How to Create SEO Competitor Analysis Report

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand? And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently? Competitive analysis is the process of analyzing all collected information to derive some insight for reducing risk and making better decisions.

What is competitor analysis?

A competitive analysis is a strategy that involves researching major competitors to gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics. Implementing stronger business strategies, warding off competitors, and capturing market share are just a few benefits of conducting a competitive market analysis.

To make your analysis truly useful, it’s important to:

1. Pick the right competitors to analyze
2. Know which aspects of your competitors’ business are worth analyzing
3. Know where to look for the data
4. Understand how you can use the insights to improve your own business.

From the SEO perspective, there are two most important things about competition you should focus on: the keywords they rank for and the backlinks they’ve got. The former will give you a solid idea on what type of search terms bring them traffic and sales, and the latter will show what authoritative websites in your niche link to them.

• Keyword analysis and ranking of competitors
• Backlink analysis of Top Competitors
• Domain status of your competitors
• Social media presence
• Organic and paid advertising status

Content Marketing Analysis of main Competitors

If content is part of your competitors’ strategy, it’s important that you analyze their blog and what they tend to write about. Are the readers engaged? Do the posts get shared around social media a lot? Does the competitor accept guest posts?

Analyze how your competitors market their products

Analyzing your competitor’s website is the fastest way to gauge their marketing efforts. Take note of any of the following items and copy down the specific URL for future reference:

• Do they have a blog?
• Are they creating whitepapers or ebooks?
• Do they post videos or webinars?
• Do they have a podcast?
• Are they using static visual content such as infographics and cartoons?
• What about slide decks?
• Do they have a FAQs section?
• Are there featured articles?
• Do you see press releases?
• Do they have a media kit?
• What about case studies?
• Do they publish buying guides and data sheets?
• What online and offline advertising campaigns are they running?

Observe how they promote their marketing content

From engagement, you’ll move right along to your competitor’s content promotion strategy.

• Keyword density in the copy itself
• Image ALT text tags
• Use of internal linking

The following questions can also help you prioritize and focus on what to pay attention to:

• Which keywords are your competitors focusing on that you still haven’t tapped into?
• What content of theirs is highly shared and linked to? How does your content compare?
• Which social media platforms are your target audience using?
• What other sites are linking back to your competitor’s site, but not yours?
• Who else is sharing what your competitors are publishing?
• Who is referring traffic to your competitor’s site?
• For the keywords you want to focus on, what is the difficulty level? There are several free (and paid) tools that will give you a comprehensive evaluation of your competitor’s search engine optimization.

Once you’re done with every step of competitive analysis, I’m sure you’ve got a clear understanding of the market and more than a handful of ideas on how to improve your own product.