Competition SEO Analysis With Semalt
There are many factors that determine your position on Google. One aspect of a holistic SEO strategy that greatly increases your chances is to perform an SEO competitor analysis. If you know what the competition is doing, you can of course respond perfectly.
In this guide, you're going to learn the steps you need to take to perform a competitive SEO analysis. Moreover, the DSD is a very good SEO tool that you can use for competitive analysis purposes.
To begin with, let's talk about the 2 most important aspects of competitive analysis.
Keyword research and optimization analysis
Conducting a competitive analysis can be divided into two parts: keyword research and optimization analysis. During keyword research, you will look for relevant keywords for your business and determine the competition for your current keywords.
Also, you will look to see if it is possible to score on these keywords, as it is a waste for you to spend your time and energy on a nice page or blog post while there is actually no chance of ranking high on Google due to the high competition. To avoid such inconveniences, you need to use a better SEO tool like the SEO Personal Dashboard.
In an optimization analysis, you will search for existing pages that you want to optimize for a better position. You will also look at the direct competition and try to find out what you need to do to achieve a higher position on Google.
Determine the keyword competition
An SEO process always starts with keyword research and determining the competition. Of course, you need to know if people are searching for your product or service.
In addition, the keyword must also be relevant to your organization. Finally, you need to know how tough the competition is for relevant keywords.
Therefore, good keyword research ensures that you are not working in a vacuum, but rather finding opportunities that actually contribute to your online success.
How many competitors are focusing on a keyword?
After conducting keyword research, you will have a clear picture of the potential keywords you want to write content for. From then on, the next step is to check if you can gain in position. To do this, you need to have a clear idea about your competitors.
Indeed, knowing the number of competitors is quite simple, but I will first explain why you should estimate the competition. Indeed, on-page SEO consists in optimizing the content of a page for a relevant keyword.
Thus, the competition might have already applied on-page SEO correctly in order to attract Google's algorithm and rank better.
Therefore, in the SEO competition analysis, you will find out how many competitors have correctly optimized a page for a certain keyword.
Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) Analysis
The term SERP refers to a search result displayed in Google searches. In fact, an SERP analysis of a keyword provides precise information about the first page of Google, such as domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), referring domains and number of backlinks.
What information do you get from the SERP?
By analyzing the SERP, you know exactly who the SEO competitors are. This means that if you analyze the SERP, you will get a picture of all the different websites on the first page.
Why is this valuable?
This analysis is very valuable and allows you to effectively answer the following questions:
Is the first page of Google dominated by home pages? Indeed, it can be difficult to get a high position for a keyword, because the domain has a lot of authority and the authority of a page always determines your position.
Do the first 10 pages have many referring domains and backlinks? If so, then there is probably link building. Of course, you don't have to worry about this, as a quality page can also score high without many backlinks.
Is the first page dominated by collection pages? These may not be your direct SEO competitors. But you probably won't beat these websites. In this case, it's better to spend your energy and time on a keyword with more chances of success.
Gaining the best Google position
Most likely, many of your pages already get good results on a number of keywords but do not always manage to reach the top positions (1-3) on Google.
For this reason, it is advisable to start optimizing your existing landing pages for a specific keyword. Indeed, with the DSD, you can know the current positions of all the keywords you are currently ranking for.
In addition, you should also select a number of relevant search terms from the keyword research for which you want to create new landing pages.
Now that you know the keywords that are targeted, you can start by determining how you will beat the competition. Indeed, to get the maximum result and know if you can win, it is important to perform a competitive optimization analysis. That is to say, a technical SEO analysis, on-page and backlink because the website technique influences the positions on Google.
So here is what you should do
Always check the technology of your own website, because Google does not like technical errors and will penalize you with a lower position in the search results if the website contains many errors.
Examples of technical errors are 404 errors (pages that do not exist) and broken links. Therefore, to ensure that your website is technically in order, you can use the right SEO tools to detect 404 errors. You can run a free technical audit of up to 500 URLs to detect broken links.
This way, you ensure that your website is always up to date, which gives you an advantage over a number of competitors.
In addition, the loading speed of the website is also an important aspect. On the one hand, it is a ranking factor for Google and on the other hand, slow websites generate fewer conversions.
Therefore, when analyzing the SEO competition, it is recommended to analyze the speed of the competitor's website with the Google page speed information. Also, compare a number of your main competitors with your own website. That is, check if your website scores lower than the competition.
Next, start by improving the loading speed of the website. To do this, you can use an SEO tool such as the DSD to get better results in a short period of time.
How to check if your pages are well optimized?
To check if your pages are well optimized, you can check the first five results on Google. Indeed, to make sure your pages are well optimized: pay attention to the quality of the content, the readability, the UX design and the videos / images. Here are some points to follow to optimize your page:
- Keyword placed in the main title and in some H2 or H3 titles
- A keyword placed in the first paragraph of the introduction
- The keyword that appears a certain number of times in the text
- Targeted keyword in the URL
- Keyword placed in the title tag and the meta description
- Synonyms and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords
- Internal link structure
- Optimized images and photos
- General user-friendliness
- Readability
Page length and quality
The first page of Google lists the pages with the best content. If you do not produce quality content on your site, then your site does not deserve the first place according to Google.
Indeed, the search engine wants to display the best and most relevant results for a search. In addition, when analyzing the competitor, you can see the number of words on the competitor's page.
Backlinks
As mentioned earlier, it is also interesting to analyze the backlink profile of the competition. In SEO, domain and page authorities matter a lot.
Indeed, a recent study shows that pages with more backlinks get higher positions. So include this in the SEO analysis of your competitors!
Conclusion
You got it! An SEO competition analysis is essential to appear at the top of the search engine results pages. It is only by following the steps described in this article that your site will be the best ranked.
Do not take this task lightly and do not hesitate to ask for help from a specialist if you see that you do not have the skills to do it perfectly. I would like to remind you that if you do not analyze your rivals on the Internet properly, you will lose time and money.
With this thorough review and the proper actions taken, your site will be the best and Google will have no choice but to favour it.
Do you want your content to outperform all your competitors? Discover without further ado the different features of the best SEO tool, the SEO Personal Dashboard, in order to boost and generate more organic traffic on your pages. With the services Semalt offers, your site will reach the first page of Google in no time.