Why do you optimize your content for search engines? The benefits of SEO are numerous – it’s a cost-effective technique that improves the quality and quantity of traffic coming to your website, helps you build your brand, and spreads the word about your business. Ultimately, it comes down to this: SEO enables you to do better than your competition. But in order to beat the competition, you need to understand the competition. This means that competitive analysis is crucial for your SEO – if you do it right, that is.
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What Is A Competitive Analysis In SEO?
Although it is not typically a part of any beginner’s guide to SEO, competitive analysis is extremely important for your website’s success. It is the process of researching the SEO practices of your competitors, analyzing their success rates, and using this information to improve your own tactics. It is an excellent source of information and can be used as a roadmap to a better SEO strategy.
Competitive Analysis Is Crucial For Your SEO Because It Helps You Learn More About Your Competition:
Facts should always be what drives your SEO. It’s essential to know everything you can about the current trends, your users, and of course, your competition. Competitive analysis makes this possible.
Discover Who Your Real Competitors Are:
There are almost two billion websites on the internet. Not all of them are your competition. You only need to be better than others in your niche, using the same keywords and targeting the same users. You can’t always intuitively know who these businesses are because competition is more nuanced online. Competitive analysis will help you find out who is stealing your traffic and how.
Learn From Your Competition’s Best Practices:
Even if you are employing effective SEO techniques and seeing results, there’s always room for improvement. After all, if another website is ranking higher, they must be doing something better than you are. Using competitive analysis, you can find out what others are doing right. See what type of content is performing well, how they’re optimizing it, and how they’re promoting it. Then, you can apply the same practices to your website.
Find Your Competitors’ Weak Spots:
A competitive analysis is an audit of other websites; audits find mistakes and measure the success. Your competitive analysis should do the same – it should reveal where your competition is weak. It can help you find keywords that don’t rank well, underperforming content, and other weak spots you need to improve. Not only will you find out which aspects of the business you can beat your competition in, but you will also learn what not to do on your website.
Competitive Analysis Is Crucial For Your SEO Because It Helps You Improve Your Strategies:
Knowledge is only as valuable as you are good at applying it in practice. So, once you learn more about your competition, you need to use the information you’ve gained to improve your own strategies.
Choose The Right Keywords:
The goal of SEO is to rank higher in Google search results. Of course, you want to improve your rankings for as many searches in your niche as possible, and there are various low-cost solutions that lead to this. But you will never rank well for every single search performed on Google. It’s essential to identify which keywords you can rank better for and among those, which will offer you the most significant gains. These will typically be keywords with which your competition is underperforming.
Create Better Content:
Seeing what type of content your competition is having success with can inspire you to create your content in a similar vein with added improvements. However, you should never copy what others are doing – let your competition’s best practices guide you but be original. As a way to test your new ideas, find underperforming content on your website and apply some of the tactics you’ve learned from your competition. Then, see if that makes a difference.
Competitive Analysis Can Help You Network Better:
Your website doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither does your competition. You’re constantly interacting with others online – linking to other websites, receiving links from them, partnering with other businesses, and more. But how do you choose who to interact with next? Competitive analysis can help you decide.
Identify Good Backlink Opportunities:
Backlinks are one of the most effective ways to improve your Google rankings. However, they’re a delicate practice: you need to choose the right websites for your backlinks if you want them to pay off, and those websites must be willing to host them. One way to find such websites is to see where your competition is getting their backlinks from. A website willing to link to a website similar to yours will likely agree to host your backlink too. And if it’s good enough for your well-performing competition, you can probably trust their judgment.
Find New Partners And Experts:
Backlinks are not always indicative of solid business partnerships. But they can be! Suppose you’re in the market for another business to partner up with, an influencer to promote you on social media, or even an expert to help you improve your website. In that case, you should take a closer look at who your competition is working with. You may be able to partner with the same people or hire some of the same professionals. Because of this, competitive analysis is crucial for your SEO. It can help you expand your network of business contacts and even the team you choose to work with in the future.
About the Author:Jessica Blanchard is a digital marketing expert freelancing at AZ Citation Services while obtaining her Master’s Degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Arizona. Her goal is to one day start her own business in the field of marketing. In the meantime, she aims to make digital marketing and SEO more accessible for small business owners, one blog post at a time.
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