SEO is a constant process, and you need to work on policies that will help you rank better in SERP. It is a critical part of your digital marketing strategy as it helps to increase sales and grow your business. But, optimizing a site for SEO can be challenging.
From keyword building to interlinking and improving speed to spying on your competitors, there is a lot that is required for the optimization process. Fortunately, there are competitive and analytic business tools that can help to provide new opportunities for your business. Keeping an eye on your competitors will help you refine your SEO strategy and improve your web traffic results.
You Can Also Read: 120+ Free High DA Web 2.0 Website List With Complete Guide
How Can Competitive Analysis Help in Optimizing Your Website?
When you perform a competitive analysis, it lets you know about the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. By looking at their actions, you can take inspiration for what is working in their favour and modify your goals and SEO policies accordingly.
SEO is complex, and you will have to update your framework once Google makes changes in its algorithms, which it often does. Many factors influence SEO, with the keyword being the main component. The backlink is an important factor to consider when you do a competitive analysis. You can perform a comprehensive analysis to know about their linking strategies.
Ways to Keep an Eye On Your Competitors for Better Rankings
1. Analyze Backlinks
Backlinks have a strong influence on SEO, as it is one of the two factors that Google considers in the ranking of a website. Google ranks a website that has links from high authoritative websites or high-quality websites. It indicates your website is credible and well respected.
From the SEO perspective, the more the number of high domain authority links, the better it is for the website. When you consider analyzing the competitor's website, look for the quality of the links. 10 links from a well-known website will offer you more link juice as compared to 50 links from smaller or non-authority domains.
You can use the famous Ahrefs tool - which will help you look at the backlink profile of any given URL. You can enter the URL of your competitors and search for all the good quality backlinks. Check how many sites are linking back - and which ones. Use the information and work out which websites you should be targeting to build more backlinks.
2. Reserve the Keywords
When you perform a competitive analysis, it lets you know about all the keywords that rank highest in search engines and the keywords your competitors are ranking for in Google. If you know about a complete list of optimal keywords for ranking, it can help to improve your ranking.Many online keyword analysis tools will show you a list of keywords your competitors use. You can get a list of keywords that have the highest ranking and relevancy to your website.
Again, Ahrefs and SEMrush is the best tool to help you with competitive keyword analysis, though you might have to pay extra to use the premium feature. Agency Dashboard is one of the best alternatives you can use. With its free keyword explorer tool, you can search any keyword you choose and it will show you the results, including the search volume of each keyword. Also, you can monitor the overall performance and track live keywords without any extra cost.
You can search for a complete list of the highest volume of keywords that may be relevant to your website. After analysis, integrate all the top-ranking keywords in your posts or content to generate targeted leads.
3. Organic Rankings
Organic rankings may fluctuate depending on reach and traffic. If your website gets good traffic, your ranking will be higher in SERP. And if your website doesn't get the required traffic, the rank will be lower. No one visits websites that feature after top ten to twenty pages in Google.
You will need to keep an eye on your competitors for organic rankings. Some tools will help you know about the organic ranks, but you can use a few top keywords to know about the ranks. Take note of who else is ranking on the first page of Google. You can include them when you do a keyword analysis or link analysis.
If you notice your competitor's website is climbing on the ranking scale, it could take you a few minutes to check out their website and see all the strategies they are using, including backlinking.
4. Paid Advertisements
If you run any paid ad campaigns, you should monitor the efforts of your competitors. For monitoring the paid ad campaigns, you can use SEMrush, and there are many other tools you can use for the campaign. Type in the competitor's URL you want to search for paid ads and click on the advertising research tab.
With this, you will be able to see the result of their ad text and average position. It will let you know the total percentage and budget for every keyword. This analysis can help you to determine the ad keywords you can target for your website. It will also let you know how much you can expect to spend on your ad campaigns.
5. Monitor your Competitors' On-site SEO Activities
You can monitor your competitor's on-site SEO efforts. If you notice a change in the SEO activities of your competitors, look for the possible scenarios. They may have adopted new ways to optimize their page, which is getting the traffic. You can track all their social media pages to look for strategies that are working in their favour. Don't follow their strategies, just take a cue from the SEO strategies they use for social media.
To Sum up,
By conducting a thorough analysis of your competitor's website, you will be able to know about the links and keywords that rank better in search engines. You can know about all the backlinking strategies and factors that are helping them achieve SEO success. Use different tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, to get a comprehensive analysis of your competitor's website. This can help in improving your site optimization.