You may think you know everything you need to know about your competitors. However, from an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) perspective, there is so much information you can gather and learn about your competitors through competitor research which you can then apply to your own business.
What is competitor research?
Competitor research analyses your competition and provides an insight into what your competitors are doing to attract and engage their website users and customers. By using this, you can spot trends and patterns across the competitors, you can see where there are gaps in current strategies, and implement methods and ways to either match or advance on these approaches to see better results and obtain a bigger share of the industry audience.
How to conduct competitor research
- Run keyword research for your own site
- Identify competitors
- Analyse and compare competitors’ rankings
- Decide on keywords
- Start ranking for those keywords
First of all, run keyword research on your own site. This starts the process by identifying the site’s strengths and weaknesses before even looking at competitors. Identify if the website meets the demands of the consumer and if there are any gaps in the on-site content. Understand the competitiveness of the keywords by using tools like SEMrush.
Identify a site’s competitor by doing a simple Google search using the top keywords identified in the keyword research. Next, understand how strong the competitor’s domains are by using metrics like TrustFlow or Domain Authority. Check the backlinks and referring domains to know where the competitors are getting their links from and at what pace by using Majestic. Finally, check how much traffic they are getting and from where.
At this point, you will have a better idea of who your top 5 competitors are and at what level they are to your website. It will give you a better understanding on how much time and budget you will need to get the rankings you want to achieve.
Next, discover which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t. Discovering these gaps will give you some examples of keywords that could potentially be valuable for your business. Using a tool like Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool will help identify all the keywords and then enable you to filter this list down by search volume, competitiveness and keyword difficulty (i.e. how hard it might be to overtake a competitor on a particular keyword).
Using the tools mentioned above has its advantages, but it does mean you could be facing hundreds of keywords that you could target. To get the most success out of using keywords, it’s a good idea to reduce the number of keywords and focus on a small cluster of keywords to create the biggest impact. Identify a group that can be targeted at the same time.
Finally, it’s time to start ranking for the keywords identified and to challenge the competition! Create new content focusing on the keywords identified, but don’t go stuffing 20 keywords into one piece of content. Be natural and bring purpose. Add the keywords in naturally to please the consumer. Update existing content and start sourcing backlinks to the new content created for maximum effect.
Competitor research is no doubt incredibly time-consuming, but once done forms the backbone of your overall marketing strategy and plays one of the most essential parts for your business. Competitor research should form an on-going part of your strategy. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. It will allow you to partake in new trends that will set you apart from the rest.
