Why and How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis

There’s an old saying: “You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.”

Likewise, businesses can outshine their competitors online – without breaking the bank – by leveraging SEO competitor analysis.

It’s all about how you do content marketing. An SEO (search engine optimization) competitor analysis involves studying how your rivals use web content to attract potential customers – and, importantly, search engines. Once you’ve honed in on the SEO techniques that have already proved successful in your competitive field, you can use the insights to create better content.

“Your goal is to shoot for one of the top three to five positions on the search results page for your chosen keywords,” says Michael Bertini, vice president of SEO at digital marketing agency iQuanti. [Disclosure: iQuanti is an American Express client.] “In any of those positions, you’re guaranteed clicks and traffic to your webpage.”

Bertini predicts the next two years will see a sharp increase in content marketing by smaller companies looking to boost brand awareness, engage customers, and edge out competitors big and small.

“An SEO competitor analysis can jumpstart that process,” he said.

What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?

Any marketing strategy includes competitor analysis, and digital marketing is no different. You and your competitors are all seeking the right balance of pay-per-click advertising, social media, email, valuable content, and other techniques to reach your customers in the right place at the right time.

You also have to create the right message to engage customers. The best SEO competitor analysis studies the content,keywords, links, and other components of your rivals’ websites, all of which may be driving them ahead of you in search results.

Content plays an ever-growing role in digital marketing. Search-optimized content has become a crucial engine driving customer engagement, brand awareness, and, ultimately, sales. This means creating high-quality articles and other web pages your customer base will find useful in solving a particular problem.

If your content includes the keywords potential customers use when searching online, search engines will recognize this and give your website a higher ranking on their search results page. For example, search engines might nudge someone shopping for a power drill to your hardware store website if it includes an article on “Power Drilling for Beginners.”

The thing is, your competitors are also going after that same shopper with the same keywords, or possibly edging you out with more targeted keywords and higher-quality content. The more you know about their strategy, the more effectively you can respond.

“The competitive analysis isn’t only meant to identify and replicate a strategy your competitors are executing, but understanding the big “winning themes” in the space."
—Kacie Gaudiose, lead SEO content strategist, Merkle

How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis

SEO strategies can get complicated if you try to include all possible keywords. Instead of starting from scratch, an SEO competitor analysis can shortcut the process by telling you what’s already working for others in your field.

There are various free and paid tools for your SEO strategy. Some SEO competitor analysis tools let you use keywords to identify companies that may compete with you locally, nationally, or globally. Others analyze traffic statistics on competitors’ websites, including the keywords they use, their most visited pages and posts, and how cross-links from other sites drive traffic to them. Competitive research for local companies might involve only a dozen keywords or more, where national and multinational companies may need to consider thousands, then determine which to focus the most effort on.

The output of your SEO competitor analysis should be a short list of keywords that are driving prospective customer traffic to competitors’ websites, alongside an evaluation of the type and quality of the content that is attracting them there.

In addition, it can include a “gap analysis” to identify areas where you could produce content that is more useful to prospects than that of your competitors.

Keep in mind: local SEO strategies should differ dramatically from state-wide, national, or global. For example, in addition to posting useful web content, local shops can carefully curate their Google Business Profile (formerly known as “Google My Business”), which may show up in a map or in search results like “pet groomers near me.” Does your local competitor appear above you in lists of local business profiles and, if so, why?

Turn SEO Competitor Insights Into Action

How do you get the most out of your competitive SEO research? The trick is to use it as part of a content strategy development to define the content your prospective customers will find most useful. The key to the success is to create search-optimized content that works for both the human and the searchbot.

“It’s a balancing act,” Bertini said.

Google’s advice is to create content primarily for the readers' benefit, not to manipulate search engine rankings. However, Google acknowledges many of the content elements customers find valuable will also make your website attractive to search engines, such as a clear page title and descriptive link text.

“The competitive analysis isn’t only meant to identify and replicate a strategy your competitors are executing, but understanding the big “winning themes” in the space. With the search engine results page (SERP) landscape becoming increasingly more complex, understanding the formats and features that appear in your target market is critical to crafting search strategies that yield results," says Kacie Gaudiose, lead SEO content strategist at customer experience management company Merkle. [Disclosure: Merkle is an American Express client.]

More expert tips:

• Reverse-engineer your strategy: Select the best-performing keywords in your competitive field, and maximize their value with quality content and precision SEO execution. Although the definition of “best performing” may vary based on your marketing goals, you should usually consider at least two main metrics: the number of readers the keyword attracts to your site and the rate at which they convert into customers.
• Develop optimized content: Search engine algorithms look at details including the number of times a keyword is used in an article, where it's used on the page, the presence of related words in the text, and the quality of the content. Is it keeping users on the page? Avoid any urge to overuse keywords to game the system; search engines detect and demote content that includes “keyword stuffing.”
• Optimize speed and cross-links: Beyond content, other optimizing factors can include the page's speed and the number of other websites that mention or link to your content. Their own site ranking can help improve your site's visibility, so getting high-quality backlinks can be a key piece of your strategy.
• Review and adjust: Your competitors are not standing still. Search engine algorithms are always changing, too. Bertini suggests smaller companies revisit their SEO competitor analysis once a quarter and update their content marketing strategy accordingly. Midsize businesses should do this every two months, and large enterprises might need to review their competitive analysis monthly or even biweekly.
• Set expectations: SEO is a longer-term strategy than pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Paid strategies may deliver more immediate results – but only as long as the PPC campaign is funded. SEO takes longer to have an impact, but is more enduring because it leverages organic search as the biggest single source of website traffic – and organic search isn't going anywhere.

The Takeaway

An SEO competitor analysis tells you what your rivals are doing to target your customer base online and how well they’re succeeding. Armed with this knowledge, you can up your content marketing game by building an ongoing SEO strategy to help customers find you first. One-upping the competition in this way can win you better search result rankings and organic web traffic.

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