Why Do We Do Competitor Analysis?
Websites should always do competitor analysis after they learn how to do keyword research for SEO. The main reason is to make sure you pick the right terms based on the data from your keyword research.
3 Main Goals Of Competitor Research
- Identify Your Competition
- Decide Whether You Can Compete
- Determine Their Strategies And How To Implement Yourself
1. How To Identify Your SEO Competitors
The first thing you should do with a desired key term, is to Google it! Generally, the pages that show up on page 1, and even 2, can be considered pages you want to analyze and emulate. A tool I like to use is SEO Quake, which is enables you to analyze many statistics of a website, including, but not limited to:
- Keyword Density
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Alt Attributes
- Headers
- Backlinks
You can now determine if your competitors are small business websites, or big competitors, like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. I would look at and analyze every single page on page one and even page two, to determine of a given keyword research has too difficult of competition to rank for.
2. How To Determine If You Can Compete in SEO?
If just about all websites have the targeted key term in a title tag, meta description, and worked well into the content, the next thing to check is linking. If they have a decent amount of high ranking backlinks using the desired key term in the anchor text, that competitor is probably going to stay on page one.
There are some things you can still do. Google has changed how they judge onsite content, which your competitors might not have adapted to. You can learn all about it in our blog about how to write SEO content in 2020. You can also make your title tag’s more succinct and avoid keyword stuffing. A well written meta description can actually draw more clicks than higher ranking products, so make sure to work in discounts, free shipping offers, and update code to show rich snippets.
What Do I Do If A Keyword Has Too Much Competition?
This might not be great to hear, but you will probably have to sacrifice search volume. All is not lost however, because if there is a more attainable term, a higher percentage of lower searches is still greater than 0% if a highly searched term. In addition, once your website is ranked across the board for lower searched terms, you can begin to swap out the target key terms and update the necessary areas. Now that you have a good domain authority, you can now compete with the big dogs. This generally takes about 6 months to 2 years, depending on how impacted the industry is.
3. Copy What Works & Target Weak Spots
Be careful when copying what works. You don’t want to copy anything exactly, but you can get a sense of what Google is looking for in a title tag, content, etc. Then you will know how to optimize your site.
Using the SEO Quake tool, you can determine if putting the key terms in the title tag will help. You can also see if creating optimized meta descriptions will help draw clicks from higher ranking results. Furthermore, once you do an on page analysis of the content, you can determine if they are using current SEO Content Strategies, or if they even have any all.
We hope you found this information useful, and stay tuned for our next installment, which will show you secrets on writing your own title tags based on keyword research and competitor research with screen shots and examples. We will also show you how it is possible to know enough to hurt your site if you do not use an expert at least for consulting. If you have any questions about topics covered in this blog, feel free to contact us or fill out the form below.
