Competition analysis is a crucial part of Search Engine Optimization in order to prepare clear and realistic strategies. It helps form the pathway for ranking your website higher on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
In this piece of writing, we will comprehensively discuss how you can perform SEO competitive analysis and research for your website. Let’s start with the first point.
Know Your Website’s Niche
Firstly, it is very important to deeply know your website’s niche. And for that, you will have to find out answers to the following questions.
- What does your website offer?
- What is the main purpose of your website?
- What are the goals you set to achieve in a targeted time?
- What is your target audience?
- What do your audiences expect from your website?
- Why do audiences visit your website?
- What do your websites do differently?
- And what you expect from your website to perform?
You need to ask these questions to yourself. Once you will get the answer to these questions, you will be able to know and understand your website niche or field deeply.
Identify Your Realistic Competitors
Once you have studied your website’s niche, the first step is to identify your real competitors. Referring to real competitors, we are aiming at the top-ranked and most-visited websites in your niche.
To identify your top or real competitors, you will first have to pick a relevant keyword. For example, if your website is about India-based professional writing services, so the keywords you can pick from are:
- Writing services in India
- Professional writing services India
- Writing services
If you are specialized in a particular field of writing such as thesis writing, SOP writing, essay writing, etc. you can pick a keyword according to that. For example, you can pick a keyword from:
- Resume writing services
- Resume writing India
- Thesis writing services, etc.
Once you have rightly picked a relevant keyword, head over to the search engine, type your selected keyword, and press enter to see the results. Search engines will show you all the possible results for your selected keyword. You will have to pick the top-ranked websites out of those results.
After that, you will have to pick another keyword similar to your previously selected keyword. Repeat the same process again to see if there are other top-ranked websites in your niche. You will have to repeat this process multiple times with different relevant keywords so that you can identify all the top-ranked and most-visited websites in your niche. They will be your real competitors.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Websites
Once you have identified your real competitors, you have to move on to the next step. In this step, you have to check and analyze your competitors’ websites. You have to find out again answers to a few question that are as follows:
- What are the SEO strategies they have applied to their website?
- What are they doing differently to attract both users and search engine crawlers?
- How many average backlinks are there on their websites?
- Which types of backlinks they are mainly focused on?
- How much quality they are offering to their audiences through their content?
- Which keywords they have used very commonly?
- What are they doing differently to beat their competitors?
- And what extra values they are providing to their audiences?
Finding the answers to these questions can be very challenging. However, to make this competitive analysis of your competitors’ websites easier, you can use different competition analysis SEO tools such as SEMrush, AhRefs, and Google products. These SEO tools will surely help find out all these questions.
Apart from this, if you don’t have access to these SEO tools, you can use the source codes of your competitors’ websites to do competitive analysis.
If it is also not your thing, the best thing you can do is to hire Global SEO services India.
They will surely assist you on this.
Figure Out What You Can Do Better Than Your Competitors
Once you have analyzed your competitors’ websites and got all the points, you have to start figuring out what you can do better than your competitors. You have to prepare SEO strategies for your websites from different perspectives. However, you will also have to focus on basic and advanced search engine optimization techniques. This is very crucial.
If you are facing difficulties in this step, you can take professional assistance from Search Engine Optimization professionals. They will surely help you with this.
Keyword Research
Lastly, once you have done all the competitive analysis practices we have mentioned above, you have to do a proper keyword search. You have to find out some high search volume relevant and realistic keywords that you can target for ranking your website higher on the SERP.
For doing proper keyword research, you can use different keyword finding or keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Magic Tool by SEMrush, and Keyword Explorer by Ahrefs. These SEO tools will surely help you find the right keywords for your website.