Why do we love SEO? Ask any SEO agency in New Jersey, and they will tell you how exciting SEO truly is. There is always something new to discover.
You can find out more about your target market, discover new keywords that will rank for your niche, and check out earlier campaigns to see what improvements you can make for the next time around.
SEO is constantly changing and staying at the top of what works to bring new business is critical for success. However, one of the most important sources of SEO data – your competition- must never be ignored.
Explain competitive analysis by Best SEO Agency in New Jersey
SEO competitive analysis is the process of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your and your competitor’s SEO. The process involves researching the links, keywords, and content to reverse engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.
Competitor analysis can help you answer the important questions about your SEO services:
- Who are your actual SEO competitors?
- What are the best-ranking keywords your competitors are targeting?
- What topics should be covered to give your SEO services a competitive edge?
- What is your competitor’s winning strategy?
How to run an SEO Competitive Analysis?
There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO. But the basic principle that most agencies offering SEO services follow is almost the same – Analyse what’s working for your competitors (keywords, backlinks, contents, etc.) and leverage this knowledge into your own SEO services.
Here are a few steps that you can add to your SEO competitor analysis process:
Know your competitors
Identifying your true competitors is not as simple as it seems. The novice way of doing competitor analysis is by simply entering the top keyword in Google and checking out which domains are ranking.
However, all of these sites may not be your true competitors. Deciding who is not your competitor is also equally important. It will not be wise to try to outrank sites like Wikipedia, Pinterest, or the big fishes in the digital world. Instead, shortlist your niche competitors that impact your traffic the most.
Keyword Gap Analysis
Agencies offering SEO services in New Jersey agree that keyword gap analyses play a major role in ranking your site. Pay attention to the keywords that you already rank for but not as good as your competitors. Pay special attention to those keywords where you are only a position or two behind your primary competitor. Once you have identified the gaps, you can work on closing or taking advantage of the same.
Content Analysis
Keywords are one way of researching content ideas. Another one is screening your competitor’s top-performing contents. Check out which content earned your competitors the most links. Since links are a critical part of ranking, it makes sense to focus on the contents with the highest number of links.
Plan your content analysis in these 3 steps:
- Discover your competitor’s top content
- Create your own content that significantly improves the one in more ways
- Promote your content to a similar group of people
Google SERP Analysis
Analysing the right keyword to target isn’t enough to crawl higher in the Google SERP. To win the traffic, you must understand the search intent of the keyword.
What do we mean by search intent? It means getting inside the mind of the searcher to understand what they are exactly looking for. Sounds impossible? Well, fortunately Google has done 99% of the job for you.
Simply type in the keyword you want to target and Google will show you all the results focusing on the particular term. Say if you search the term, ‘baked alaska’, Google will focus on recipes in its results and not the history, the pronunciation or the origin. It understands the intent of the search is to find the recipe of baked alaska instead of its history.
Other SERP features and metrics like keyword difficulty, ‘people also ask’ boxes and link matrices can tell you a lot about what people are looking for.
In this huge blooming digital world, SEO competitor analysis will never technically be complete. As sites keep evolving, keep an eye on the changes competitors are making so you can pick up the strategies and hopefully stay a step ahead of them.