Just recently, one of our visitors asked us to take a quick look at his website, because he felt some of his keywords were not performing well enough. Other companies have outperformed him on Google, and he wondered why.
In such a case, it is often essential to make competitive analysis quick. In most cases, it is not necessarily your website that performs poorly; other websites are doing better. Now we knew he was using the Yoast plugin and applied the concepts of content optimization perfectly. First, we checked the configuration of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, but everything seemed to be in order.
- What else could have happened?
If you want to do a competitive analysis to optimize your SEO efforts, there is indeed a lot to do on your own, without having to hire an expensive SEO consultant. Let me guide you through its 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 as one of the primary keywords, you might not even have any competition, let alone any decent organic traffic to your website. An example: if you offer "summer houses", but insist on the use of the keyword "vacation homes", you sell yourself short. Match your keywords with the ones your customers are using.
Proper keyword research will be of great help not only for this competitive analysis, but for the SEO optimization of your website, so please put some effort into it.
Step 2: Analyze these keywords
Once you have defined the keywords you want to check against your competition, the next step is obvious: do a research for those keywords. See who your competition is by writing who ranks higher than you.
Be realistic
If you are on page 2 of Google and want to do a competitive analysis with number 1, there is probably a lot to be gained. But you should probably accept the fact that your ranking will go up step by step, and that high ranking web pages, depending on the keywords, might have a higher marketing budget than you to support their ranking strategies.
This is perhaps the main reason they rank so high. Don't give up for any other reason. Climb the rankings step by step and try to increase your marketing budget along the way.
Look up the keywords and make them long tail or add local keywords (city name, region name) to them, if necessary. Do a thorough analysis. Google Trends will tell you which keywords have the most traffic in your business's target markets, and tools such as Ahrefs.com et Searchmetrics.com will give you even more views on the keywords.
Gradually climb the rankings
Sometimes you will be able to achieve a big improvement in your ranking. But if your website is ranked number 6, it is easier to go up to 5 or 4 first and then target the top three. Again, it's possible that the top three probably have a great marketing budget to make it happen, but stick to beating your next door neighbors first. It's easier. That said: if you have the chance to dethrone number 1, 2 or 3, sure, go ahead and do it.
Step 3: Check the technical differences
You will also need to check a number of things to determine where 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.
Website speed
There are so many ways to test the speed of your website, which we have mentioned quite often. No need to explain them to you yet. But, in a competitive analysis, the speed outlook will tell you if there is a huge difference between you and your main competitors in terms of website load speed and the difference. user experience that goes with. The faster the website, the happier the visitor and the happier the search engine.
SSL / https
Https and SLL are the new standards for security on any website. Serving a secure website means providing the best user experience and earning the trust of your future customers. It makes sense to rank a secure website versus an unsecured website. Again, there are several ways to test SLL / https in a competitive analysis.
A nice overview is given by Builtwith.com, which gives you a ton of technical information including SSL certificate etc… You can obviously check your browser's address bar, but Builtwith could give you more information and other details.
Mobile website
A good mobile website should gain more visitors as soon as possible. This is due to the speed, the decision on the top tasks of your website, and a clean and nice design. Go take a look at your competitor's websites and see where they clearly outperform you. Test this, using for example:
- The mobile test of Google
- Mobile usability test in the search console
- Ready.mobi Mobile device test (premium benchmark test available)
- Un Google Lighthouse audit will give you even more information.
Step 4: Find content opportunities
While technical optimizations are crucial, the quick wins will likely be in the content area.
- What did you write about your business and products, and what did you post on your website?
Click on all menu items
- What are the main pages, what is your competitor trying to sell?
- And how did he manage to rank above you?
Find out how focused their menu is and what pages are related to it.
What is the end goal of all this SEO?
It serves your website better on Google which will lead to better rankings. You might not care what schema.org is doing, or what XML Sitemaps are, but if they benefit your business goals, you probably need to add them to your website.
See if your competitor tells a better story than you. And improve your story. The main menu of your website should be aimed at your visitors, not so much at explaining all the awesome things you have to offer.
Category pages or product pages
If you have an online store, it might be worthwhile to do a competitive analysis of your competitor's online store structure.
Is it trying to convince the customer on a product page or already on the category pages?
In a market where there are thousands of products, and ranking in each niche is difficult! It's probably best to optimize most of your category pages. Write engaging, quality content, make those pages cornerstones and try to rank a lot of them.
Learn more about the optimization of the category pages of your online store.
Your competitive analysis will tell you which of these pages is optimized by your main competitors. Optimize yours accordingly.
Sitemap
A Sitemap can show you the structure of your competitor's site, whether through an HTML Sitemap or an XML Sitemap. It can tell you, for example, if your competitor is targeting certain long-tail keywords through slugs pages, and a few clicks on their pages will tell you how their internal links are made.
You can find this Sitemap on most websites at:
example.com/sitemap.xml or example.com/sitemap_index.xml or at example.com/sitemap.
Sometimes a website just doesn't have this Sitemap, but tools like Screaming Frog et Xenu could help you. Analyze the website.
Blog
The main question here is: do you have a blog? A blog is made to display dynamic content, keeps your website alive and, if you post regularly, Google will find all kinds of "Latest Updates". If you don't have a blog, and your competitor does and ranks better, start a blog. But do not forget that your competitor has probably woven this blog in his content strategy.
Step 5: Compare User experience -UX-
A better user experience allows you to increase your page views and lower your bounce rate. I'm not getting into that too much here, because I think in a competitive analysis you should focus on other things first, but I wanted to highlight two things: call to action and contact.
Call to action
A great call to action helps any page. Whether it's driving sales or driving engagement, every page needs an appropriate call to action. Just then go over to some of your competitor's pages and see how they fared on it. See if you can grab a few ideas and improve your own call to action. By the way removing a Slider and / or video background is not a call to action. It's a call to no action.
Contact page and address details
Your contact page and your address details could be the end goal of a visit to your page. If so, check how this page was created.
- Did they add structured data, for example?
- Is there a Contact form ?
- Did they make it easier to find these details?
Adjust accordingly, if comparing this gives rise to some great ideas.
Step 6: Perform a backlinks analysis
Last and not least: if everything looks reasonably the same, and there's no logical way to explain why your competitor is outperforming you, the other website might have a lot more relevant links than you. Or simply the best. You must consult Ahrefs.com, Moz's OpenSiteExplorer or, for example, Searchmetrics for it.
Follow-up of your competitive analysis!
At this point, you know the main differences between your competitor's website and yours. This is the time when you start to prioritize optimizations and get down to business. First, start by fixing the things that are easy ASAP.
Next, figure out which issues could have the most impact on your rankings, and fix those as well. If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you will have no problem with this.
Recommended Resources
And for those who want to go further, especially in optimizing their WordPress website, here are some resources that we invite you to consult.
- Keyword Research For SEO: The Ultimate Guide
- Why and how to organize virtual events in WordPress
- 5 WordPress plugins to create a directory on WordPress
- 10 WooCommerce plugins to create dynamic pricing
Conclusion
Here is ! That's it for this article that shows you how to do a competitive analysis of your website. Do not hesitate to send us your appreciations and suggestions. in the comments section.
However, you can also consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation or the one on Divi: the best WordPress theme of all time.
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