Finding the potential competitor is crucial for any business. Competition helps you to push yourself to give your best.
What is competitor analysis?
A competitor analysis identifies your competitor and analyses their strategies and compares them with yours to determine strengths and weaknesses. It gives you a clear picture of your status in the market and things you lack to get to the top. Just the way you do analysis of your competitors, others also try to look for your weaknesses and capitalize them. You should look into the strategies of the competitors in your market and try to make changes in improving where you are lacking to get an edge. This doesn’t mean that you should copy them. Instead, you should try giving better data and experience to your audience. This will help you in getting to the top and increasing traffic for your content.
Here are some tips that help you perform competitor analysis-
Who are your true Competitors?
Anyone in your field can be your potential competitor. Just because someone ranks below you doesn’t mean that they are not your competition. They can always better themselves and emerge to top in the long run. But, your true competition is those who rank above you. You should keep visiting their page and always try to keep up with them. So, always keep looking out for your competitors. Take your competitors as allies from whom you can learn new things rather than enemies.
Discovering keyword gaps.
Look out for the keywords that are being used by your competitors and compare them with yours. There are many online website seo services where you can find the keyword rankings.If you rank above your competitor it’s fine, if not check for other lesser used keywords and try to use those to increase your ranking.
Knowing strengths and weakness
The most important step to do is identifying your website’s strengths and weaknesses. Because of the Ikea effect we often value the work made by us more and are a little biased towards critical examination of our work. As we, most of the time are not the best judges of our work, it is best to ask for an external opinion. Ask around your employees for their opinion about the website compared with the others. Conduct surveys with the customers. Analyse those weaknesses and strengths and take necessary actions.
Identifying popular pages
We always cannot predict what makes a hit. Thinking that a certain page alone can be popular is a mistake nonetheless. Identify popular pages of your competitors in the terms of keyword, traffic and rankings. This might shed light on ways you can make your pages more popular
Page by page analysis
Comparing the website page by page would give you a higher understanding of the finer parameters at play. Just comparing those pages that outperform you would itself give a good understanding and help identify individual issues on each page. One you are done with that, you can figure out what you can do to reduce those differences or outperform your competitor.
Titles
Compare the title as Google adjusts it for specific keyword searches and the title from the title tag.Make sure you are taking the title tag either directly from the page itself or the one that Google is showing for the particular keyword search without “site:”.
Headings and subheadings
One knows that using proper tags for headings and subheadings are helpful determining the hierarchy of the website. And a good hierarchy means good user experience and better ranking. Make sure to use proper title tags. Check for these consistencies in the competitor’s website and if in any way affecting the search results.
Meta Keyword Tag
Comparing the meta-keyword with your competitor’s would enable you to understand how the keywords are targeting a specific page or the website.
Meta Description Tag
Check out how your competitor makes use of meta description tags. Even though its importance in ranking is low, sometimes a well compiled description tag may make a difference.
Backlink gap analysis
Backlinks gap analysis deals with finding the backlinks to your competitor that you can also get.
The number of backlinks determine the trustworthiness of your website. This is what can make your website rank to the top relative to your competitor.
Most of the time people go for more backlinks without considering their quality of them. This can actually hurt the trustworthiness of the website. Instead aim for few but high quality backlinks to your website. After looking up the backlinks of your competitor, find such high quality backlinks. Try reaching out to those webmasters as they might already be interested in your products too and reason out how your products are better than your competitors. In this way you may get new backlinks
Another method to obtain backlinks is by using broken links. In this, you find broken links relevant to your niche that already have backlinks to it. Reach out to the webmaster who has given a backlink to the existing broken link. You notify him of the broken link and suggest an alternate link(your links) to be used instead.
Analysing the content
After done with the keyword gap analysis, identify your competitor’s popular content. Analyse it in terms of keywords used, keyword density and traffic. What we are looking for is the content which is able to garner the most links. We already know that links are an important factor in increasing a website’s trustworthiness and thereby its ranking. So, it is important to consider all the possible ways to get all the high quality links.
Based on the content analysis, we can narrow down to the content that others are interested in and want to give a backlink. Improve your own content over your competitor’s and promote to similar groups of people. Add on dynamic graphics and make it more appealing.
Discovering Search Features
Every search term is created by the searcher’s intent. If we can understand that intent we can do much better than with keyword research alone. This might give a better ranking on the search results. Knowing the searcher’s intent is difficult but not impossible. Google has terrific tools to aid our research. Look at website seo services like SERPs and SERP metrics for understanding the user intent.
SERP metrics in terms of keyword volume, keyword difficulty, priority and click through rate would be a way in revealing different data points.
Nothing can be done in one day. Popularity takes time to build on its own. Nothing is permanent. So always be on the lookout for your competitors.
