How to do an SEO Competitive Analysis

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a digital marketing technique that involves optimizing websites to help them appear higher on search engine results pages (or SERPs). The ultimate aim of an SEO strategy is to get to the top of the SERPs for a particular set of keywords and phrases that target a chosen user demographic.

Traditional SEO focuses on what’s known as ‘organic’ techniques. ‘Organic’ in this case simply means optimizing website content to meet the requirement of search engines’ inbuilt algorithms. Doing so ‘organically’ boosts a website’s rankings. When SEO includes paid search (such as advertising or pay-per-click techniques), this is not known as organic search but is usually called search engine marketing.

There are three types of organic SEO. These are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Hold on tight: here’s a quick whistle-stop tour!

On-page SEO

On-page (or ‘on-site’) SEO involves optimizing a website’s content to boost website traffic in the eyes of search engine algorithms or crawlers. It includes conducting keyword research and amending body text, headings, image tags, HTML, CSS, and internal links to optimize them for relevant keywords and phrases.

Off-page SEO

Off-page (or ‘off-site’) SEO involves optimizing content beyond your own website. Doing so helps maximize engagement and builds your domain’s trust rating. Off-page SEO primarily utilizes link-building strategies or integrates web pages with social media campaigns to boost traffic.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the non-content aspects of your website. We’re talking about stuff like site speed, crawlability, and ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly. Whereas on-page and off-page SEO are both about content, you can think of technical SEO as the web development side of SEO.

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

Whether you’re a start-up or an established company you should know who your competitors are. This not only applies to the products or services you sell but also to where you rank on search engines – your SEO competitors!

The first thing to do in identifying your competitors is to make a list. Look at your keywords and website searches that you want to rank first for and see what websites or companies come up.

There are also some great SEO competitive analysis tools out there that can help you. SEMRush has a competitive analysis tab that will give you insight into other websites that are ranking for the same keywords. KW Finder is another tool with a competitor option to consider.

Step 2: Analyze their SEO Strategy

Look at your competitors’ websites to get a sense of their SEO strategy. This includes the website structure, types of content created, and the targeted keywords (both short and long-tail).

You should also check your competitors’ website speed and mobile responsiveness. This can be done using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Analyze your competitors’ content

It’s important to not only know the types of content your competitors produce but what content gets the most traffic. To help your SEO strategy, find out:

What are their top-ranking pages?
Which pages rank for keywords?
Which pages drive the highest percentage of traffic?

You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find the most popular content in a given niche. This will help you understand what types of content are resonating with your target audience and which topics you should focus on.

Look at your competitors’ social media presence

Social media holds a lot of sway when it comes to driving brand awareness and directing traffic.

So check out your competitors’ social media channels. Look at the number of followers they have, the type of content they share, and their engagement levels. This will help you understand how your competitors leverage social media to drive traffic to their websites.

Check your competitors’ rankings for keywords that you are targeting

This will help you understand which keywords your competitors are ranking for, and how well they are performing.

You should have a target list of primary and secondary keywords you want to rank for. Remember these keywords can change and rankings can decline so a regular check on your keywords is recommended.

The goal is to rank for your main keywords but also look at low-hanging fruit i.e. keywords that are relevant but have low competition so you can rise up the rankings.

Step 3: Analyze their Keywords

You may be doing well when it comes to your primary keywords, but what about the ones you rank for but place you at the bottom of page one of the SERP?

Pay attention to those keywords as putting some effort into including them in your content could help you overtake your competitor to land a position ahead of them.

You should also look for keyword gaps and keyword opportunities. This will help you to identify terms or phrases you could and should be ranking for using tools like SEMRush or AHREFS.

You should also look at any keywords your competitors may have lost and have a good search volume. See where they are declining in the rankings, visit the page, and see if you can figure out why. Then capitalize on that opportunity by creating content that includes those keywords.

Step 4: Analyze their On-Page Optimization

The reason your competitors outrank you for SEO could be that they spend time and effort on optimizing their pages.

So you need to analyze the pages that are outranking you. This will help you to identify why your competitors are doing better when it comes to where they are positioned on search engines.

Elements you should consider in your analysis are:

Titles – The title of your page is important to Google, it shows how relevant a keyword is to a search and is a ranking factor. Make sure your title tags are correct and tied to the right keyword as they tell browsers how to display your page’s title in search results, social media, and browser tabs.
Meta-data – This is important for the meta keywords and meta description tags. Both will help Google to identify what your page is about. See what your competitors are doing to optimize searches.
Headlines or Headings – Google likes headings and gives weight to <h> tags when they are related to specific keywords. These can also be pulled out for featured snippets so can send your content to the top of the page. Be aware that when Google ignores the title tag, it uses H1 tags nearly 51 percent of the time instead according to Ahrefs.
Internal linking structure – Internal links help to direct visitors to relevant content and can also give your pages a lot of SEO juice. Don’t overload a piece with lots of links but include quality and relevant ones that keep people on your site.
Quality content – You can write as much content as you want but unless it’s quality and relevant, people won’t hang around to read it, and search engines won’t rank it. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to content creation. The competitors that rank highly may be using blogs that help them become an authority on the topic, so do a quick search to find out what they are.
Images and videos – Are your competitors optimizing images and videos for the web and mobile? Are they properly tagged with descriptive and relevant names? You should do the same to compete.
Schema markup and structured data – Structured data helps search engines understand the content of a page and can improve visibility in search results.
URLs – Look at your competitors’ URLs and see if they are doing anything different. Make sure your URLs are descriptive, and concise, and include relevant keywords.
Customer experience – Usability is a ranking factor so look at the layout of your competitors’ pages, the navigation, and load time. What’s the overall experience for a customer and how does it compare to yours?

Step 5: Analyze their Backlinks

Backlinks are important to search engines and ranking. You can learn a lot from your competitors’ backlink profiles by using Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to get insights.

But it’s not about quantity for backlinks. Quality backlinks are what you are looking for and they are a great addition to any piece of content. In fact, low-quality backlinks can hurt your pages and be seen as spam so don’t use outreach to just get links from anywhere.

For example, if one of your pages is being linked from a high-authority site such as Wired, then it adds authority to your pages and is great for ranking.

Do an analysis to see what backlinks your competitors have that may be helping them rise up the rankings and see if you can replicate it. Are they getting good links from the media or being recommended by a well-considered organization or body?

Best free SEO courses

Without further ado, here are free SEO courses for digital marketing beginners:

CareerFoundry: Digital Marketing for Beginners Course

In this free, 5-day short course—sent to you directly by email—you’ll be introduced to the most commonly used digital marketing channels (including SEO!), learn about marketing metrics, and try your hand at developing an SEO creative for a digital marketing campaign!

At the end of the course, you’ll have an opportunity to take a final test–if you achieve a result of over 70%, you’ll receive a discount on the full Digital Marketing Program.

Aspiring SEO specialists and digital marketing enthusiasts alike will get a great overview of the topics that digital marketing professionals deal with every day, helping them to decide if this is a career path that suits them. Digital marketing beginners, this free SEO course is for you!

Ahrefs: SEO Course for Beginners

Starting with the basics is Ahrefs’ SEO Course for Beginners. Offering two hours of video tutorials, the course isn’t the most comprehensive or interactive on our list, but it’s well worth checking out if you want to summarize the basics without investing lots of time. Plus, Ahrefs provides an SEO software suite, so you can rest easy knowing they are experts on the topic!

You’ll learn about keyword research, on-page SEO, off-site SEO and link building, and the basics of technical SEO. The course is also available in five languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. And you needn’t worry about dodgy subtitling here—they’ve fully translated and localized the course into each language. For total beginners, Ahrefs offers the perfect crash course for getting started.

Semrush Academy: On-Page and Technical SEO Course

For many, keyword research and content production are the most seductive aspects of SEO. However, this often comes at the expense of technical SEO, which should be the foundation of any strategy. Enter Semrush Academy’s technical SEO course. Another quick one—just an hour or so long—you won’t need to commit lots of time to get the basics down.

The course focuses on using Semrush tools to carry out technical SEO. While these tools are part of Semrush’s paid suite, the course allows you to try them out for free. Plus, the principles are applicable regardless of the tools you’re using, so even if you don’t go on to become a paying customer it’s still a valuable introduction to the topic.

Through seven video tutorials, further reading, trials, and quizzes, you’ll learn all about the technical aspects of SEO. This includes how to conduct an SEO audit, solve common issues with HTTPS, crawlability, and log file analysis. And while these aren’t the only technical SEO problems you might meet, they are some of the most common. For good measure, you’ll also learn a bit about how to create SEO-friendly content and get rid of on-page errors that might impact your ranking. Bonus!

HubSpot Academy: Free SEO Certification Course

Another short course from HubSpot Academy comes in at about 2.5 hours. Plus, you get a free certification. And while some practical exercises require paid features to complete, you can still gain a good amount of practice without them. The course includes 26 short video tutorials across six lessons, with five end-of-module quizzes to test your knowledge. Start with the SEO basics before moving on to on-page and technical SEO, keyword research, backlink strategy, content optimization, and SEO reporting.

Like the first two courses on our list, this one doesn’t dive deep into the topic, but it does cover all your bases, allowing you to figure out which aspects of SEO you might like to explore in more depth.

Yoast: Free SEO Training for Beginners

Join the highly enthusiastic Marieke from Yoast, whose passion for SEO won’t fail to bring you along for the ride! Yoast’s SEO for Beginners course includes four short video modules covering all the basics. Start with what SEO is and how search engines rank content before progressing to optimizing content via keyword research, copywriting, and site structure. Once again, you’ll cover technical topics like crawlability and practical site speed tips. One of the modules also explores the Yoast SEO plug-in and what it can do for your site, but it’s easy to skip over this if it’s not of interest.

Perhaps most interesting, however, and something that none of the other courses on our list offers: Yoast’s SEO news. Including monthly hour-long recordings of webinars with experts discussing the latest SEO trends, there’s plenty in here to geek out on if you’re interested! Also check out Yoast’s full course list, which includes some other free online courses (and some subscription-only content)—great if you want to dive deeper.