If SEO competitor analysis is not a part of your business routine, it’s about time you made it one. Competitor analysis is precisely what it sounds like — the strategic assessment of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in comparison with your own. A comprehensive competitor analysis can reveal insight into everything from competitors’ products and sales to marketing and retention tactics. How, though, can such insight prove useful to you? Though there are several ways, there are two benefits that are more noteworthy than others.

Competitor Analysis for SEO Helps Enhance Your Own Business Strategy

The foremost reason that competitor analysis SEO is beneficial for your brand is that it can provide the insight you need to advise your overall SEO strategy. By conducting an SEO analysis of your competitors, you can identify what your competitors are doing right versus what they are doing wrong.

For instance, if a competitor’s FAQ page frequently outperforms yours, a deep dive can reveal why. Maybe it categorizes its questions and divides them among topic pages instead of lumping them onto a single page. Maybe its FAQ page is easily navigable while yours is hard to find. Whatever the reason, even the briefest of assessments can reveal differences and, in the process, provide insight into what you can be doing better.

Some other ways a competitor analysis can advise your SEO strategy are as follows:

• Reveal how competitors talk about their products versus how you do
• Divulge competitors’ marketing channels versus your own
• Identify ways your offerings differ from competitors (i.e., reveal your value proposition)
• Show where your competitors fall short in terms of what you offer and what your audience expects
• Glean insight into how consumers feel about competitors’ offerings versus how they feel about yours

Ultimately, a competitor analysis can provide a benchmark for your own efforts and goals for success.

Out-Do Your Competition

When you use the data you glean from an SEO competitor analysis to inform your own marketing strategies, you can create robust strategies that far outpace those your competitors have in place. This is because your insight allows you to build systems that combine the best of your strategies and those of your competitors–and negate the worst of them. To really make the most of your efforts, though, ask yourself the following questions:

• What content do their customers engage well with? Do competitors’ customers consume eBooks, whitepapers and podcasts while you’re still creating short-form blogs and sending out email newsletters? What type of content performs best on both your site and the sites of your competitors? If you notice that, say, listicles and how-tos, receive the most likes and shares, consider increasing the number of blogs you create in these formats.
• Do they use social media? If your competitors are on social media, what channels do they use? Which channels see the most actions? In addition to identifying the channels used by your competitors, analyze which types of posts see the most and least success. Also, look into whether they use paid advertisements or if they rely on organic traffic.
• Are their products the same or similar to yours? Finally, explore ways in which the competition’s products are similar to and differ from yours. What features do customers seem to value? Which could they do without? What do they like/dislike about your products versus competitors’ offerings?

Performing a competitor analysis without knowing what exactly you are looking for can prove both difficult and futile. To make the most of your efforts, retain the help of professionals who specialize in competitor analysis for SEO. At Unwired Web Solutions, we provide and execute the types of SEO strategies that help businesses grow. To learn more about how our services can benefit you, contact our team today.