Competition Analysis
Competition Analysis
Competition analysis is important for any business and brand. Its where we know who is doing better and the why and how are they doing it. It is so useful to find all of their information.
Competition Analysis will show the strengths of their linkbuilding strategies, the strength of their onsite SEO and even the PPC ads they are currently using.
We can use SWAT Analysis to start with our competitor analysis.
SWOT analysis is a technique used to determine and define your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats – SWOT. Using SWOT we can identify our direct competitors and analyse their strengths whether it’s their website or brand and how did they get popular or on the top of the search engine results.
So things we can analyse when researching competition analysis:
1, Content – How many pages, blog posts, informational articles do they have? – Use Screaming Frog
2, Is the website SEO enhanced or is the website fast loading? Check the code using Structured data testing tool in the Search Console and check speed using GTMetrix.
3, Check their website authority – Use Ahrefs – Semrush – Moz
4, Get their backlink data – Use Ahrefs – Semrush – Moz
5, Analyse their Press Releases, did they use a paid service like PRWEB? or Free such as PRLOG? have they been mentioned on the news? if so who was the journalist? did they write multiple times about them? opportunity?
6, Check Social Media metrics – Facebook – Twitter – Linkedin etc.. are they active and responsive on posts? do they have a celebrity endorsement? Do they use paid ads?
7, Do they use Google Adwords or Social Media Ads for their top keywords? What’s their messaging look like?
8, If it’s a local website look at Google Maps, their business times and business information. Can you improve? Read our Local SEO Services post for more information.
Compare this data on a spreadsheet and benchmark where your website is against your competition. When you look at the data it will look overwhelming and it can be time-consuming, but you need this important research so you can be direct competition.
Once you have compiled all the research then it’s fishing into the backlink data. Our Linkbuilding services post explains how important it is to build anchored text links on authority websites. We can also try to build our keywords and brand keywords on websites that your competitors have used.
On most of the website authority statistical tools, you can very simply create a funnel and choose the best sites using the domain authority, and this normally works as the higher the number the better i.e 65/100 is good.
Competiton Analysis is a long process. If you have a strong website and brand you can use your competitor data to your advantage. We have normally created in-depth reports of the top 5 competitors that are in direct competition in our niche.
We then look at their strengths and weaknesses and we can then identify where their own gaps are and how can we surpass that website. It could be as simple as using a press release service, or mirroring their own backlinks and try to get the same SEO anchored text link on the high authority website that they are using.
Just remember its all research, research research. The more thorough research you do, the easier it will be to rank higher than your competition.
Last point* If you do all this research and have a new website with little domain age: it takes time for your website authority to build up. In most cases it can be a couple of years. It all depends on how competitive your niche is.
Simon Birch CEO and Search and Marketing expert has managed many Fintech organisation from Director level.
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