perform a competitor analysis, which is particularly important for your search engine optimization efforts.

A competitor analysis is a lengthy process that involves looking at the content, links, and keywords that your competition uses for their search engine optimization. Once you have performed this analysis, it’s possible to reverse engineer the results into SEO techniques that you can use to enhance the visibility of your website. Without performing this kind of analysis, you would need to make guesses on the types of keywords and content to place on your website, which has a much higher chance of being unsuccessful.

Keep in mind that it’s very important that you research your competition before using this specific tool for SEO. You need to know who your competition actually is before you perform an extensive competitor analysis for SEO.

If you’re thinking about conducting a competitor analysis, the following provides a close look at what it takes to do so and the benefits it can provide to your brand.

SEO Competitor Analysis Questions You May Have

A SEO competitor analysis can help you answer a wide range of questions that you might have about your competition and how they have been able to garner success. The results from this analysis can be used to improve your brand while also helping you react quickly to any moves that you believe your competition might make in the near future. There’s almost nothing worse for a company than not knowing who their competition is. Without this knowledge, you could find your business losing market share within your specific industry. The types of questions a competitor analysis should be able to answer include:

• How can I figure out who my competitors are?
  
• What do I need to beat my competitors?
  
• How do I determine what topics to cover?
  
• Where can I find links?
  
• How do backlinks help my SEO strategy?
  

If you can answer each of these questions, you’ll be in a much better position to adapt to the market and understand your competitors. It’s also important to answer these questions if you’re about to perform a rebranding for your business. Whether your company got off to a slow start or has recently experienced a downturn, a rebranding can revitalize your business and help you grow it to new heights. With the information that you gather from these questions, your rebranding strategy should have what it needs to garner success.

SEO Competition Analysis Tips

When you perform a competitor analysis for SEO, you should be able to drive more organic traffic to your blog by identifying keywords from your competitors that have been successful. Without this analysis, you would be required to guess the keywords and phrases that are most likely to get more organic traffic to your site, which isn’t nearly as reliable.

Once you have identified the keywords and phrases that have been effective for your competition, you can integrate similar keywords into your site content in order to improve your search rankings, which should enhance site visibility and increase customer conversion rates. Keep in mind that your website must also be well designed once visitors enter your site. Speed is everything, which is why you should remove anything that could slow your website down. Here are the top seven SEO tips that can help you beat out the competition.

1. Focus on Interacting with a Human Rather Than a Search Engine Algorithm

While it’s important that you implement the right keywords in your site content and make sure that your website is well optimized, it’s also essential that you focus on interacting with a human when you create content for your website. Real quality engagement occurs when visitors to your site are provided with content that’s relevant to them. Even though keywords can help increase site visibility, they won’t automatically improve the quality of your content.

Once a user gets to your site, they need to have content at their disposal that will engage and intrigue them to continue doing business with you. Instead of writing for search engines, it’s important that you perform SEO copywriting, which focuses on putting users first by writing content that’s helpful to them. Search engines like Google will reward websites that write useful content since this content will engage site visitors.

2. Have a Strong Web Analytics Site for Research

Once you have begun to implement various search engine optimization techniques, it’s essential that you make use of web analytics. The top sites for web analytics include Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush.

When you use the right analytics tool for research, you’ll be provided with detailed reports that measure the effectiveness of your SEO. It’s important to use web analytics because this type of software will allow you to understand how effective your SEO currently is. If a certain keyword is failing to gain traction, it’s better to make adjustments to your SEO techniques instead of wasting money.

3. Include Unique Meta Descriptions

Every page that you create on your website should include unique meta descriptions, which are descriptions that users will see when pages of your website appear on search results. It’s important to understand that Google and other search engines don’t like when a website has duplicate content, which is why every meta description should be unique. The meta description that you add to each page can be the difference between whether the user clicks on your website or travels to another search result.

4. Keep Your URLs Short

Every URL associated with your website should be relatively short and readable if possible. You’ve likely traveled to a web page with an URL that consists of dozens of numbers and letters after the main portion of the URL, which only serves to make the web page seem messy and poorly designed.

However, lengthy URLs can also confuse search engines like Google. Keep in mind that search algorithms follow users as opposed to websites, which means that the algorithm will have the same reaction as the user. Make sure that every URL on your site is comprised of 2-4 words, which ensures that the URL is friendly with search engines and memorable to site users.

5. The Importance of Social Signals

Social signals are also important for search engine optimization. Even though Google has yet to add social signals to their main algorithm, these signals can still alter your search engine rankings. If you don’t know what social signals are, they refer to shares, tweets, pins, and likes on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

As such, it’s important that you perform a significant amount of social media advertising, which should be a large component of your marketing campaign. You can gain more social signals by creating content that will be shared across accounts, encouraging readers to share your content, adding share buttons directly to every post, and hosting social media contests.

6. How Vital are Images in SEO Service

Images are a critical facet of SEO that can add a premium look and feel to your content. When a user is searching for a specific image on engines like Google and Bing, they will type in keywords that take them to the image they’re looking for. With this in mind, it’s recommended that you add keywords to each image you post with your written content. When implemented correctly, users should be taken to your images and website when searching for relevant keywords.

7. Why It’s Important to Link to Other Sites

Linking to other websites is necessary if you want to increase the visibility and popularity of your website. When you provide site visitors with links that take them to high-quality content, your website will be viewed as more reliable and more relevant. Think of these links as support for the article that you’re writing.

If you mention a statistic in one of your blog articles, you should include a hyperlink that takes the user to the exact study where this statistic was taken from. While linking to other websites and content will cause users to leave your website temporarily, including these links in your content allows you to send traffic to other websites that can be tracked, which will invariably increase the value of your website while also helping to guide the discussion among site visitors.

Conclusion

Performing SEO competitor analysis is very important if you want to improve your business strategy and make sure that this strategy is well-rounded. When you understand more about the competition, you can avoid some of their pitfalls while also adhering to the SEO strategies that allowed them to obtain success. The analysis that you conduct gives you the ability to be wholly informed about the competition, which can pay dividends in many ways.

If you implement strategies that were successful for your competition, these same strategies will likely be successful for you and may help you improve site traffic. The tips listed above work as a great starting point when you begin to perform search engine optimization. Once your SEO techniques have been implemented, you can assess your work with a web analytics tool.