How Competitive SEO Analysis Helps your Website Rank Better

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In an internet world that is becoming increasingly competitive by the day, it becomes imperative to keep track of what others in your industry are doing. A thorough analysis of your competitor’s website design, quality and content will let you decide better what to have and what not to have on your website. Similarly, a meticulous research on their set of keywords and the difficulty level of each keyword will let you know the best ones to choose for your own website depending upon your industry or business niche. Below is a detailed description of how competitive SEO analysis will help you achieve better rankings with your website. Identifying your competitors The very first step you must take in the direction of good, long-term search engine optimization of your website is identifying your competitors. This can be done by creating a comprehensive list of websites that includes the websites of your industry competitors or peers, the top-ranked websites from your industry in Alexa and SimilarWeb and the organic search competitors from SEMrush. Identifying their position After identifying your competitors, you must identify their position on the web. You need to list down all the keywords that they are using which attain some ranking, and check the web traffic on their page using SimilarWeb. After that, check the ranking of your own keywords using GwtQuery, the SEMrush positions and search traffic using Similarweb. After doing this, you must single out the competitors that are using the same or similar keywords as you. You must expand your keyword list after that, including more keywords you might have previously missed out on, using Google Keyword Planner and SuggestMrx. Compare After the keyword and web traffic research is done, you must compare your website’s statistics with those of your competitors’. For keywords, you must compare the type, relevance, search volume, numbers ranked, and the ranking positions. For ranked page authority, you must compare the page authority and the domain authority, external links anchor text, external links volume, and external followed links volume, linking domains volume and followed linking domains value. After this, compare the ranked content. This includes keyword relevance, optimization of keywords, search snippet, format and social metrics. You must also compare the search result pages characteristics for each keyword, which encompasses indexed pages, pages with keyword in title, type of search result page, and number of results shown. Keyword Selection After competitive analysis of the keywords and the competitive websites, you must make your keyword selection. The factors that should determine your keyword selection are: Keyword relevance, search volume and profitability -Your ranking vs. competitor ranking -Your popularity vs. competitor popularity -Your content availability and optimization vs. competitor -Number and type of competitors in search result pages -As you can see above, competitive SEO analysis is not the solution to the problem; it is the beginning of a solution. This is something that needs to be done in order to achieve better rankings.