What Is An SEO Competitor Analysis? Put in simple terms, it is the technique you would use to discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Some people think SEO is overwhelming. Well, they are right. There are so many little details you must know and follow to have top level SEO. As a result, knowing your competitors keywords is essential. Some people don’t realize that their competitors are actually an undiscovered ally. Especially when they have been doing it for much longer than you have.

By discovering what keywords your competitors are ranking for, you uncover what keywords you must start developing throughout your website. Due to their hard work, you are able to reverse engineer their success, identify its weaknesses, and develop more credible and trustworthy content. However, you must not duplicate their content as you will not receive the same boost.

Your goal through doing this is to get insights and strategies from others in your market, adapt them as your own, improve them and gain an edge over those who are already thriving in the rankings. When it comes to search engines, this has never been more important. People forget that the reason all these algorithms were created by Google were to provide the best possible search engine experience for the users through relevant, high-quality content.

1. They don’t take into account how competitive their keywords are. Fighting for keywords is fun, but you must have a grasp on how competitive each keyword is. Also, how to breach the market for those keywords.
2. They do not consider what sort of ROI they can get through targeting certain keywords. Ranking first for a keyword doesn’t mean the keyword will convert. So, finding those keywords that you can convert for are the keywords you must be targeting. The rest are just for extra site power.
3. They do not accurately predict what resources they will need to compete and win. SEO isn’t an overnight victory. As a result, the lack of understanding for the amount of time and effort needed to win for keywords sometimes destroys your process before it has even started.

What Is Keyword Competition?

Now that you have answered, “What is an SEO competitor analysis?”, you can move on to understanding the competitive advantages. Most people believe that they can rely on a keyword tool to tell them how competitive their keywords are. Well, that is a mistake. Keyword competition refers to the level of difficulty involved to rank for certain keywords. As a result, it provides you with a sense of how many web pages you must overcome to claim the top spot across search engines.

The two factors which influence the competitiveness in a keyword are its overall popularity and the level of competitiveness throughout the industry. If the whole industry isn’t trying to win for a specific keyword, then its competition will go down. However, this will also mean its popularity is most likely low,. Therefore, causing it to not be a very important keyword to be aiming for.

So, this means that the days of using a basic keyword tool have come to an end. You now must take into account the entire landscape just to find out how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. Due to the fact that you must know every aspect to find out the competition, knowing which keywords to go for has become increasingly important.

Why You Need To Do A Competitive Analysis

• Growing you traffic exponentially using the resources which were already at your disposal.
• Finding those keywords that have high search volume and haven’t been targeted by other SEOs in your industry.
• Finding those specific keywords that give your competitors the highest ROI.
• Going after high competition keywords and having success winning them.

So, if you have ever thought about any of those four factors, then you are aware of what opportunities a competition analysis can provide you. Although, more specifically, it tells you how you fare against your competitors. SEO, by design, was made for competition. As a result, every SEO expert has  a secret, or well know, love for competition.

You want higher rankings, not have to spend as much as the others, and claim the largest ROI in the industry. Well, so does everyone else trying to win rank for their keywords.The way to do any of those is to know where you stand with your competition. This is achieved by finding out what resources you have at your disposal, keeping track of the progress you are making to improve your rankings, and then finding out what more you can do outrank them without outspending them.

How To Find Different Keyword Types And Analyze Their Competitiveness

Consumers have never been as sophisticated as they are right now. Each prospect will have several interactions with your business before they even consider using your solutions, products, or services. As they cycle through the buying process, their search intent will change with each passing step until they hit their defined choice of purchase. If your keywords aren’t relevant to that intent, then you have lost the battle before it even started. However, just imagine the power of knowing which keywords that users search for at every stage in their journey. It would strengthen every aspect of your sales funnel.

• Your messaging would be sharper and more effective thanks to your knowledge behind what keywords to target.
• You will see an increase in your click through rate. This is due to your content being more finely tuned to the search intent of your potential buyers.
• Your conversion rates would increase thanks to all your additional knowledge. As a result, you are gaining a massive competitive edge and a higher ROI.

Now that you have an understanding of how everything works and how everything you can do can give you an advantage, you can now start to map your keywords to the buying process. These are the steps you should be tracking to ensure optimal effectiveness.

1. Your customer’s journey.
2. The keywords that correspond to each stage of that journey.
3. The competitiveness of these keywords at each corresponding stage.
4. How you can find these keywords and compete.