So what is a competitive analysis report, and why should you create one for your business? A competitive analysis report is a detailed information sheet about your website's competition. It usually contains the website's most important characteristics (such as domain rankings, social media profiles, links, potential risks and more) so that you can make informed decisions on optimising your website.
Creating a competitive analysis report requires researching your SEO competitor's website content and related elements, such as keywords and links. The report can include analysing keywords, competitors' backlinks, keyword gaps and the top content.
A competitive analysis report allows you to observe what your competitors are doing and incorporate it into your SEO strategy. Rather than guessing what keywords to use, content to write and links to create, you can use the report to learn what has worked for others and build from there.
Without keeping up with the latest trends, companies can go out of business instantly. But regardless of whether your industry is prone to seismic change, you should know what drives your clients' decisions. This is where a competitive analysis report comes in handy, giving you an overview of your competitors and your market.
When you regularly analyse your marketplace through competitive analysis, you'll notice improvements to competitors' existing products or services and potential threats from new competitors. As such, this helps you adjust your strategy accordingly.
For SEO competitive analysis, follow these steps:
Identifying your SEO competitors is the first step. When undergoing this step, it's important to remember that your largest market competitors may not necessarily be your biggest SEO competitors. Smaller companies can have excellent SEO and perform better than their competition in the digital world.
Identifying your competitors shouldn't be a guessing game. When you rely on your instincts to figure out who your competition is, you may miss some important details. Often, large companies concentrate on high-volume keywords and neglect long-tail keywords, which allow smaller companies to gain a competitive advantage. So conduct a wide-ranging SEO comparison and analysis of various keywords. Next, check out the top 10 or 20 sites that consistently rank for them.
Identifying non-competitor sites depends on factors such as current ranking, resources and effort invested. Remember, the more established or bigger the site, the more effort you will need to devote to outranking it, affecting your overall strategy.
So focus instead on competitors who will impact your traffic the most. Your lost traffic will likely come from these sites.
Often referred to as keyword gap analysis, competitive keyword analysis helps you uncover keywords that your competitors rank high for but not you. To optimise individual pages, you should conduct a keyword gap analysis.
Look for keywords relevant to your business, highly searched for or likely to result in sales. Ideally, the keywords you choose should also be ones that you can rank well.
Manually analysing keywords is difficult because there may be thousands of keywords that you or your competitors rank for. The good news is that there are simple solutions and keyword analysis tools you can use to make things easier.
Once you discover relevant keywords for your business, you can create a page dedicated to ranking them. By doing this, you have a chance to attract customers to your site instead of the competition.
Content ideas can be developed using keywords. Aside from keywords, it is also a good idea to check out your competitors' most successful content. This content may be the ones that have earned the most links for your competitors. Links are essential for ranking, so focusing on topics others link to is a good idea. Once you identify your competitors' best content, you can significantly improve it in one or more ways. Afterwards, you can share your content with a similar audience.
Rather than simply copying your competitors' content, make it significantly better. It could be enhanced with more information or eye-catching graphics–anything that would improve its appeal and utility.
You can also determine your competitor's top pages by looking at the pages' traffic. You can identify good topics based on this information with accurate traffic estimates for each page.
Backlink analysis involves analysing the inbound links that point to a website. By studying these links, you can learn a lot about your competitors' SEO tactics, such as the type of content they're producing, their link-building strategy and how powerful their backlink profile is.
As you analyse your competitors' backlinks, you should consider the number of backlinks, the domain authority of websites that link to theirs and the relevance of the links in general.
Understanding the right keywords isn't enough. To succeed with your keyword, you must understand search intent.
The idea is to understand what the searcher is looking for by getting inside their head. You can do this by looking up a keyword you want to target. You can also use tools that would provide a SERP analysis report on a keyword's monthly volume, difficulty, priority and more.
Using the relevant data, prepare a competitor analysis report. With this report as a basis, you can develop your SEO content strategy. Please make a list of keywords and content ideas and save it. The next step is implementing the content strategy and contacting external sites if necessary.
After you publish new content or re-optimise old ones, you should track their performance. Ensure your competitor analysis strategy works by auditing your keywords regularly and creating competitor analysis reports.
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