The next step in SEO after keyword research is a competitors’ research.
Analysing your competitors is not spying, it helps to reveal trends in your market place, evaluates business strength and weakness.
5 main benefits of competitors’ research
- Competitors research helps to create more effective content by identifying trending keywords and the most viewed content
- Improve your marketing
- It helps to create strategic plan for your business
- Find content opportunities based on your competitors’ pages that get the most search traffic
- You can learn about site structure
Main steps to make competitors’ research
- When you have done keyword research, you can check what websites and businesses are ranking with the same keywords in search engines and what businesses are at the top.
Keep in mind that search engines often personalise searches and form an SERP(Search Engine Result Page) based on your past searches. Therefore, for greater accuracy it is recommended to use ‘Incognito’ mode like Chrome Guest or through the VPN or proxy.
The top 4-5 companies are the most of interest for us, because that means that these companies had a great promotion compaign
Enter keywords in each search engine one by one, as the results will be different. - Make the list of their links in Google sheets or Excel doc.
- Look at the competitors in the paid search.
- Copy their domains to our table
- Have a look at the competitors in the list directory such as cluth.co
- Copy their domains to our table
The most interest for us are the companies with Sponsor tag.
Now that we have a list of competitors we have to analyse them.
The main focus for us are:
- What keywords they use
- The budget they spent on google ads to be at the top of the SERP
There are 3 main platforms where it is possible to pull out data about paid traffic
- SEMrush will help you discover new competitors, find their best-used keywords, and analyze their ad copy.
- Ahrefs
- SpyFu
In my opinion, Semrush and Spyfu are the best for paid data traffic analyzes. The data there is more accurate.
After you finished with collecting competitors:
- Export the competitors’ keywords. It is easy to do with SEO tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs
- Create a separate list for each competitor in your table. In this list add data from each SEO tools. Delete any duplicates from the list.
It is not necessary, but it is good to know and sometimes check the competitor latest blog posts and website updates. It is a bit tricky.
Here is a lifehack:
- Enter in Google site:competitor.com
- enter dates, for example for the last 3 months.
- As a result, Google shows the recent updates pages and new pages, articles, posts.
This can help you in what direction to go for your business.
From SpyFu you can also export ads texts. That helps you to make your ads better and drive you higher ranking
It is also a good idea to analyse competitors’ subscription and probably to subscribe also to their mailing list.
Conclusion
Competitive analyse is a significant part for running successful business. Your competitors have valuable lesson to teach you. It is also important to monitor their activity regularly. Doing like this will strengthen your business and improve the quality of your product and services.
Please, leave any questions in comments. And if you need assistance in keyword research or competitors research services, feel free to contact us via Contacts.