SEO Competitive Analysis: Why Is it Important?

Stealing other people’s work is wrong on any level. Using your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to improve your own performance? That’s just smart business. Every company in any industry should always keep a close eye on what their main rivals are doing. It’s no different when it comes to SEO.

Search Engine ranking algorithms are one of the most mysterious components of the ever-changing world of digital marketing. A detailed competitive analysis is a fundamental aspect of any SEO marketing strategy and can serve as a road map for what you need to do in order to gain the upper hand over your competitors.

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Ready to leave your rivals biting the dust after beating them at their own game?

Here’s how an SEO competitive analysis will help you do that.

Why An SEO Competitor Analysis is Vital to Your Success

Marketing is all about explaining to potential customers why your product or service fits their needs the best. The only way to do that is by studying what your competitors are doing. An SEO competitive analysis gives you insight into why competitors are outranking you and what to do about it.The goal is to get a panoramic view of what you’re up against and where your opportunities are.

How well do you know your competitors? Are they working on anything new? Do you know anything about the strategies they’re using for success? If not, then you probably should. Why? Because conducting a detailed SEO competitor analysis is vital not only for matching your competitors, but giving you an edge and ultimately outranking them.

Benefits of an SEO Competitive Analysis: Why Is it Important?

Healthy competition encourages innovation and prevents complacency. But, it’s definitely more fun when you’re the one on top, and people are trying to figure out how to get the best of you, instead of the other way around. The only way to do that is through conducting regular SEO competitive analysis.

In SEO, as in life, the mantra of “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” remains valid – the importance of being proactive rather than reactive is critical to your brands success.

Here’s why no business can afford to neglect a strong SEO competitive analysis in 2022.

1. Identify your actual competitors

When you do SEO, focusing solely on your own website’s visibility and ranking can be tempting. However, SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How can you win if you don’t know who you’re up against? Who is the real threat?

The success of your SEO strategy is highly dependent on how your competitors’ websites perform, rank and the tactics they use. Surprisingly, one of the first things a competition analysis will do for your company is assist you in determining who your genuine competitors are. Putting together a good competitive analysis demands a good understanding of industry hierarchy. You might believe the person down the street is dominating the search engines, while it might actually be a hidden rival you least suspect.

2. Utilize Your Strengths

There are going to be things you do better than your competition. When you figure out what that is, you can focus on those aspects and continue to improve them, in order to keep that leg up on your competitors with your “secret ingredient”.

3. Pinpoint Gaps in Your Strategy

Likewise, there will certainly be areas where your competitor has the upper hand. No SEO strategy is perfect. Even if you think that your SEO strategy is pretty impressive, there’s a good chance that it might lack something. By looking at your competitors’ SEO strategy, you can see what they are doing that you aren’t. It helps you turn your rivals’ weaknesses into your advantage, and discover new tactics that can help your business grow.

4. Get The Right Keywords

Finding the right keywords and using them correctly is crucial if you want to increase the organic traffic to your website. You may use a keyword gap analysis to figure out what terms you’re missing, yet your competitors are using the most. Keywords are crucial in SEO, and if you see that certain keywords are performing well for your competitors, it is a good idea to incorporate them into your own SEO strategy to reinforce it.

5. Improve Your Backlink Profile

Link building is an important practice for any SEO strategy. Quality backlinks help a website ranked higher on search engine result pages. You can never have enough credible backlinks to help improve your online visibility and this is where an SEO competitive analysis can help you out. Simply checking the backlinks of your competitors will help you determine which ones help them rank in SERPs. With this information, you can then start building your own successful backlink campaign.

6. Enhance Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is a complex, multi-step process that takes a great deal of action and planning. Leveraging high-quality SEO is not enough – you also need to launch digital marketing campaigns tailored to your specific projects and audience.

SEO competitive analysis improves your digital marketing efforts by allowing you to create campaigns based on accessible data and market demand. Thus, it’s critical to research your sector thoroughly in order to understand what your competitors are up to and how they’re reaching their clients.

7. Connect with your audience

Every business, as well as SEO strategy, revolves around its clients. Luckily, your competitors expose you to new tactics. SEO competitive analysis is a great opportunity to adapt tactics that help improve customer connection and retention. Through an analysis of the mindset of your competitor’s client base, you will be able to identify practices that are used to attract these customers.

An SEO competitive analysis allows you to concentrate your efforts on what your target audience already likes and isolate what they’re currently responding to. What a terrific place to start when developing your own content! Taking advantage of this information as part of your SEO strategy will help you reach, expand and engage your audience.

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8. Create or Optimize Existing Content Based on Your Discoveries

By taking a closer look into your competitors’ top-performing content, you can identify ways to significantly improve upon your own, whether it’s by using newer data, different keywords, adding in visuals that create more engagement or doing a deeper dive on the topic.

By using an SEO analysis to check out your main competitor’s top keywords, top pages, lead magnets, social media presence and brand design, you can work towards creating a digital marketing strategy that will outrank them and promote your new content to a similar audience your competitors targeted, but more efficiently.

SEO Competitive Analysis Keeps You in the Know (and On Top)

The importance of an SEO competitive analysis cannot be overestimated. Knowledge is an asset. Analyzing your competitors is a simple, yet effective marketing tactic to make sure you are keeping up with others in the industry. It prevents you from getting ‘lost in the noise’ of your competitor’s efforts, so you can implement a digital marketing strategy that will strengthen your online presence and expand your online footprint and audience.

Taste the relish to be found in competition – in having to put forth the best within you. Analyzing your competitors and learning from them, instead of fearing them, will push you to do better and help you build a stronger online presence and run a successful business.

Want to stay on top? Never stop learning from your competition and never stop using the benefits of an SEO competitive analysis to your advantage.

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