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The SEO competition analysis and the way I see/do it
SEO competition analysis is not only about blindly looking at the competitor’s content and backlinks.
In most cases, that’s not going to give you any actionable insights.
Here is how we do it in our agency to get some insights we can act upon.
In the process of onboarding a new client, we create a competitors analysis sheet and take Ahrefs screenshots of our competitor’s websites.
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We make sure it shows the stuff like:
– Number of referring domains
– Organic traffic approximation
– Number of keywords ranked on different positions
– Total number of keywords
– Traffic value(I can’t use images here but that’s the basic data you can see from Site Explorer in Ahrefs)
We mostly ignore DR and UR as that can be easily manipulated. Although you can track those too if it makes you happy.
We update the sheet with new screenshots every 2 or 3 months.
Now, you can see how your competitors are doing:
1) If some of them are growing then you can do research and see why are they growing (is there anything you can take from their growth)
2) If some of them are failing badly, you can also see why is that so and learn from it.That’s what competitor analysis should be used for in my opinion.
**Example**
After 6 months of tracking, you see your competitor having 2000 traffic by Ahrefs instead of 1200 from the last report. It’s definitely worth exploring what was the action that resulted in that growth.You can learn a lot from it and it’s a perfect opportunity to spend some time checking your competitor’s website to see if there is something else you missed that could potentially help your client.
We also do the competitor’s analysis to see how competitors form their content clusters.
In my opinion, that’s the future of content marketing and SEO because it’s the only way (except for backlinks) Google can see how authoritative you are.​
Hope this helps someone as I’ve seen quite a lot of people doing content or backlink gap as a part of competitor’s analysis. That’s not bad either but there is no point to search for the low quality and monotonous content that has been created by other SEOs that thinks mentioning a keyword to 7% “keyword density” (another useless term) is the right strategy for content.
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4 Replies
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Sounds like a basic Ahrefs audit, not really seeing anything bespoke here.
Can you clarify how metrics like DA can be easily gamed? The premise of the metric is the higher the value the harder it is to obtain so you can pretty safely expect 70+ DAs are there by no accident.
How’re you determining your competitors anyway? From your client? From your Ahrefs export? What if those competitors offer services you don’t, and so they inevitably rank for more keywords than yours.
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I feel like there must be something to content clusters I’m not getting. I hear people rave about it, but when I read more it feels a little no-duh?
Basically, I’m making a pillar piece on a head term, building out pages for related long tail terms, and building internal links to the pillar (and other pieces in the cluster). Is that generally the story, or am I missing a key piece?
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I add visibility as a large competitor gap analysis and sometimes break down by position.
I try to add number of pages on the competitors sites as well… not always but helps let the client know where they stand.
I calculate link ratio- backlinks / referring domains. Helps see who might be spammed. More than 100 is usually a clue. Big sites like Amazon have a link ratio of more than 1,000 but thats not the norm.
I have caught early signs of spam links by using link ratio.
Trying to think of what else…. Depending on industry and client Input the age of the domain name. It can be telling when a company/site has been around for awhile but still middle of the pack- those are targeted as being able to be beaten… they aren’t aggressive.
Also, it helps to set expectations about beating the competition and their likely spend over the years on content/SEO.
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I personally think that competitor reports/analyses are pointless at this time if you already know what you’re doing, and have a system in place.
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