You and I both know that online competition never sleeps, and I’ve seen it on so many occasion that a site owner wakes up one day and finds their most important keywords are out-ranked in Google by a brand new site.
Losing huge amounts of website traffic is never fun and it happens more than you think, because setting up online businesses is easy. Even teenagers with basic technology skills create them today. Because all one needs is a domain name, website that’s fully optimized and, voila, you get top rankings in Google following RankYa SEO insights. But if that’s your competitors who are out-ranking your site in Google, then, you too need to learn
How to Conduct SEO Competitive Analysis
Good news is, your competitors are basically naked online, literally, everything that they are doing for online marketing and improving their website is out there for the world to see.
Knowing this, you can take advantage and begin to conduct website SEO analysis on your competitor’s website using SEO Tools or by using online website SEO analysis tools to see how well your competitors are investing for their website optimization (if at all). Find out what their website’s weaknesses and strengths are so that you can create a better plan of action to outperform them.
Use Google Index
What this will tell you is if the competitor website is having issues with duplicate content, indexation, low quality content. This also tells you if the website is search engine optimized, if not, you can easily out-rank and out-perform their results.
Analyze Their Content and Keywords They are Targeting
Content is king, but the meaning of content isn’t just the textual content such as the amount of web pages or blog posts your competitor has. Content is everything as far as an online businesses are concerned. Meaning, think of content as everything that makes up the competing website. Dependent on the industry, this can include: images, videos, PDF’s and textual content. So look at their site from that point of view to see what makes up their content structure.
SEO Tip for business websites: did you know that your privacy policy page, terms and conditions page, and contact page are as important for Google rankings as your home page. Now you know, make sure your website has fully optimized contact page (because almost always, contact page actually is the most important web page on a website).
Analyze Competitor Website to See if Search Engine Optimization is Done
Using online tools, look at their web page name, titles, meta description, keywords meta tags, heading tags, image file names, alt attributes, navigation linking menu structure, broken links. 
When analyzing competitor website, look at the source code, analyze page name, title, description, navigation menu text, keywords, internal linking, image name, img alt attribute name. Also search for other file types such as PDF, Microsoft Word Document, video files. If your competitor is using other file formats, then, ask yourself if you too can create similar content.
Google search engine indexed many different file types, meaning, if the content you have on your website can be complimented using different file types, then, consider creating them.
How much attention has gone into the mobile usability of their website? These are the questions that needs answering when researching your competitor website. Furthermore: use the tools made available by Google
- Check mobile friendliness
- Check Structured Data for Rich Results
- Check PageSpeed Insights
Perform Analysis on Their Social Media Profiles
Social media profiles of your competitors can also reveal to you important aspects for outmaneuvering your online competitors techniques. Look at the manner in which they are communicating with your ideal customers. What promotions they are offering, and are they trying to get visitors to certain pages you weren’t aware of? Because at times, certain landing pages may not be visible when you analyze their website navigation structure.
You can also search Google with Advanced Search Operators like this:
- “YourCompetitorName” -inurl:yourcompetitordomain.com
- “yourcompetitordomain.com” -inurl:yourcompetitordomain.com
- “YourCompetitorName” “Facebook”
- “YourCompetitorName” “YouTube”
Above search patterns will show information Google has on external websites. All of which help you to gain the understanding about the efforts you’ll need to make to out-rank them in search and outperform them online.
Competitor Backlink Analysis
If anything, its quality backlinks that must be analyzed. Using many backlink checking tools, you can find out where they got those backlinks and how many. Furthermore, competitor’s backlinks may also allow you to get backlinks from those websites as well.
How Long They Been Online?
Wayback machine that archives the internet by taking snapshots of websites in particular moment in time. Wayback machine can reveal useful insights such as “when your competitor website first went live online” “how often they are updating their website” and also “what they are updating on their site”.
Additional Notes
Keep in mind always, researching your competitors can be as detailed as you want depending on your allocated resources. Or it can be done in less than an hour if you are an efficient data miner. Above all else, there will always be competitors online, whether you are offering services as a local business or you an eCommerce operator. Do not neglect learning from your competitors.Free SEO Course Category
