How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Before starting any king of marketing, competitor analysis is necessary to define and initialize the strategy, budget, goals for marketing. Similar is for Internet Marketing; If you want to do better in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) You must first know what your competitors are doing. To out stand a competitor; you will have to make a strategy better than the competitor.

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Today; We will tell you how to do competitor research for a better SEO.

Step Wise Guide to Competitor Research in SEO

Determine Keyword For SEO

First step in the process of Competitor Analysis is to determine the keyword for which you want to rank a website. This keyword is used to search your competitors out of the millions of websites and references on world wide web.

Keyword can be determined by you or the client. Most of the time in Business World; Keywords are determined and finalized by the client with consultation of the SEO Agency or SEO Consultant. You must choose keywords strategically so that you can meet client's expectation and business goals. Not every client is same so you need different strategy for all. 

I will tell how to choose keywords strategically in details in upcoming blogs and articles. 

Till then for demonstration of Competitor Analysis Process; Let's assume that we need to rank "https://digital.vrgyani.com" for keyword "Digital Marketing Blogs in India" 

Link: https://digital.vrgyani.com

Keyword: Digital Marketing Blogs in India

Determine the Search Engine to target.

As You Know; there is not just one search engine i.e Google but there are many other search engine as well namely Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo,Baidu. 

Every search engine has different business share in different country so you must choose search engine to target based on country to target. As working for a search engine that has no business/ traffic share in a specific region may give you ranking but it will be of no use for business. As there will be no traffic, engagement or lead generation.

Google has over 90% traffic share in India as compared to Bing, Yandex, Baidu and Other search engines but this scenario is different in Russia; where Yandex has over 50% traffic share compared to other search engines.

Now let's come to our example demonstration. We are targeting India with our keyword "Digital Marketing Blogs in India"; So we will choose Google as our preference.

Find Competitors to Analyze

So now; You have a keyword and a website to work on and also the search engine to target. Let's find the competitors for the keyword and website.

Now go to Google.com

Search for the keyword "Digital Marketing Blogs in India"

A List of results will appear in screen.

All these websites that appear on top 10 results of SERPs are your competitors. Now you need to refine these competitors based on your website type. Because it doesn't matter if you have content similar to a website but if your type doesn't match you can't compete with it.

A blog article site can't compete with a feed listing website.

A digital blog can't compete with a digital marketing agency.

As of now "https://digital.vrgyani.com" is a blog/article site.

So we will consider websites that are blog or article websites. Here is the example.

Now we have our competitors.

https://www.socialbeat.in/blog/top-10-digital-marketing-blogs/

https://insomniacs.in/blog/

https://www.adlift.com/in/blog/

Competitor Backlink Analysis

As of now; you know the competitors. It's time to do some backlink analysis of the competitors and find out what Off Page SEO Strategy they adopt to be in top of SERPs. We will have to formulate a strategy better than them to rank higher.

To Do Backlink Research There are number of tools such as SmallSEOTools, SEOReviewTools, Backlink.IO and more. But I recommend SEOReviewTools as it shows backlinks in a formatted way to analyze easily.

1. Search Google for SEOReviewTool Backlink Checker
2. OR Just Go to https://www.seoreviewtools.com/valuable-backlinks-checker/
3. Enter the competitor URL in the "Enter URL" field.
4. Pass Captcha and Hit "Perform Check" Button.

Next Screen will show you the list of top 100 backlinks with Anchor Text, Follow, No Follow Tag. Note down these statistics in Spreadsheet for analysis.

Just Copy All These Backlinks and Paste to Spreadsheet. You will need to format it but it is not that big task. Now analyze the extracted backlinks and categorize them into categories like bookmarks, classified, articles, blogs, forums, commenting based on activity.

It will give you an idea of Off Page Strategy of competitor website and Which activities you must target to outrank competitor in SERPs.

Repeat this process for all competitors that you found.

We will discuss about how to create targeted backlinks for ranking in upcoming blogs.

Competitor Content Analysis

When you have complete list of backlinks of all competitors. After categorization of backlinks you will know what content stragtegy your competitor has used to be on top. Formulate a strategy that is far better then them and also meets your business goals and resources.

Finally; One Point to remember always. Choose realistic competitors whom you can compete with the amount of resources you have. Majority of marketers choose unrealistic competitors and goals that are hard to match at initial stages and this leads to failure of SEO strategy.

For example; You are a News Website launched just 3 months earlier and You choose BBC as your competitor. It's fine to choose BBC as competitor but your content strategy must match your business capabilities and resources. It should not be with an aim to outrank BBC in SERPs.

 For More; Stay Tuned. Browse More Articles.