Top 20 Points to Remember for SEO Competitor Analysis 2020

Points to Remember for SEO Competitor Analysis

Do you want to rank on Google first page?

If you replied yes, you must conduct effective competitor analysis and keyword research for your business because this is the root of your SEO strategy which decides whether you are gonna to rank on Google or not.

Now if you are thinking who are your competitor? And how do you find them?

The answer is very simple, enter your main keyword in search engine URL bar, hit enter, and the top 10 sites which appears on the first page are your competitors.

Open each competitor sites one by one and start analyzing their SEO strategy for ranking on first page.

Now the question comes here, what points you should consider for doing effective competitor analysis.

So below I have shared some major points which you can consider for doing effective competitor analysis.

let’s begin…

How to do Competitor Analysis for SEO Marketing in Google 2019

List of Important Factors To Look Upon While Doing Competitor Analysis for SEO

So, when you get landed on your competitor site, analyze all the factors given below one by one…

Domain authority and Page authority

So, when you land on your competitor site, first you should check for the authority of that site.

And to do this you can install a free chrome extension tool called Moz.

Moz is one of the most popular and trending SEO tool available in digital marketing industry which has got the legal approval from Google.

It has its own algorithm where it analyzes your on-page and off-page activity you have done and gives the authority in numbers from 0-100.

So, if your competitor has much higher authority than you then you will have to understand that he is going to be your tough competition. And that’s why I would recommend that compete with only those competitors who has the authority near to your site.

Now let’s move to our second aspect.

Quantity and Quality of Backlinks

The second area you should look for Backlinks.

Backlinks are the link of your site which has been added in some other sites.

Backlinks have been always one of the most important factors for ranking from a decade and always it will be valuable in future also.

Now when you are checking the backlinks of your competitors, you should keep two factors in mind, Quality and Quantity.

Google focuses on quality first and then quantity. This means a single quality backlink is much better than a hundred non-quality backlinks.

Now you might be thinking that what are the quality backlinks?

So, quality backlinks are the one which are coming from some high authority site with less spamming scores.

Spamming score is another algorithm of Moz in which it analyze your site for different black hat SEO activities like keyword stuffing, Backlink purchasing etc.

You know that black hat SEO is very harmful for your site so even never think about it to do.

So, be aware of black hat SEO while doing on-page or off-page optimization.

To check the backlinks of your competitor site, I would suggest use Moz, Semrush or free version of Ahref.

Referring Domains

Referring domain describes the number of other sites are linking to your site.

The more referring domain your site will have, the higher ranking it will get.

You can check referring domain of any site with the help of a free Google chrome extension tool called SEOquake, but this tool will tell you referring domain of sites only if you will connect it with the free version of Semrush.

And here is how you will do it…

1. Install SEOquake extension in your browser.

1. Click on the icon of SEOquake from the browser header and then click on backlink option, where it will ask you to connect your semrush account with SEOquake.

1. Click on it and the login into your semrush account, it will automatically connect SEOquake with semrush tool.
2. And once are done with all the above steps, then now you can see the referring domain of any sites along with much more information about competitor.

This tool can help to do lot’s of things on your competitor site, as you can see all the options given above like Page info, Diagnosis, internal etc.

So, go explore this tool as much as you can.

Ranking Keywords

If you don’t have paid tool, open Ubersuggest which is a free tool and check out all the ranking keywords of your competitor site.

Once you found out all the ranking keywords, look for a low difficulty keyword with high search volume.

If you don’t know how to do it, check out the above mention article on Competitor analysis technique.

Title and Meta description

This is one of the most important part of your on-page SEO because based on your sites title tag and Meta description, Google figure out what the website is all about.

So make sure you don’t forget to analyze the title and Meta description of your competitor site, look whether they have included their targeted keywords in their title and meta description or not.

If not then you have the golden chance to rank for the particular keyword.

Make sure while writing title of your site, include the targeted and make it look attractive to your visitors.

Length of the content

Check out the length of the content of your competitor.

If your competitor have lengthy content than yours then that means you need to add more content than your competitor because Google rank sites which has lengthy and quality content.

Keyword Positioning

Check the keyword positioning on your competitor site like heading tags, title tag, Meta description, keyword density etc. and then optimize your site according to that.

Traffic

Check out the traffic of your competitor site and the source of traffic also.

You can use tool called similar web or Semrush.

Internal Linking

Nowadays internal linking has the same as your external linking according to Google because it helps crawler to crawl better and also helps visitors to navigate better.

So, do proper internal linking.

Age of the site

Age of the site matters in ranking but not so much, if you build quality backlinks and provide quality content then age doesn’t matter.

To check the age of any site you can use tool called Small SEO Tool.

Alexa ranking

Alexa is a Google chrome extension which tells you the position of your site among billions of websites.

So, it can help you to plan better SEO strategy.

Social Shares

Social signal shows the brand value of your site to Google and if the brand value of a site is high then surely Google will promote that site in search engine.

To check the social shares you can use tool Ubersuggest.

URL structure

Make sure you use simple URL structure which help Google to crawl better.

Like don’t use URL like – https://strechtechlimit.com/12-1-2019/category/seo-strategy

But as short your URL will be, the more benefit it will get.

So, you can have your URL like given below…

https://strechtechlimit.com/seo-strategy

One most important thing, don’t forget to add your targeted keyword in your URL.

Headings

Your all heading H1-H6 should be in order and included with your keywords.

Don’t use exactly same keyword in all the headings but give some variation.

For example if your keyword is “health fitness” then you can use different variations in your heading like – “Health fitness tips”, “Tips to lose weight”, “why being healthy is important” etc..

Alt tags

If you are using an images on your site then don’t forget to specify alt tag for it because it tells Google about the image you have put in your site.

Schema.org

It’s a schema markup structure which you need to implement in your site because it helps Google to show better result.

Here is how it looks like-

Page load time

Page loading time of sites affect too much in your site ranking so check page loading time of your competitor site and then optimize your according to that.

Most of the time your page load time increases because of putting so much of unnecessary CSS code and JavaScript code so you can reduce your load time by reducing unnecessary CSS code and JavaScript code.

To check the load time of any site you can use tool provide by Google itself name PageSpeed Insights.

Mobile Friendly

Give more focus on Mobile first because Google has announced officially that it gives boost to sites which are well optimized for mobile devices.

Conclusion:

Let’s wrap up…

Above I have talked about some of the most important area to look upon while doing competitor analysis, hope it will be helpful for you.

Bhanu Mishra

Blogger and Founder

strechtechlimit.com