Beware of guessing! Chasing the wrong competitors could be badly affecting your SEO strategy - wasting your time and money

Chances are, you could probably do a quick brainstorm and identify at least three Goliath competitor companies within your industry - but to determine how your company really measures up, conduct some online research for data to back up your suspicions. You will likely find different companies that you may not be aware of, who are competitive in similar - or even the same - products and services in the search rankings.

What To Do

So let’s start with the manual process of identifying your SEO competitors:

1. Enter your target keyword in Google
2. Collect the results in a spreadsheet
3. Identify which domains are ranking
4. To get more accurate results for a topic, repeat steps 1-3 for three to five keywords per cluster
5. Combine the results into one spreadsheet
6. Calculate which domains appear in which positions, and the most frequently

You’ll need to repeat the above steps for every product, service, and content topic on your website

Make a list of companies performing better than you ...

Look where you show up in the search results compared to your competitors. Who comes before you? How far down the search results page is your company?

These are your competitors online, so potentially more important than the physical ones you were aware of.

Now that you have a decent list of companies, you can narrow them down according to their products - But firstly lets look at the keywords they use : Competitor keyword analysis - sometimes called keyword gap analysis – is a process of identifying valuable keywords that your competitors rank highly for, which you don't. A few important points to consider:

• The keywords should be valuable (high-volume, related to your business, and/or likely to convert)
• The keywords should be ones you could rank for, or could rank for better
• Bonus: Comparing two or more competitors often gives you a richer analysis!

The challenge with keyword analysis is that you or your competitors can potentially rank for thousands of keywords, so this type of analysis can be difficult to do manually - so to begin with the obvious question is where is my competitor winning? There are a variety of competitor research tools here - but we use Moz's Keyword Explorer, specifically the Ranking Keywords feature.

if we want more actionable insights, the Moz Keyword Gap tool can help to spot relevant and attainable gaps between your site and the competition. This tool filters out branded terms, and focuses on attainability - i.e., keywords where your site already ranks in the top 20, but is outranked by your competitors.

If they seem to fit a different niche than you, like selling swim shoes instead of swimsuits, they are indirect competitors. Essentially, they’re a lower priority. Concentrate on your direct competition. Understanding how one competitor markets their products should give you better insight into how you should market your own. NEXT ...

What To Do

Take a full inventory of at least two competitors’ products.

Your product-based SEO competitive analysis should make note of a few things:

• What do their products cost?
• What is their pricing strategy online compared to a brick and mortar?
• How do they try to differentiate their products from other competitors’ products?
• Do they deliver their products?
• Who might they be trying to reach with their products?
• Are you offering products they aren’t?
• Are there things neither of them offers but should consider?

Now it’s time to get into keyword specifics. There are two basic steps to proper keyword analysis - the first mentioned above: Make a list of relevant topics you want to cover. Find keywords that fit into each of those topics.

Typically, it's not enough to understand the right keywords to target. If you want to win traffic, you need to understand search intent for your keywords too. This means getting inside the mind of the searcher to understand what they’re looking for. Sounds impossible, right? Fortunately, Google has done 99% of the work for you. You can start by simply Googling the keyword you want to target, and also look for what people are searching for related to that - either in search bar 'auto suggest' or look for 'people also searched for'

What To Do

To find your competitors to content - we suggest Moz Link Explorer:

1. Enter your competitor's domain

2. Click on the Top Pages tab in the left navigation

3. Change the Status Code dropdown to 200-OK:

Once you have some keywords you want to target, search those on Google and Bing to see how your competitors fare with them. How are they using those keywords in their web content? Are the results from a blog or a webpage? You can also take time to find keywords your competitors aren’t yet ranking for. Additionally, note any product, industry, or customer questions for which you can’t easily find an answer. Answer these questions to get a foothold on search engines..

Next ... Discover your competitor's top content - Create your own content that significantly improves upon it in one or more ways - Promote your content to a similar group of people !!

Because there are so many ways your competition can communicate with customers, you’ll have to be all over the board to see how customers are responding.

We suggest you deeply check all of your competitors’ channels:

• Facebook - Instagram - Twitter - TikTok - Snapchat
• LinkedIn - Minds - Pinterest - YouTube 
• Foursquare - Yelp - Yell - Nextdoor

What to Do

Check all of their social media, local directory channels and blog pages; look for the following:

• The average number of likes, comments, and shares
• The tone of the comments from customers (positive or negative)
• Which topics seem to be more popular
• Which channels have the best engagement
• How your competitor categorises their content

From there, you can determine what kinds of content work better than others to save yourself time and money in your marketing efforts.

We also suggest using MOZ Link Explorer's Link Intersect tool. This report will show you domains and URLs that link to your competitors, but not to you.

A SWOT analysis can be used to determine the best opportunities within a business venture. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. One of its most useful applications is for SEO competitive analysis.

What to Do

Go through each section of the SWOT analysis for each of your main competitors— and do the same thing for your company. You may have to do some extra digging, but discovering the advantages will be worth it.

Use these questions to guide your competitor analysis:

Strengths

How is their business different from yours?

What unique resources do they offer?

What is their unique selling proposition?

What skills do their employees have that your company lacks?

What positive things do their customers say about them?

Do they have a solid customer base?

Weaknesses

What expertise do they lack?

How does your company fare better than theirs?

What are some negative things customers are saying about their company?

Opportunities  

Are there positive industry trends their company could benefit from?

Is there a niche market they are currently not targeting?

Could they get more customers by offering something more?

Is their target market changing in a beneficial way?

Threats

Are there other potential competitors?

Are their employees happy?

Is their website safe to put information in?

Is their target market shrinking?

Once you have this outlined, you can compare your strengths to their weaknesses and vice versa. This can give you a clear idea of what areas you should improve first.

Now that you have all this information, what do you do with it? The purpose of a competitor analysis is to remove blind spots and help your organization to step up its SEO game.

Here are some actionable tips to help you get started:

• Make a list of key takeaways.
  Think of new strategies, ideas, and opportunities you can glean from the information you’ve found.
  
• Prioritise actions according to ROI.
  What are the things you can do that will bring the greatest results? What are some low-hanging fruit tasks that will improve your business?
  
• Think of your company goals. 
  Do you want to beat a specific competitor?
  Or do you simply want to make a name for yourself in the market? Your goals will inform what you should do with the information you gather.
  
• Discuss findings with your team.
  Avoid putting all your findings on a single, massive document, never to be looked at again. Company improvements should be a constant discussion among your team.
  
• Try and take on the bigger picture tasks before the smaller improvements.
  Chances are, those high–concept changes will take a lot of time to effectively implement, so get started as soon as possible.
  
• Create a fact sheet about your competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
  This simplified list of findings from your SWOT analysis makes for an easy reference when pitching your strengths—and implying your competitors’ weaknesses—to new clients.
  
• Organise your findings by how they fit into your strategy.
  Make a spreadsheet that shows common patterns and traits about your competition. For example, maybe all of your main competitors have high rankings, but only one has impressive engagement with their audience. Take note of these patterns so you can be hyper-aware of them.