Just recently a friend of mine asked me to take a quick look at his website because he felt some of his keywords were not performing as well as they used to be. A few other sites have overtaken him on Google, and he wondered why. In such a case, it often pays to do a quick competitive analysis. In most cases, it isn't necessarily your site that performs the worst. It's other sites that do better. How to know in his case, what is not working? It was therefore necessary to do an improved benchmarking of SEO performance.
If you want to do competitive analysis to optimize your SEO efforts, there are actually a lot of things you can do on your own, without having to hire an SEO consultant. Let me walk you through these steps!
Step 1: Define your keywords
It is very important to use the right keywords in a competitive analysis. If you insist on using your brand's keywords, you might not even have any competition, let alone any decent organic traffic to your website. An example: if you offer "vacation homes" but insist on using the keyword "vacation cottage", you will probably have little results. Match the words your customers use.
A good search for keywords will be useful, not just for this competitive analysis, but for the complete optimization of your website, so put some effort into it.
Step 2: Analyze these keywords
Once you have defined the keywords you want to compare to your competition, the next step is obvious: conduct research on those keywords. See who your competition is by noting who is higher than you.
To be realistic
If you're on page two of Google and want to do competitive analysis with number one, there's probably a lot to be gained. But you should probably accept the fact that your rankings will increase step by step, and high ranking websites, according to the keywords, might have a budget marketing higher than you to support their ranking strategies. This could be the main reason why they are so high up. Do not abandon. Climb to higher leaderboards step by step and try to increase your budget by marketing.
Check the keywords and make them keywords or add local keywords (city name, region name), if necessary. Do a thorough analysis. Google Trends will tell you which keywords are driving the most traffic in your business's target markets, and tools (free / paid) such as Ahrefs.com et Searchmetrics.com will give you even more information about keywords.
Climb the rankings one (a few) step (s) at a time
Sometimes you can make a big improvement in your rankings. But if your website ranks sixth, it's easier to climb to the top five or four and then target the top three. Again, the top three probably have the budget of marketing to achieve these results, where your immediate neighbors in the rankings fight like you. Defeat them first. it's easier. That said, if you have the opportunity to dethrone number 1, 2 or 3, sure, go ahead and do it.
Step 3: Check the technical differences
You will need to check a number of things to determine which areas your competition is ahead of you. The next step in your competitive analysis, after you have listed the keywords you want to perform this analysis for, is to see if there are any technical differences.
Speed ​​of the site
There are so many ways to check your site's speed, which we've mentioned quite often, like Pingdom and Google's speed tools. In a competitive analysis, statistics speed will tell you if there is a huge difference between you and your main competitors in terms of website service and the difference in user experience that goes with it. The faster the site, the happier the visitor and the happier the search engine.
SSL / https
Https and SLL are on the service of a secure website for your visitor. It is becoming the norm and for good reason. Serving on a secure website is all about providing the best user experience and earning the trust of your future customers. It makes sense to rank a secure website above an unsecured site . Again, there are several ways to check SLL / https in a competitive analysis. A good overview is provided by Builtwith.com, which gives you a ton of technical information, including SSL certificate etc. You can obviously check your browser's address bar for this, but Builtwith might give you more insight while going through all the other details. Like the CMS your competitor uses (what if he / she has updated their WordPress installation and you haven't?).
Mobile site
It's all about mobile these days. It makes sense, as most of the website traffic comes from mobile devices with a few exceptions.
A good mobile website is all about getting your visitor to the right page as soon as possible. It has to do with speed, with deciding the main tasks on your website, and with a clean and nice design. Go check your competitor's websites and see where they clearly outperform you. Test this out, using for example:
- Mobile test of Google
- Quick screen preview for multiple devices
- Mobile usability test in the Search Console
- Test Ready.mobi for mobile devices (premium reference test available)
- A Google Lighthouse audit will give you even more information.
That's all for this first part. We will cover the other aspects in the next tutorial.
