Tracking SEO Competitors: How to Stay Ahead in the Search Landscape

According to an old digital marketing joke, the best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of the search results. Almost no one ever goes there: according to one study, only 0.63% of Google searchers ever click results on the second page!

If you’ve been looking with envy at your SEO competitors’ first-page positions, this joke may not seem as funny. Climbing up the rankings can be tough, and it’s hard to tell which strategies will give you a foothold.

That’s where a SEO competitors analysis comes in. This type of research can help you pinpoint your opponents’ weaknesses, find areas of opportunity, and reshape your SEO strategy for powerful results. If you’re hoping to outrank the competition, here’s what you should know.

Find Your SEO Competitors

Before you dive into SEO competitors analysis, it’s important to figure out who your competitors actually are. Not all similar brands will be in direct competition with yours, and it’s always a good idea to narrow down your main competitors before you use them to develop campaign strategies.

Identify the Right Keywords

If you want to find competitors for all of your products and services, figure out which keywords you’re targeting. If you’ve already done keyword analysis, you may have a list of keywords handy.

If not, you’ll need to develop one. Start with basic keyword research, figure out the search volumes of these phrases, and analyze your current rankings. You’re looking for realistic terms you can rank for with a bit of effort.

Go to the Source

Google makes it easy to start your analysis for free. Punch in the keywords you’ve come up with one by one to see who ranks in the top positions. The sites that rank above you may be your SEO competitors.

You can also search the term “related:” followed by your site’s URL. This search operator asks Google to find sites it thinks are related to your domain.

Use Third-Party Services

For in-depth analysis or to avoid a repetitive search for dozens or hundreds of keywords, consider using free or paid third-party tools. Sites like Moz and Semrush offer a few free or freemium tools that help you identify SEO competitors by inputting your brand’s domain.

Be Picky

Be careful about who you select as a competitor. Choosing the wrong brands can make it hard to develop a campaign. Chasing their irrelevant keywords may even make you waste your marketing budget in vain.

Your direct competitors offer similar products and services to a common audience. Major nationwide brands may not be your direct competition if you’re targeting local buyers, and a brand with a slightly different niche audience isn’t always worth adding to your list.

Perform a SEO Competitors Keyword Analysis

Next, it’s time to figure out what keywords your SEO competitors are ranking for.

There are plenty of free keyword gap tools that can help with this, though paid tools will offer helpful features that make your work easier. Some tools can even help you see competitors’ rankings in both organic search and ad search. Many will also let you enter your URL to compare your keyword rankings with those of your chosen competitors.

This is where you can start analyzing individual keywords.

Which of your competitor’s keywords is performing best? Are there any keywords missing from your site that your competitors are ranking for? Are there opportunities to overtake the competition over neck-and-neck keyword rankings?

As always, make sure you’re focusing on attainability. It may be tougher to rank for a shorter, more general keyword like “tennis shoes” and easier to rank for a specific long-tail term like “running shoes with arch support,” for example.

Check Backlinks and Domain Data

Keywords may be one of the most obvious factors in SEO, but they’re far from the only factors essential to a site. Your competitors’ domain authority and backlinks can affect the way they rank in the search engine results.

A site’s domain authority is a measure of its overall quality and trustworthiness. Several factors can affect this score. Among these factors are high-quality backlinks, which are inbound links from an external website to the target website.

You can use free online domain authority checkers to see how you measure up against the competition. You can often use these tools to check a site’s backlink profile as well. This can help you understand where you stand within the competitive search landscape.

If a SEO competitor has a higher domain authority than you do, outranking them may be a challenge. However, don’t give up just yet: there’s plenty you can do to improve your backlinks and domain authority, though these strategies will take time and effort. Checking your competitors’ backlinks can give you an idea of how and where to seek backlinks of your own.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Content

Content is a key metric for website rankings, and it’s also a crucial way of connecting with your target audience. Checking out your competitors’ high-performing content is a great way to figure out what strategies might work on your own site.

This is easy enough to do by browsing another brand’s website, but there are free tools that can help with this as well. Some domain authority or link explorer tools allow you to see a domain’s top pages at a glance, which means you can click through to see what kind of content has drawn so many eyes. Ask yourself these questions as you check:

• What topics are your competitors writing about?
• Which keywords are they using in their best content?
• Are there any thin or surface-level articles you can expand on?
• How high-quality and readable is the writing?
• What types of content are they creating?
• What tone of voice do they use?
• How long is their content?
• Are they using videos and images?
• How well are they using their headers and subheaders for easy scanning?
• Does their best content appear on service pages or their blog posts?
• What unique selling propositions do you offer that they haven’t mentioned?

Once you’ve started to identify areas of opportunity, it’s time to get to work! The goal isn’t to mimic the content of your SEO competitors but to create new, better content that surpasses theirs.

As always, this content needs to resonate with your target audience while offering appealing, useful, or entertaining information in your unique branded voice. Don’t forget that there’s a huge range of content types you can work with, from infographics to case studies to videos to tutorials. Figure out what might set you apart from what you’ve seen, and start creating!

Consider Website Data

If you haven’t done so already, it’s a good idea to look at your competitor’s website on a page-by-page basis. This gives you the chance to analyze the site’s performance and on-page SEO.

Pay attention to the title tags, headers, and meta descriptions. What information is your competitor including here? What keywords appear, and how natural is the wording?

You should also look at the URL structure of these pages. Are they using readable, descriptive URLs or shorter ones? Are they integrating their keywords?

If they’re using images, are they making the most of their alt tags? These useful features make it easier for bots to identify relevant images.

Plug the website into a free site speed tool. How fast is it? Google shows a preference for faster websites in its ranking hierarchy, so getting your site’s speed higher than the competition can help you outrank them. You can use plugins like NitroPack to optimize images and reduce unused CSS/JavaScript and much more to boost site speed so it is higher than your SEO competitors.

Harness Your Competitor Checks

Given all of the steps we’ve run through above, it should be pretty clear that competitor SEO tracking can be a time-consuming process.

However, delving through your SEO competitors’ keywords and websites can provide a wealth of insights for your own campaigns. Seeing which tactics are working for other brands and targeting attainable keyword, backlink, and content gaps allows you to be strategic with your marketing spend and effort.

This process isn’t something you’ll need to do all the time, but you should consider adding this kind of analysis to your schedule at a few key moments.

Whenever you’re launching a new SEO campaign strategy or upgrading your website, it’s time to reanalyze the competition. The same is true if your rankings drop or you’re seeing less website traffic. If you want to be thorough, you can even schedule a new SEO competitors analysis once every few months or have an agency do the work on your behalf.

Get Ahead of the Competition

If you’re hoping to grow your online business, you’ll find the task challenging without knowing where you stand. Analyzing your SEO competitors gives you invaluable data that can help boost your site in the search engine results, so you won’t want to skip it!

When you want to outperform the competition with less guesswork, Ascendance Website Solutions is here to take your business to the next level. From SEO services to content marketing to link building, our one-stop shop is ready to help your business reach its long-term goals. To start growing your brand with confidence, get in touch today.