Are you struggling to make a mark in the digital marketing world? If that’s the case, then you must strive to learn how to analyze your competitors in the digital sphere to discover potential keywords, look for link-building opportunities, and create persona profiles. Understanding how your competitors are doing business can provide you with tactical insight, which will help you to discover many possibilities.
Before competing, players spend many hours judging their opponents’ weak points to exploit them and stay ahead in the game. Similarly, your digital marketing strategy must be formed based on the insight that you will gather by analyzing your competitors. It will help you identify a list of potential keywords and stumble upon many link-building opportunities. Doing so will help you in making your personal profile. You can follow below steps or take help from Social Market Way SEO services.
Start By Analyzing Your Competitor
While performing the analysis, make sure you get the answers to the following questions:
- What are your rival companies up to at the moment?
- How are they carrying out their strategies?
- Which SEO optimizing factors are helping them gain momentum?
- What are their drawbacks?
Once you have gathered answers to all of these questions, you will be in a position to form a strategy of your own that can help you in outdoing them and fetch you a higher ranking. First, start by assessing the bigger scenario. You can type in the important keywords in the Google search engine to see which websites show up in the search results. You can take the help of tools to take you a step forward in the competitor analysis process.
- Identifying your competitors
The following data points can assist you in your research.
- Competition level: Analyze the number of each domain’s potential keywords and find the common keywords shared between them. More the number of common keywords, it’s more likely that they will compete with each other.
- Common keywords: Try to discover the number of common keywords they share.
- SE Keywords: Total number of keywords for which a site is being ranked for
- An estimation of the organic traffic volume
- Traffic cost based on expected volume and CPC data
- Paid Keywords: The number of keywords for which Google Ads charges a fee.
- Analysis of hyperlink profile
After identifying a list of competitors, the following stage is to examine their backlink profile. Some of the relevant questions you need to work upon are –
- How many distinct referring links point to their website?
- How effective are these links?
- What then is the link velocity of their obtained links?
Knowing their link profiles can help you decide how many backlinks you have to get in order to compete for particular keywords.
- Traffic analytics
The Semrush tool for traffic analysis provides estimations of your competitors’ traffic. You may quickly view how your competitors rank up in the following categories:
- Visits
- Pages/visit
- Unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Average visit duration
Besides, trends over time can be viewed for each of these criteria. You’ll be able to see whether competitors have ended up losing traffic or made significant gains during a given time period.
Other data points and statistics, such as top pages, traffic journeys, and traffic sources, might assist you in gaining a deeper insight into your rivals.
Keyword Research
It is among the earliest and most underrated SEO approaches. Choosing the appropriate keywords can determine the success or failure of an SEO campaign. Keyword research is not appealing, but it is required. It is a foundational task that must be performed correctly.
- Consider the concept of “Keyword Sets”
You should ideally organize your keywords into “Keyword Sets.” Start with a seed term and then look for its long-tail versions. For example, if your main keyword is “women’s sports shoes,” some of the keyword sets you can use are – “women’s sneakers,” “women’s basketball shoes,” “women’s tennis shoes,” etc.
Then, you can proceed to another set of keywords and obtain variants for that term. Other examples of seed sets are – “running shoes,” “evening shoes,” etc.
Once you have them in place, you can continue to refine your search using additional keywords, faqs, and other alternatives.
- Consider long-tail key phrases
You can generate these seed sets using the Keyword Magic tool on Semrush. You only have to enter the seed sets you’ve identified, and it will generate a list of potential keywords. By using the checkmark, you can add keywords you expect to rank for and track. You can add them to your “Keyword Manager” list as you find them.
- Assess the level of competition
Next, you must evaluate the likelihood of ranking for the selected keywords. You may like to rank for your seed keywords, but you must choose keywords that you can effectively rank for based on your website’s authority score. If you chose keywords that are very competitive, your SEO efforts would never be successful.
Many keyword research tools include a Keyword Difficulty (KD) metric. You should identify terms with high volume but lower KD. This level fluctuates depending on your website’s age, backlink profile, structure, and many other factors.
- Finding keyword gaps
A keyword gap analysis will allow you to broaden your keyword list. There may be keywords that you never thought of considering and for which your rival companies are ranking.
To do a keyword gap evaluation, navigate to the Keyword Gap report, enter the names of your top competitors in the bar at the top, and select “compare.” You will see which words and phrases are shared by all of your competitors, which keywords they rank for but you do not, which keywords your site ranks for but not at the top, etc. If any of these keywords appear pertinent, you can include them in the keyword manager’s list.
- Create your conclusive keyword list
The final step is to import all keyword information into the Keyword Manager. You can separate your lists or compile all of your keywords into one single list.
Utilizing competitor information to form your strategy
At this point, you will have a thorough knowledge of your SERP competitors. You have, by now, learned which companies have the strongest link profiles, have access to a variety of data points regarding prospective chances that your competitors have missed, and know which keywords you can take advantage of.
Conclusion
The information you have gathered can assist you in compiling your final list of target keywords and prepare you for the following phase, which involves developing an understanding of your target audience and creating persona profiles.