In conditions of enormous competition in Australia in almost all spheres of activity, a business has to fight for its place under the sun. There are at least three factors, thanks to which you can become the first in your niche – an impeccable product, correct and effective promotion and competent marketing. However, providing the consumer with something truly different from the competition is not an easy task. To do this, you need to identify your strengths and weaknesses by thoroughly studying and analysing the competition.
Why conduct a competitor analysis before promoting your site?
Imagine you are launching a new product. You need to understand the market, study the products and services that competitors offer. This will help you identify and target your potential customers better.
Competitors’ websites are a valuable source of information where you can learn from experience and implement the most successful solutions in your project.
1. How do you identify your competitors?
So, in order to start analysing the SEO competitors, you must first determine your competitive goal. Do you want to use existing product/service promotion strategies that really work and give a positive result? Do you want to try new practices, such as digital marketing reporting, to analyze better and create a new strategy, or develop your own promotion plan that has not been implemented by anyone yet? The best competitive goal is the goal that will allow the project to grow and develop.
Competitors are those companies and brands with which you compete for the end consumer.
Basic information about your direct competitors can be obtained:
from search engines (manual mode);
the method of conducting a survey among clients;
using SE Ranking – Competitor analysis.
SEO Ranking
Manual search has its drawbacks. First of all, this concerns time losses, the inaccuracy of the whole picture, the inability to track changes in competitors in the future and having the latest relevant data at hand. You can find direct competitors and analyse them automatically using the SE Ranking tool, which is much more convenient and faster.
So, online rivals have been identified, and you have a list of competing companies and brands. Now you need to conduct a competitive analysis of SEO competitors, which will allow you to understand why they are taking the lead in some parameters and will point you in the right direction for developing your own SEO strategy.
Practical part: SEO-analysis of organic competitors
Competitive analysis is an assessment of your competitors’ strategy and the ability to determine their strengths and weaknesses in comparison with your brand. It includes researching your SEO competitors: traffic, links, keywords, content, link mass, and more.
Main traffic sources
Comparing your traffic with the traffic of a competitor’s site will help you understand how to build your own product promotion strategy and what experience can be learned from competitors in the market.
This allows you to find out:
-share of traffic on site pages;
-estimated traffic volume;
-how much does a lead cost;
-by what keys, more visitors come to the site.
Content rating
What content brought competitors the most links? What is worth writing about and with what density of keys? What content to generate on the promoted pages? Analysing and evaluating existing content from competitors will help answer these questions.
Based on the information received, you can start generating ideas for content on your resource.
You can also find the best pages on a competitor’s site using traffic analysis. If you have access to accurate traffic estimates for each page, it is helpful to use that data to find relevant topics for future articles.
Internal optimisation
The semantic structure of the text
The competent structure of the text improves the perception and readability of the information submitted. Thanks to it, search robots analyse texts for relevance to the queries for which they are written.
It is worth analysing the markup of the text from competitors and applying successful practices on your site.
Meta tags
Whether the content is relevant to search engines depends largely on the meta tags used. Errors in meta tags can lead to difficulties in website promotion.
Keyword spam should be taken into account, whether the competitor uses manual meta tags or they have generated automatically, what is the structure of the metadata, whether they contain an incentive to action and whether a unique selling proposition is described.
Site structure
SEO specialists from Sydney note that the site structure is very important to your SEO strategy. It tells the search engine which pages are more prioritised and important. Thanks to this, it is possible to influence which content will have the highest ranking in search engines. Improving the structure of your site means having a stronger online position.
It is important to conduct a complete analysis of the structure of your site and compare it with the resources of competitors. Think that they have something that you do not have. The analysis will help to properly optimise your site, make it user-friendly and competitive.
External optimisation
If the site is ready from the inside and internal optimisation has been made, you need to think about external promotion using backlinks. You can start by comparing your linking strategy with those of your competitors.
It is important to control the quality of links not only on your resource, but also on competitors’ sites in order to:
see the growth of the link mass;
be able to analyse links of direct competitors;
identify new sites for the development of a link strategy.
Website page loading speed
Website page loading speed is very important for interaction with users and potential customers. Pages that take a long time to load have a higher bounce rate. Loading too slowly can also negatively impact your conversion rate.
You can check the loading speed of the most important website pages (main, product cards, blog pages, page types, categories) for desktop and mobile versions using Google Page Speed Insights.
Brand specificity
SEO strategies do not always help to achieve 100% of the desired results. It is also important to analyze competitors from the service side and additional interesting offers for the consumer. If you notice a gap in your competitor’s direct mail marketing efforts, consider enhancing your postcards with personalized messages and compelling designs to capture your audience’s attention and stand out in their mailboxes. Or, if you see that your competitor is not active on social media, consider investing in more targeted and engaging posts to reach a wider audience and increase brand awareness. Doing a thorough analysis of your competitors’ brand specificity can help you identify areas for improvement and stand out in the market.
Find out:
-competitor’s pricing policy;
-a set of services provided;
-what users write about a competitor in reviews;
-about promotions, discounts, offers on competitors’ websites;
-hours of technical support or online consultants, etc.
It is not shameful to be equal to those who are superior to you in some way. Competition drives us to achieve great success in almost every aspect of the business. And SEO analysis of competitors’ sites allows you to identify weaknesses and use the information obtained to your advantage. Competitive analysis is a powerful and effective strategy that will help you climb the rankings, get more traffic and more conversions. Its magic manifests itself in uncovering SEO opportunities that you previously did not even know about.