Competitors and Partners

Competition never ceases to exist. Even if we start something from scratch with no competitors, eventually we’ll find ourself surrounded with competitors, especially when the trade we are in is profitable. As SEO practitioners, we can learn from the competition but also have to be mindful of unscrupulous players who engage in black hat techniques to undermine search engine rankings for others.

Learning from the competition

When it comes to SEO, remember the age old proverb "keep your friend close and your enemy closer." Pay attention to the strategies employed by our competition and the rankings they hold. Here’s are some of the items we should keep our eye on with respect to our competition:

Keyword analysis

Competitor analysis can help us to understand the keywords our competitors are targeting and how they are ranking for those keywords. We can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to find relevant keywords and analyze the keyword landscape. This can help us to identify opportunities for optimization, target the right keywords and improve our rankings with respect to our competitors’.

Content strategy analysis

Analyze the content on our competitor’s website and see how they are using keywords and other optimization techniques. Look at the topics they are covering, the type of content they are creating, the cadence of publishing fresh content, and how they are engaging with their audience. Use this information to create better content that stands out from our competitors. Another technique is to search the competitor’s site on Google using site queries (site:domain.com) and observe how the query results show up on Google. We can see the total pages for our competitor, meta descriptions, title tags, images and just the overall content quality and strategy.

Backlink analysis

Use tools like Ahrefs and Moz to see the backlinks our competitors have and the authority of those sites, top keywords driving traffic, recent trends on performance, and any similar sites linking to them that we may not have been aware of before. This can help us to identify potential link building opportunities and improve our own backlink profile.

Technical SEO

Check the competitor’s website for technical SEO issues, such as broken links, slow load times, and poor mobile responsiveness. These issues can impact a website’s rankings and user experience. Identify areas where our competitor exhibits weakness and use them to our advantage by improving metrics for similar content on our website. We can use online tools/services to crawl our competitors website and learn how it is structured.

Constant vigilance

Don’t let the guard down, and continuously monitor our competitors to see what changes they are making and how their rankings change over time. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track our own rankings and traffic. This will give us a good idea of how our efforts are impacting our search engine visibility.

Match the SEO analysis category on the left with its corresponding benefit on the right.