Have you recently conducted an SEO competitor analysis as part of your website optimization strategy? You can bet your competitors have.
Your competitors have a tremendous impact on your business. Your competitors will not walk into your store to steal your customers. But, if you don’t know who your competitors are, you will end up losing your customers to your competition. You’ll have a competitive edge in winning customers if you know precisely who your online competitors are.
You might be tempted to optimize your website without considering how the top players in their field are optimizing their websites in order to boost traffic and earn higher ROI. Who cares what everyone else does as long as your strategy works, right?
“Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. ”
Source: Internet Live Stats
A critical mistake is to ignore your competition. While your performance may currently surpass that of many of your competitors, there is no doubt that your competitors will figure out what you’re doing and then copy your strategy – perhaps even better.
For this reason, you need to regularly analyze your competitors when it comes to SEO to stay one step ahead of them.
What is an SEO Competitor Analysis?
An SEO competitor analysis is a marketing technique used to evaluate websites that rank higher on search engines results pages (SERPs) for keywords related to their products or services.
With this analysis, you can determine which keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their sites, their strategies to outrank you with those keywords, and how they communicate their value to their audience. Your website can then be optimized, and your content can be tweaked to climb higher in the SERPs once you’ve identified what your competitors are doing differently.
Why is Competitor Analysis Important?
Upon learning more about competitive analysis for SEO, you may wonder how it’s relevant to your business. Here are a few reasons why competitive analysis is valuable to your business:
1. Describes your strengths
You’re going to excel at certain things over your competition. In order to keep an edge on your competitors, you need to figure out these aspects and make them better.
2. Pinpoints gaps in your campaign
There is no perfect SEO campaign strategy. Observe what your competitors are doing to improve their SEO that you aren’t. By discovering new SEO strategies, you can grow your business.
3. Helps you connect with your audience
You learn new lead generation strategies and tactics from competitors. This is an excellent opportunity to help you adapt tactics that help you improve customer connection and retention.
Your business will grow if you conduct a competitive analysis. Your business will benefit from new tactics that will help you attract more valuable leads.
Steps For Performing B2B Competitor Analysis
If you want to perform a competitor analysis for your business, you need to follow some steps and examine many things. Following are some important points to consider when performing SEO competitor analysis:
1. Selecting competitors
It’s important to identify your competitors before you start the SEO process of any website or business. By choosing the right competitors, you can gain a competitive advantage and identify differences in order to target key markets.
If you think about it this way, your competitors aren’t only the companies that are competing for the keywords you’re after—your competition is also made up of companies who rank for similar keywords. So instead of thinking about your direct competition, look at companies that rank well for competitive keywords.
2. Website Structure
If your website was a building, the structure is what would define its walls, doors, and windows. Your website structure is critical in determining your SEO success. When you look at the website structures of your competitors’ sites, you can learn quite a lot about what they are doing right and wrong that affects their SEO rankings.
If a competitor’s site structure is moderately loose, you will be able to more easily implement a more targeted on-page strategy, leading to higher rankings.
3. Website Lead Generation
Web-based lead generation takes the most work but pays off in the long run. Whether it’s through blogging and whitepapers or through guiding customers to your contact page, you need a system that provides an attractive offer for users to exchange information for your thought leadership.
Take a look at your competitor’s lead generation processes. Analyze what lead generation methods and processes they are using and which methods are working for them. If possible, integrate those methods into your business or come up with something even better.
4. Keyword distribution
When performing the competitor’s analysis, you will find out that your competitors are ranking for thousands of keywords. But, it doesn’t end here. You need to take a closer look at their keywords distribution. You need to determine how they are using branded and non-branded keywords on their website.
It is obvious that you won’t be ranking for those keywords that include your competitor’s brand name. So, your only focus will be the non-branded keywords. There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to analyze the keywords of the competitors, and we will discuss most of them later in this article.
5. Backlinks
“High-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search.”
Source: Search Engine Watch
The last thing that you need to consider when performing a competitor’s analysis is checking their backlinks profile. In the competitor analysis process, a significant part is to compare the competitor’s site backlink profile with your site’s. Knowing details about your competitor’s link profile allows you to analyze the relationship between your site and those of your competitors. You can then use this information to alter your own strategy or emulate what competitors are doing right.
SEO Tools of B2B Marketers
1. SEMrush
B2B marketers are using this tool in increasing numbers. Besides keywords, competitor analysis, and backlinks, it is a full-featured marketing tool. With SEMrush, you can monitor your business’s social media, content, Search Engine Marketing, and SEO aspects. With SEMrush, you can discover how, why, and where your website behavior is occurring. SEMrush is a favorite tool of B2B users for this very reason.
Its ability to improve keyword research and enhance content marketing practices has been proven. Keyword analysis and tracking keyword movements, as well as solid competitor research, are its USPs.
2. Ahrefs
Businesses and digital marketers are using Ahrefs because it is a trusted tool for search marketing. According to a survey, 70% of digital marketers use Ahrefs for link building. Furthermore, it offers more options than just keywords, backlink predictions, and content ideas. You can obtain unlimited access to predictions and analysis by integrating your website with this site. If you are using agility cms, then you can easily integrate Ahrefs to your website in just a few simple steps. This tool is ideal for analyzing, monitoring, and optimizing your website. Many of its features are free of charge.
3. Moz
You can use this SEO tool to find out how your site performs on different search engines. To check your listing, enter your business name and postal code. Immediately, your listing score is displayed as a percentage; the closer to 100 you are, the better your listing is performing.
You can monitor the performance of your website indefinitely with Moz. The program analyzes your site and provides you with suggestions for improving it once it is done. You will see a list of tabs that are complete, incomplete, inconsistent, and duplicate. This tab will show you everything that is excellent and everything that is poor about your listings. You can then click on the links to make the required changes in order to improve your ranking.
Your website will receive the boost it needs with this tool. In addition, the free version of this tool provides you with useful insights into how your website behaves.
4. Google Analytics/Google Search Console
An SEO analysis tool such as Google Analytics allows you to manage all your data in one place, and you can check, improve, and edit it regularly. The results of your website’s performance are presented more accurately when you integrate Google Analytics and the Google search console. It is available both for free and for a fee. Free versions are widely used by marketers.
You can gain an in-depth understanding of your website’s technical aspects using the Google search console. If your site doesn’t attract visitors, what use is it to produce quality content and use correct keywords? With both Google search console and Google analytics, you will learn everything you need to know about improving your site ranking.
The best thing is the integration of google analytics and google search console with agility cms. In just a few simple steps, you can integrate these tools into your website.
5. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Technical and SEO auditing is made easy with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The tool will reveal minor errors on the site. This tool does not miss any technical, on-page, or off-page SEO aspects. The process takes a little longer but ensures that every little detail on your website has been reviewed. Beginners may have difficulty grasping how it works, but they provide an excellent video to help.
How To Decide Which Tool You Should Use?
All tools mentioned above perform pretty well. Some of them are free tools like Google search console and google analytics. However, some are paid, like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush. It all depends upon your choice, marketing strategy, marketing budget, and which tool you will use. There may also be a little variation in the results of these tools, as well as some differences in their features.
However, if you are looking to make your website top-notch from an SEO perspective, then we recommend you to go for agility cms. You can integrate most of the tools listed above easily into your website using Agility cms since it has a lot of built-in SEO features.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed some of the most important aspects that you need to consider when you are performing b2b competitor analysis. We told you how you can recognize your competitors and how you can analyze their search engine marketing strategies. We also provided you with a list of the best competitor analysis tools that you can use to find out what your competitors are doing out there and why they are ranking on the top.
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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