How to Do a Competitive Analysis for Organic SEO

Competitive analysis is among the most important SEO activities that every business should do to get insights about their competitors. Just like we perform keyword research, backlink analysis, and more; in competitive analysis, we study all these data of our competitors to check their strategies. If you are new to competitor analysis then don’t worry as we have prepared a comprehensive article for this.

In this article, we will have a look at how to do a competitive analysis for organic traffic and improve our site’s SEO and boost organic traffic. If you don’t have an in-house SEO team, then you can also opt for a suitable SEO packages from a professional agency that can get you going. But still, these steps are useful to know for better understanding.

Identify the competitor’s keywords

The first thing you need to sneak is for what keywords your competitor is ranking and what their ranking status is. Use can use any tool to scan their site and check out the organic traffic section. In that section, you will find all the keywords that are bringing the most of the traffic.

To get ahead from this, download all the keywords of your competitor and arrange them in any order as you prefer— ascending or descending. Now match those keywords with your site’s keywords and check which keywords are missing from your site’s profile.

Suppose you find 20 such keywords for which you are not ranking and your competitor is ranking, then you need to prepare a ranking strategy for this. Check how they have used these keywords— blogs, landing pages, white papers, it could be many things.

You need to keep in mind that the domain authority of your site and the competitor’s site is different and it will affect the overall SEO strategy. However, this is the smartest way of generating more organic traffic through keyword research.

Identifying top-performing pages

The next thing you need to do is to check all the top-performing pages of your competitor and check how many pages are coming on the first page of search results. For example, you find that there are eight top-performing pages, then you need to begin your analysis from those eight pages.

In the analysis, check what kind of content they have written and how many keywords are ranking for that page. Content and SEO go hand in hand and an in-depth SEO content analysis will give you more insights for making your content more SEO-friendly.

Use an SEO tool to scan those pages and check their keywords, number and source of backlinks, the word count of pages, and the number of images used. Once you identify all these things, start optimizing your old pages and articles. After you complete all the existing pages, follow the same process while you create any new page for your site.

Also, check if your competitor is creating the pages in only one language or multiple languages. This single thing can affect organic traffic drastically. If your competitor has a multilingual site then they will definitely have higher organic traffic because they are serving a large set of audiences.

Creating better content

Once you analyze the top-performing pages and articles of your competition, it’s time to use that same information and create content that is better than theirs. For example, if your competition has posted an article on the top 15 ways of doing email marketing better, then you can add more value to that article topic and create something better.

Instead of repeating the same 15 ways, you can write an article on the top 30 or 35 ways of doing email marketing. This will not only attract more users but also add more value to them. But, you need to ensure that the content quality should be much better than your competition. To rank on better spots on Google and other search engines, create long-form content as it offers more information to the readers.

For expansive organic traffic, make sure your website is mobile-friendly and the site’s loading speed is also good. Google and other search engines pay a lot of attention to these things.

Backlink analysis of your competition

After keywords, the second most important thing in SEO is backlink analysis. This will give you a good idea about what is the overall network size of your competition. If the competition has 1500 backlinks, check out the number of domains from where these links are coming.

For example, there are 100 domains from where 1500 backlinks are coming, you need to sort all the domains based on their authority. You will notice that many of the links are coming from low DA sites and you have to ignore them.

Suppose you found out that there are a total of 35 domains that are of high DA. And also have a good reputation, then you also have to get a backlink from those domains. Having hundreds of thousands of backlinks are of no use if they are coming from a low-score domain. It’s always better to create limited but good authority links.

Check their social media activities

Social signals are also a major ranking factor and it becomes important for you to check all the social media platforms of competition. Check their content sharing efficiency, the type of content they are sharing, if they are creating videos to engage the audience, and more. After analyzing these things, you will get an idea about how you can also optimize your overall social media activities.

If you found that your competitor is using more social media accounts than you and they are generating good traffic from there, you should also start using those platforms. Just like content planning, prepare a strategy for social media also. The number of social media users is growing rapidly and this is the right time to take over your competitor and gain more traffic from these sites.

These were some of the important competitor analysis tips that you can follow and grow your organic traffic. You can also hire a professional SEO company that can help you in getting started with improving organic SEO.