SEO Competitive Analysis: One of the main benefits of SEO is that it generates more quality leads as an inbound marketing strategy. When a customer finds your product or service, they will consider doing business with you or your competitors.
If you can reach these customers through organic search, you’ll be ahead of the competition at a critical point in the customer journey, without spending money to deliver your marketing message.
What is SEO Competitive Analysis?
In SEO, competitive analysis is the search for any website that contains keywords and topics that are relevant to your business. Shortcuts will help you understand
- Keyword Opportunities
- Type of information with which users interact.
- SEO strategies that work for your competitors.
- Where should you optimize your time?
- Who are your direct and indirect competitors in terms of organic traffic?
While your business may have competitive analysis on everything from product lines to marketing strategies, it’s important to recognize that your key competitors may be different from your competition. Therefore, competitive SEO research can help you decide which brands you should focus on in your business SEO strategy.
Competitive analysis can improve your business’s SEO results.
A thorough and ongoing process of competitive SEO research on your business will give you a competitive edge in your SEO efforts. An advanced SEO technology platform like Conductor can add a weapon to your marketing technology arsenal and give you a clear competitive advantage in your industry.
Explore our competitive SEO analytics platform and track your market share by category, device type, location, ranking, and more. See your competitors’ best-selling pages, ranking keywords, and other information you can use as part of your SEO strategy.
Whether you are a business or a startup, you need tools that can help you with your business SEO activities. Consider the following helpful tips:
- Innovation gives you creative ideas for future SEO campaigns, such as keywords that may not have been accounted for during the content ideation process. Discovering topics that turn searchers into customers.
- Automation aggregates data sets into a report. Save time when you don’t need to dedicate time to put raw data into readable formats.
- Integration aligns strategies and verticals between teams. Campaigns are more successful when there’s a team goal.
How to Conduct an SEO Competitive Analysis
- Find your competitors: Analyze your competitors using search terms. This will help you better understand their efforts, what drives traffic to their website, and how to position your business.
- Compare content and rankings to your competitors: you’ll see how much competition there is for your desired keywords that you didn’t even know existed. This allows you to see all competing brands and publishers for your visitors.
- Identify content opportunities during the competition: never guess. Base your SEO efforts on facts gathered through competitive landscape analysis, on- and off-page analysis, and analysis of your competitors’ marketing strategies.
- Create or add existing content: Analyze your page to find target keywords. Then you look for opportunities to improve the content already on your site. Keywords that appear on the second page of search results often provide the best advertising opportunities. If your desired keywords are way down in the original SERP (or not ranking at all), consider creating new content tailored to your customers.
Is SEO important for every business?
SEO can improve the growth and bottom line of almost any business, and we have SEO research and customer data to prove it. From global leaders to young startups, we’ve seen companies succeed at every level, including:
- Consulting
- E-commerce
- Education
- Fashion
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Technology
Whether your company is small or large, has a storefront, or is online, SEO is important for your business. SEO is constantly evolving, and every business looking to establish an online presence needs to focus on SEO at some level. While older techniques like keyword stuffing are now obsolete and even punishable, new ones have taken their place. What hasn’t changed is that high-quality content that offers value to the user can benefit from thoughtfully incorporated keywords.
Quality Content is Needed for SEO
SEO isn’t just about your website’s backend architecture or the way things are laid out on a page. The content of a given page is also a critical component of SEO and should speak directly to what users are searching for.
Content Quality
Search engines prioritize pages with high-quality content over those that are spammy or don’t provide valuable information. Google in particular looks for content that follows its E-A-T guidelines, which pertain to a page’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. This is especially the case for pages about medical, financial, and health topics.
Content Relevance
The goal of search engines is to present content to searchers that are most likely to be helpful for their query. Keyword research can reveal topics that are of interest to your audience, while also helping you better understand their voice and what’s important to them.
Keyword Research is the Foundation of Business SEO
Keyword research, a fundamental practice in SEO for business, is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines. You then include these phrases strategically throughout your website so that your content appears higher in SERPs.
The keyword research step should underpin any SEO initiative for the best opportunity to rank well for the topics relevant to your business. Higher rankings generally equate to more organic traffic to your website.
The best keyword is a term or phrase that:
- Is frequently searched by your target audience
- Is relevant to the topic of your content
- Is it realistically on your site can rank for
Why Should Your Business Analyze Keywords?
A keyword analysis is a science. Analyzing keywords enables your marketing team to prioritize and focus on using the phrases that will drive the best results. There are several factors to look at when determining the value of a given keyword:
- Search volume: On average (usually monthly), how many people search the keyword or phrase?
- Competition: How difficult will it be for your website to rank for the keyword?
- Intent: Is the person searching on the keyword looking for information or are they looking to buy?
- Relevance: Does the keyword align with and have the same meaning as your product or service?
To avoid missing out on new visitors, your team must understand there are variations, misspellings, and even different ways of saying the same thing. You can’t simply target an exact match of one keyword and be done.
Our Suggested Keyword Research Process for Your Business
Create a plan for the keywords you already rank for and those you want to rank for. An easy structure to follow is the PIE method, which we recommend to our customers at the beginning of our onboarding process.
PIE stands for Protect, Improve, and Expand.
- Protect: This slice is concerned with keywords that you already rank for and want to maintain where they’re at. You’re protecting their position. An example of this might be your brand name or a keyword that’s related to your product or service.
- Improve: This slice deals with opportunistic keywords where you might rank beyond the first-page search results and want to improve upon the position. Sometimes it takes only a few tweaks to increase the authority of your pages with these “low-hanging fruit” terms.
- Expand: This slice is for keywords that perform well in your PPC campaigns but don’t have organic visibility for your business. They don’t rank and they’re likely new to your campaign.
Learn how Conductor can help boost your SEO, traffic, and business results.
A truly great SEO platform functions as a partner with brands to scale their organic marketing programs to create valuable content, ensure that it appears in search results, and help you measure results.