How to conduct an organic SEO competitor analysis

Introduction

It’s essential and crucial to carry out an SEO competitor analysis because you need to know how strong the competitor’s search engine optimisation is so that you can come up with your own marketing strategy.

For example, if your business only wants to build one backlink per week, yet your direct competitors on page one of Google already have 70 thousand backlinks, your link building will drop in the ocean.

The fact is that some businesses, such as PLC companies, might have teams of people working on improving their marketing. So, you must be realistic with your marketing budget or available time.

Suppose the competition has 120 articles on page one of Google, supported by thousands of quality backlinks; then there is a tremendous amount of work to do. That business will most likely spend millions on its marketing. Therefore, you must be realistic about whether you have the marketing budget to compete with that business.

Therefore, a competitor analysis is needed because you need to weigh how strong the competitor’s SEO is. Also, you must determine whether you have the time or the budget to compete with these businesses. If you have the time or the budget, you must devise a marketing strategy based on competitor research.

For example, if all your competitors have a strong backlink profile, when you check their backlinks in Moz, you will also have to spend a lot of time building links.

Or if the competitor has a lot of evergreen content marketing, your business may need to write such work, too.

Why it’s essential to carry out an SEO competitive analysis

 

Keywords

You must determine which SEO keywords you will optimise your company website for.

For example, many businesses and start-up companies may start optimising for long tail keywords, as these are generally easier to get on the first page of Google.

Then, as the business improves its Google EEAT score, you can improve your SEO for the keywords, which will bring in more organic visitors.

However, because it takes a long time to get most businesses on page one for the main SEO keywords, a company usually starts optimising for long-tail keywords. Therefore, it’s a good idea to work out which keywords you are optimising your website for to plan the content marketing you will be writing.

 

Content marketing

The content marketing needs to have a high Google EEAT score. This means it needs to be well-written. The work needs to be written by an expert on that subject, so if you’re writing about, let’s say, something to offer legal advice, then a solicitor should help with drafting that article.

Then, you need to improve the page’s authority and build quality do-follow backlinks.

Then there’s also experience, so you need to work with the expert, said the solicitor, so that they can reflect their wealth of experience in the article. Google’s algorithms will know whether the person who wrote the article has experience with what they are talking about, that’s, real-world experience.

So, for example, a solicitor, if they have input writing the article, can often suggest case law to reinforce what they are saying. When they mention this case law, it will strengthen content marketing; Google algorithms will know that the person is an expert and highly experienced in what they are talking about.

Then there’s trustworthiness, so if you reinforce what you are saying with, let’s say, links to a news article or the author of a statistic, it shows that you have completed research. This makes the article more trustworthy. Therefore, Google’s algorithm is likely to rank the article higher on Google.

Good SEO agencies know it’s about improving a business’s Google EEAT score.

 

Backlink Analysis

We recommend using quality backlink-checking tools; there are some excellent ones a business can use. If you ask us to recommend a company, we recommend MOZ Pro. Then, you can check your competitor’s backlinks.

In your competitor analysis, work out how many backlinks your competitors have and the quality of those backlinks. This will give you an idea of how much work you must do to improve your business off-page SEO. For example, if the direct competitor has 10k good-quality backlinks, much work is needed to gain this number of quality links.

However, you will have to talk to your SEO agency about link velocity because you don’t want to build too many quality links too quickly. It’s far better to build quality links over a protracted timeframe.

 

Technical SEO

Also, work hard on improving the technical SEO, for example, making sure that Googlebot can crawl and index each page you want to be indexed. Add schema markup, and work with your web designers to improve page speed; make your company website as fast as possible, as this helps improve user experience.

You should conduct a competitor analysis regularly

So, a lot of businesses only undertake a competitor analysis right at the start of building a website and starting to improve their SEO.

However, large businesses and global businesses know that it is important to conduct competitor research regularly.

Because you don’t want to be overtaken by the competition suddenly because, let’s say, they are optimising their website for a keyword that you haven’t concentrated much effort on at your business.

What could happen is the competition, and then you could gain a competitive advantage if you don’t concentrate on improving the website for many different SEO keywords.

 

Major algorithm updates

After a significant Google core algorithm update, sometimes this is where businesses substantially alter where they rank in Google SERPs. So they may have been 1st the previous day, but now they have moved to 7th for the same keyword.

A business must understand why you don’t keep using the same SEO methods that have caused your business to slip down Google’s ranks.

So, you need to adjust and alter the marketing strategy to avoid repeating what’s causing the problem.

For example, you could build links that don’t have a high DA score, which could mean you slip down Google’s ranks.

So, instead, you might have a meeting with your link-building team and say we only now want to build backlinks with a high DA score of 75, for example.

So, after a core Google algorithm update, it’s essential to understand why the business may have moved down Google’s ranks. Then, adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

 

How our agency can help

We are based in the heart of Bristol; if your business wants to improve its SEO, give us a ring.