One of the most over looked and dis-regards pieces of SEO is Competitor Analysis. It dosent matter if we are talking about SEO, Digital Marketing, Competitor Analysis is everywhere be it sport, music, cooking etc if your competitors are in front of you, you need to do something to get back at them, improve your game and come out on top! The way to do this is to look at their methods, analyse how they are doing this. For example, our Essex PPC Agency was first launched and appeared around 48th on Google. The first thing we done is looked at those first page results, what were they doing that we was not. From that we got the information we needed to better our Ad Copy and improve our results.
With both PPC campaigns and SEO Campaigns it is all about being cunning and looking at what others are doing, combining your findings to create tools for you to do even better then they are doing! As with our SEO Packages, we put this type of SEO work at the forefront of what we do, right next to keywords comes competitor analysis.
Getting to position 1 on Google doesnt happen by accident. It is either the result of having a very niche website making it easy to achieve that position or, months of SEO work, research and, optimisations to secure yourself in Google's rankings. Even with all that hard work you still need to wait for Google. When they index your new content is very much up to them.
The first step we advise our clients to take is look at a high-search keywords they are using, enter this keyword in to Google see what pages appear for your website, and start work on that page. Do not try to tackle the whole website and hundreds of keywords in one sitting! It just wont work!
Look For Your Direct Competition
Whilst this sounds incredibly obvious, it is a key element to any SEO stratedgy. Of course everyone appearing on Google for your keywords is technically a competitor but you cant decide to fight the world. Some of these will be irrelevant either your USP's are much better then theirs or, the two services are very different or simply you dont consider them a threat. At our Essex SEO Agency, we tend to advise our cleints to just focus on those first page results. As everyone wants to be on the first page at least!
Use different keywords that you want to be found in, see if these competitors show multiple times. Write down each competitor on page 1.
After you’ve done this a few times, take a look at your list and see who is showing up the most. This will give you a list of anywhere from 3-10 websites which keep cropping up. These are the sites you want to be analysing and competing against.
KEYWORD ANALYSIS
We love to throw this term around it its just because of the important factor it offers. One of the tools we would recommend the most for those looking to tackle SEO head on instead of checking out one of our SEO packages is SEMRush. Using this tool you can just put your competitors website in n and find out all the keywords they are ranking for, the page it affects and even their Ad rank.
Once you have done this, your original list of keywords you just reasearched from your competitors will multiply! It will show things such as Phrase Match and Broad Match keywords. These are keywords which you maybe didn’t consider before. It also allows you to see how popular the keywords are as well, and maybe change your views on what direction you want to go in with your business and where you want to focus your SEO efforts.
CONTENT ANALYSIS
Now you know what they are ranking for and what page on theior site is showing up for your ideal keywords, , you can start looking at what on-page and off-page content your competitors have. When we refer to on-page content this is what the consumer and Google actually see when clicking on this page, is it relevant to the keyword and search term? Are the titles well constructed? do they have internal and externa links going too and from the page? All of these factors need to be considered, you want to take notes of all of these for your own content.
With shoogle this is general practice, we carry this our both within our SEO Packages but also, our Essex PPC Agency will use this method for Ad Copy if you are using Google Ads to advertise your business.
What you have probably noticed by this point, is the targeted keyword and key phrases are being used through the content. compare it with your on-page content and see which you think it most relevant. Doing this and comparing directly to your own, will allow to find clear areas where your pages may not be of the same quality as your competitors, helping you to already highlight areas for improvemen
TECHNICAL
Content to us is the most important factor for imrpving your SEO and climbing the Google Search Rank. having said that, there are other factors which can help you out when wanting to be up there with your competitors. We would never advise copying your competitors content word for word, as well as this being plagarisim, it may also lead to. Google penalty and that is a whole different game!
The most stand out element you can add is your Structured date. Thios is the additional information you can add that will be displayed in Google such as price, stock and ratings etc, these elemetns allow youur potentioal customer to get the information they need without having to click on your website.