How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is something that all site owners should be doing, yet far too many are either not doing it all, or are doing it haphazardly. A thorough competitive analysis can be turned into your roadmap of what you need to do to improve your site to be as good as your competitors.

It can also be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both your site and your competitors’ sites for everything from SEO to search feature wins. Utilizing this information, you can discover the areas you are weak that you can improve upon them, as well as identifying the areas where your competitors are weak, and then capitalize on their weaknesses for your site and search performance.

Why Competitive Analysis is Important
Who are the Actual Competitors?
Finding Keyword Gaps
Discovering Popular Pages
Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses
Analyzing On a Page by Page Basis
Backlinks: What You Need to Know
Analyzing Types of Content
Identifying Search Features
Researching Featured Snippets
What to Do After Major Algorithm Updates
Why Competitive Analysis is Important
With competitive analysis, you will be taking a step back and looking at the overall market area, where you stand, who the competitors are, and what the search landscape looks like for crucial keywords.

Even if you are already ranking at the top of the search results for all your most important keywords, there will always be another site that is trying to take over your rankings and capitalizing on your own site’s weaknesses.

Your Roadmap for Success
Competitive analysis can be used as a roadmap for what you need to do to improve your search rankings and the user experience for the visitors to your site. You will always discover things about what your competitors are doing that is superior to your own site, such as better search rankings. You might also discover they are doing better at specific aspects of the search results, such as dominating all the featured snippets or having an immense number of pages that show up in people also ask.

Even if you are ranking number one for what you think are your most important keywords, if they dominate in featured snippets, you are missing out on a considerable amount of potential traffic.