SEO, by nature, is a competition where you try to outrank other sites. This is why an initial competitive analysis is an essential part of any SEO implementation. When done correctly, you can get valuable insights into how your competitors are approaching their SEO strategy, which can generate various benefits such as:

• Get inspirations and ideas on how to build better content, which backlinks you should pursue and how, and which keywords that can be good opportunities, among other aspects
• Figure out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and so you can find out how to outdo or outsmart them
• Find your competitor’s secret tactics and strategies you can “steal”.
• Improve your own SEO strategy based on real, collected data. This way, you avoid assumptions when planning your strategy

These are just some of the benefits you can have by performing an SEO analysis, and in this guide, we will learn how.

We will divide this guide into four major sections, from identifying your key competitors to finally analyzing their backlinks profile. Let us begin with the first one: identifying and validating your competitors.

Identify and Validate Your Competitors

The first step of a successful competitive analysis is knowing whom to analyze, which is this case, your competitors. Depending on the size of your industry, you can have very few to so many competitors.

On the other hand, obviously, we don’t have the time and resources to analyze all of our competitors, and so there are two layers to this step: identify your competitors, and validate the ones that are worth analyzing. First, let us discuss the key principles in identifying your competitors.

1.Identifying Key Competitors

Generally, there are three main approaches to determining your potential, most relevant SEO competitors:

• The obvious industry competitor sites

This can range from the market leaders of your industry, your closest competitors, and so on. Here, you are using common sense and the data you’ve gathered from market research.

• Top sites in your industry

The top sites in your industry can belong to the market leaders, which we have discussed above. However, there are cases when these top sites don’t belong to major brands. You can use Alexa and Similarweb, among other tools to check these top sites.

• Keyword Competitors

This is probably the most accurate approach in relations to SEO. Here, we use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to check our target keywords, and the top ranking sites for these keywords are our competitors. Obviously, here you will need to figure out your target keywords beforehand, and you might want to check out this guide by Backlinko here.

These three are the main approaches in finding your key competitors. Now, how can we validate them to make sure we are using our resources and time for the most important ones? This is where the validation process comes in.

2. Validation

The main approach in validating your SEO competitors is through keyword research: you would want to target competitors that are targeting, or are currently ranking on your target keywords.

To do this, we will need a keyword research tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner among other tools, and figure out two things:

• Check your current positions for your target keywords
• Check these competitors’ ranked keywords, their positions, and analyze their content pieces whether they are targeting the same audiences as yours

Based on these, you should prioritize competitors who are targeting the same target keywords as yours. Depending on your available resources, you should focus on three to five key competitors to analyze.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Target Keywords

Now that you’ve selected and validated several key competitors, we should first analyze their target keywords. The purpose of this is to figure out our opportunities: we can decide whether we can target the same keywords or find other opportunities based on this data. There are several factors to consider in this step:

• The keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords. Even if your competitors are successful with a certain keyword, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it if the KD is too high.
• Find keyword gaps, which is, keywords where your competitors rank for when your site does not. This can be an effective approach to find new target keywords.
• There can be opportunities in your competitors’ branded keywords. For example, if your competitor, X, is the market leader of your industry, the keyword “X alternative” or “alternative for X” can be good opportunities. Similarly, you might want to target “X vs your brand name” keyword and its alternatives.

You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush of Ahrefs to figure out your competitors’ keywords easily. With these tools, you simply need to enter your competitors’ URL into the search bar, and they will display important metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty (KD).

Analyzing Competitors’ Sites and Content

The purpose of this step is to figure out how your competitors are approaching their on-site SEO optimization, which can be divided into two things: their technical on-site optimizations and their content optimizations.

First, let us discuss several important aspects of technical optimizations you should analyze:

• The page’s load speed. It this competitor’s site is currently ranking, especially for popular keywords, you should aim to have similar loading speed, if not faster.
• Mobile-responsiveness. Pretty self-explanatory. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool for this.
• Use of Schema.org or other structured data markups.
• URL structure and XML sitemap
• Metadata optimizations, like how your competitors are optimizing their title tags, meta descriptions, and image/video optimizations

As you might have guessed, the purpose of analyzing these technical aspects is so that you can emulate their efforts, or find areas where you can do better than them. With that being said, let’s see what we can analyze in the content department:

• The most important thing to analyze is how they are optimizing the target keyword(s) within the content. Especially pay close attention to their titles and subheadings. Also, analyze their keyword density using various available tools.
• Examine their content types. Are they using videos, images, or podcasts to enhance the textual content?
• How optimized are their landing pages, including sales pages if it’s an e-commerce site.
• The structure of their content. How long is the blog post? How are they maintaining engagement and readability of the content?
• How many links are included in each content for both external and internal links? Analyze how they are using the anchor texts.
• How are they approaching their content according to their audience’s search intent?

To get better SEO results, you should first and foremost aim to create better content than the top-ranking sites. So, this step is especially important. Hire an SEO consultant to analyze how your competitors are approaching their content, analyze their content promotion strategy, and aim to outdo them.

Analyzing Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals in SEO. In relations to SEO competitive analysis, there are two main purposes in analyzing your competitors’ backlinks:

1. Figuring out backlinks opportunities. You can aim to get the same backlinks when targeting the same keywords.
2. Figuring out whether pursuing these same links are beneficial for your site. For example, are some backlinks going to be really hard to get yourself? In this case, you would also want to decide on the alternatives.

In most cases, however, it’s a good idea to pursue the same backlinks as your competitors. In theory, you should at least similar results when you have the exact same backlinks profile. However, there are two major factors when determining whether you should pursue the backlinks:

• Links quality. Nowadays, the quality of your links is far more important than quantity. So, you might not want to pursue backlinks that are low in quality.
• Bad links and broken links. Obviously, you should avoid these two. Broken links are simply backlinks from sites or pages that are no longer operational for one reason or another. Bad links are generally purchased links or links built through blackhat tactics.

However, remember that the higher the quality, generally the harder it will be to get the inbound link. You can build a list from these high-quality backlinks, and start building your relationships with these sites until you earn these backlinks. You might want to check out this guide by Backlinko on more about link building tactics.

When analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, here are a few key areas to focus on:

1. Finding backlinks gap

Here, your aim is to find sites which are linking to your competitors’ sites but not yours, especially on pages where you are targeting the same keywords. There are various tools available that can help you in this aspect, and this list by Neil Patel is a good place to start.

2.The number of deep backlinks

Backlinks that are linking to “deep” pages have more value for SEO than a backlink to your landing page or homepage. For example, a backlink that is pointing to a content page can be considered as “deep”.

The goal of this is to find out whether your competitors have a lot of these backlinks. If the answer is yes, you will need to do the same—if not better—to rank for the same keywords. The best way to get these deep backlinks is to develop relevant, high-quality content pieces and build backlinks for each of them.

3. Anchor text usage

In SEO best practices, anchor texts should always be relevant to the content of the linked page. However, using exact-match anchor text too heavily can get you penalized by Google.

So, analyze how your competitors are using their anchor texts, as well as the anchor texts of the backlinks linking to their sites. Check the ratio between exact-match texts and generic anchors, as well as the usage of semantically-related texts.

4. Sitewide backlinks

A sitewide link is, in a nutshell, links placed throughout the whole site, commonly in the sidebar, footer, or header. Using sitewide backlinks aggressively nowadays can induce a Google Penalty due to the Penguin update. However, it can still be effective when done properly. Check out whether your competitors are getting sitewide backlinks, and you can either aim to emulate them or find different opportunities.

5. Redirects

Using 301 redirects is one of the most common (and effective) link building tactics. This is why you should analyze whether your competitors are using redirect tactics to get their backlinks, and find similar opportunities.

There are three different redirects to look for:

• Traditional 301 redirects: where a brand redirects their existing/old site to the new site, generating a backlink in the process.

• Using link shorteners: can be considered a black hat tactic, but is still quite common

• Merger redirects: where your competitor redirects an expired, but still relevant site to their site

6. Hidden links

There might be cases where a competitor is ranking really high, but has very little to no backlinks at all. In this case, there is a high probability that your competitors are hiding their backlinks.

Quite often, these sites are hiding their backlinks because they are using grey hat tactics like using a Private Blog Network (PBN) or even black hat tactics.

End Words: Learning From Your Competitors

As we have mentioned, SEO competitive analysis should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. A proper competitive analysis can provide very valuable information about your competitors’ performances and their strategies to achieve them.

By collecting this data, you can, in turn, plan your own SEO campaign without relying on instincts and assumptions, that will drive better results. As the old saying goes: knowing your enemy is half the battle, and by knowing how your key competitors are approaching their SEO, you have a much better chance in outranking them.

The post SEO Competitive Analysis: Learning From Your Competitors To Achieve Better Results appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO audit should be performed before you attempt any SEO efforts, especially if you are an SEO agency handling a new client’s website. To achieve the best results, however, you should do SEO audit regularly.

In this guide, we will share 9 important steps you should do when performing an SEO audit, covering the most important aspects of SEO activities.

Before we begin, however, let us discuss the concept of SEO Audit itself.

What Is SEO Audit?

SEO website audit, in essence, is checking the health of your site according to SEO principles. A proper SEO audit allows you to check the performance of your site regarding the important ranking signals. This way, you can find the important weaknesses, as well as as strengths and optimize them further.

Without SEO audit, you can’t properly identify the current state of your site and implement the necessary improvements to improve your ranking on the search engine results page.

Sites that are properly optimized get more traffic and thus, generate more prospects with the potential of converting into paying customers.

What To Expect From SEO Audit?

There are three main things you can expect from SEO audit:

1. The accurate current state of your site, which is, a detailed analysis on how your website is performing according to the ranking signals. Especially, your social media presence, search results performance, number of inbound/outbound links, and any other relevant information.
2. SEO audit checklist, which is a list actions necessary to improve your SEO results.
3. Complete internet marketing strategy according to the available data.

Step-By-Step Guide To SEO Audit

Step 1: Making Sure Your Site is Indexable

No matter the amount of optimizations you do, it won’t matter if Google cannot index your page. So, this step, and arguably the most important one, is to ensure Google that other crawl engines can crawl your site.

First, let us understand how Google crawl your website.

1. Google’s spider bot visit your web page and “crawl” it.
2. Google then add the optimized pages to their index, cataloging them
3. Google then show the best results based on queries

Fortunately, Google does provide a tool to check whether your site can be crawled, which is the Google Search Console. Google Search Console is also an essential tool for any SEO audit activities, so keep it in mind.

To use this tool, you only need a Google account, which the most of us already have at this point. Also, if you already used Google Analytics previously, you can link the two together so you can monitor Search Console data from Google Analytics.

Here are a few necessary things to consider when monitoring Google Search Console to check whether your site is crawlable:

XML Sitemap

Having a proper XML sitemap is essential in making sure your site is indexable by Google. By creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console, you tell Google the exact location of your pages, giving Google an easier time to crawl them. Also, by doing this, you are telling Google that you are the original owner of your site content, which will prevent removal in the cases of duplicated content pieces.

Thankfully, there are many available tools that can help you in developing XML Sitemap. For instance, XML Sitemaps is a fairly popular site providing this service. If your site is WordPress based, you can also use various plugins to assist you, such as Yoast SEO.

Crawl Errors

Use Crawl->Crawl Errors to check for crawl errors on your site. 404 errors are not a direct ranking signal, but the can affect your SEO performances due to bad user experience, and thus, higher bounce and exit rates. Use redirects to fix these 404s if necessary. Again, if your site is WordPress-based, there are plugins that can assist you in this process.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a small text file on your site server which tells the search engines which pages of your site they can (and cannot) index.

Not all sites have robots.txt, and Google can still crawl your site in this case. However, having a proper robots.txt can help in optimizing crawl budget.

You might want to check out this guide from Moz on how to optimize robots.txt.

Step 2: Make sure you rank on your brand name

Do a quick Google search using your proper brand name as the query.

If your brand name is properly unique, your own site should be the very first organic result. If your site is very, very new, however, you might need to wait a couple of weeks or even months.

If your site currently rank further down in the search results page, then Google thinks there are other sites that are more relevant for your brand name. Again, this often happens if your brand name is a generic word.

Here are several things you can do when you don’t rank on branded keywords:

• More backlinks, especially from high-authority sites
• Getting a PR mention from high-authority media, relevant influencers, and high-quality sites
• Have a Google My Business account (and verify it), and build citations on local directories. Make sure your Phone, Address and Name are consistent across all listings
• Have a proper presence on all major social media platforms

With these relatively simple steps, your site should slowly climb up the ranks.

However, what if your site is nowhere to be found in the SERP? If you don’t have any indexation problems, as we have discussed on the first step, most likely your site is affected by serious Google penalties. (internal link)

Again, use Google Search Console to check whether you are currently penalized by Google.

Step 3: Use HTTPS and secure your site

If you are serious about your business, you should definitely switch over to HTTPS.

Since 2014, having a secure website URL is a very important ranking signal while also bringing other direct and indirect benefits to your business.  More and more people are now really concerned about online security, and let’s face it, if you land on a site with a security warning, most likely you are going to leave.

Thankfully, migrating to HTTPS is now easier than ever, and you can check out this guide by SearchEngineLand on how to do it. Also, if your site is WordPress-based, you might want to check this guide by WPBeginner.

However, migrating to HTTPS is just one aspect of site security. So, in this step, we will discuss how to audit the possible security issues that might affect your site.

You can use SEMRush’s Site Audit feature, click on HTTPS, and SEMRush will show various HTTPS-related security issues such as:

• Internal links to non-secured pages
• Some pages on your site that are not yet using HTTPS
• Mixed content
• Checking the state of your security certificates and server security protocols

Step 4: Broken Links

Inbound links, or backlinks are obviously essential to any SEO activities: the most important and prominent SEO ranking factor.  Yet, these backlinks will only bring value when they work properly, and this is why checking for broken links is a very important step of SEO Audit.

There are many different tools you can use to identify broken links. Again, SEMRush’s site audit feature can be useful, and if you are using WordPress, you can use various plugins to help you.

Also, consider using DrLinkCheck in this process, the free version have a 1000-URL limitation, which is quite generous.

Step 5: Check for Redirect Chains

Redirect chain, is the term we use to define more than one redirects between two URLs. Redirect chains can affect your link profile, and so affect your ranking. Also, a long redirect chain can affect the page load time, which is also an indirect ranking factor.

A redirect chain can especially happen after a site migration, including when you switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

Most SEO audit tools can find redirect chains and redirect loops, and fix them.

Step 6: Checking Backlinks Quality

Backlinks from low-quality sites not only can hinder your ranking. In a worst-case scenario, you can get penalized by Google. So, during your SEO audit, it is important to find these low-quality backlinks and remove them.

Most SEO audit tools have the feature to check these low-quality links, but again you can easily do this with SEMRush’s Backlink Audit feature.

Here are a few different factors to look for:

• Link Relevancy

The relevancy of the backlinks is extremely important in determining SEO results. For example, if you are a real estate company, having a backlink from entertainment sites can be concerning.

Yet, manually checking the relevancy of each inbound links can be extremely time-consuming. Thankfully, there are many tools that can help you with this aspect, especially Ahrefs with its Bulk Backlinks feature inside Link Map Tools.

• Authority/Quality

As we have mentioned, the quality of your backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. Having just one or two authority backlinks can get your site to rank higher faster compared to having tens of low-quality links. Yet, how can we determine the quality of our backlinks? You might want to check out this guide by SEOMark, and use various SEO audit tools to track the metrics listed there.

• Link Diversity

There are many different sources of backlinks from directory links to contextual links to sidebar links, and so on. You might want to check this list to check all the different types/sources available.

The thing is, you would want a decent amount of diversity to make your link profile more natural. Also, you would want a proper diversity of DoFollow and NoFollow links.

• Anchor Texts Ratio

There are generally two different anchor text types to consider: exact match anchor text (EMA) and branded anchor. The thing is, the majority of your anchor texts should be branded anchors, so check the ratio between EMAs and branded anchors, and adjust your tactic when necessary.

• Homepage Links VS Deep Links

If your SEO is based on content marketing (which is, the most of us), the majority of your backlinks should target deep pages. Again, however, aim for proper diversity to allow a more natural link profile.

Step 7: Page Analysis

Since, as we have just mentioned, the core of most, if not all SEO activities is content marketing, SEO audit should properly address the quality of your content and page optimization of each content.

No matter how good your content is, it won’t get ranked unless the page is properly optimized, and vice versa. In this step, we will first discuss the key areas to audit when optimizing your page.

• Duplicate content check

You can use various duplicate content checker like Copyscape. This is useful if you are outsourcing your content development process, as well as to check whether there are others on the internet who are stealing your content. If you do find a duplicate content, you can remove it (if the duplicate content is yours), or file a DMCA Report to Google, which will allow Google to remove this content from indexation.

• Target keyword locations

There are four main locations where your focus keyword should be included: the title, META description, and the first paragraph (or at least, one of the earliest paragraphs, and the last sentence of your content. Mention your target keyword only once in these four locations.

• URL

Your URL should also include the target keyword. Make sure the URL is short and comprehensive enough for human readers.

• Internal links

For internal links, make sure you are using exact match anchor text (EAM).

Step 8: Content Analysis

As mentioned, an optimized page will only work with an optimized content. If in the previous step we have discussed how to audit your page optimization, here we will focus on content quality.

Analyzing content is both the most important and time-consuming part of SEO audit, and here are the key areas to focus on:

• Uniqueness

Your content should be unique not only in the eye of the search engines, but also human readers.

• Value

Your content should bring value to your audience by giving new information or solving problem. Also, your content should be engaging, usually by using “you” and “your” within your content to address your audience.

• Length

Longer content pieces generally perform better on Google SERP. 1,800 to 2,000-word is the average length for top-ranking content.

• Advertising

Avoid using excessive ads on your content pages, it can distract your audience and even cause a high bounce rate.

• Blog Comments

Look for links in your blog comment, remove any unrelated and suspicious links. Having these links in your blog comment section can get you penalized by Google, so be extra careful.

Step 9: User Interactions

In this step, we will focus on analyzing how your users are interacting with your site, and especially your content.You can do this step just with the handy Google Analytics, and here are some key data points to focus on:

• Bounce Rate

Generally, you would want a bounce rate below 60%, with 80% being the threshold until you should worry about a potential problem. If your bounce rate is above 80% or even 90%, this should be your priority to fix.

• Dwell time

Dwell time is now considered a significant ranking factor, although Google hasn’t confirmed it. However, a high dwell time means there are more chances to convert the audience, so you should definitely aim for a higher dwell time. An average dwell time of above 1 minute is decent, and you should aim for above 2 minutes. Remember, the better your content is, the more time they will spend on your site.

• Exit Rate

Exit rate measures the rate of visitors that are leaving specific pages. This way, we can identify which pages that are not performing well. Again, aim for an exit percentage of around 50-70%, and you will need. High exit rate often occurs when your content in this specific page doesn’t provide enough value or doesn’t answer your audience’s problems.

• Return Visitors

The number of people who return to visit your site is a strong positive signal. It means, your audience finds value in your content, and with more visitations, you have more chance to encourage conversions. If your return visitors rate is low, you either have issues with your content or with your overall user experience (including site optimization).

End Words

There are certainly other areas SEO experts can analyze when performing an SEO audit. However, the 9 steps we have shared above are among the most important, and you can use the same principles to assess other areas.

Regular SEO audit is a very important aspect if you want to maximize your SEO results: monitor everything regularly, find gaps, and know when to adjust your approaches.

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