Effectively Utilizing SEO Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is an emerging trend in digital marketing that involves determining who your direct SEO competitors are, and then performing in-depth research on the tools and strategies they’re using to generate search engine rank.  Using data related to links, keywords, content, pay-per-click campaigns, website structure and expert-level technical analysis, we are able to reverse-engineer the most successful elements of your competitors’ marketing campaigns and create opportunities to capitalize on underutilized keywords or rapidly take advantage of emerging market trends.

The primary goal of any effective SEO strategy is to remove all of the guesswork, and that’s almost never as easy as it sounds.  For example, if you’d like to get a general idea who your search competitors are, you could make a brief list of 10-20 keywords your site currently ranks for, and simply search for them and see what comes up.  Doing this isn’t exactly guesswork, but it’s an obvious exercise that is actually much more removed from objective analysis than you might think.

The first real problem with this approach is scalability.  Even a relatively small business/informative site with 3-5 pages can potentially rank for hundreds of keywords if the content is rich, and that immediately makes it more difficult to manually account for your site’s search presence across the full spectrum of keyword exposure.  Putting together a list of 20-30 of your most important keywords, manually searching for them and tracking all of the results in a spreadsheet is a perfectly valid way of performing SEO analysis on a small scale, and it can yield useful results if it’s done on a regular basis.

More often than not, though, this data is only partially accurate and involves a larger up-front time investment – which is why we utilize a set of tools built specifically to automate this task and account for the entire keyword universe represented by a larger number of websites.  Using an algorithmic approach to curating the data, we can get a comprehensive report that accounts for all keywords regardless of value, and uses the content associated with your site for comparison.  In just a few minutes, we can see exactly how many other sites rank for your most valuable keywords, what those sites are, and more importantly, which keywords they rank for that your site doesn’t.  This gives us a much more accurate representation of where your site realistically ranks among competitors and provides the basis for building an intelligent strategy for your marketing campaign.

This next step in the process refers to the practice of identifying keywords that your competitors outperform you on.  This is always a competitive space regardless of the market you’re in, but we can effectively narrow the data set down by taking a few extra parameters into consideration:

• Keyword value:  words or phrases that have high search volume, are directly relevant to your business, and are more likely to create a conversion
• Rank potential:  keywords that your site can realistically rank for, or existing ranked keywords that could perform better
• Multi-Competitor Analysis:  comparing two or more direct competitors to further refine the list of potential high-value keywords

This type of analysis can be performed at the domain level (across the entire site) or on the page level, which involves a direct comparison and rewriting/editing your site’s content on a page-by-page basis in order to boost search performance.

We couple this data with trend identification to refine your site’s existing content and add new pages or posts on a regular basis, which naturally boosts SEO due to search algorithms placing higher value on fresh content.  Keeping track of these metrics and acting on them intelligently is the backbone of your digital marketing strategy.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using search performance analysis to create a winning content strategy for your brand.  If you’d like to see more on this subject or have a specific conversation about how we can use these tools to grow your business, get in touch with us today and let us know!