What is Competitor Analysis in SEO?
Competitor Analysis in SEO refers to analyzing and monitoring your competitors in various aspects, including their search engine optimization (SEO) to learn from their methods and mistakes. Understanding the backlink profiles of your competition and comparing them to your own is vital for various reasons. It is, of course, the most important step in link building if you want to find out why they are ranking better than you and how you can do better than them. It is also essential to inspect the common link risk in your niche so that you can continue to boost your rankings without moving into the penalty area. Therefore, the Competitive Analysis should be a solid foundation of your SEO strategy.
Competitive Analysis Workflow
You can get the most powerful results out of the Competitive Analysis when you know exactly when and how to use it.
Find Competitors
It might be possible that you don’t even know who your competitors ARE if you are new to the market or just started working with a new client. In that case, you need to ask yourself: what keywords should the site rank for? When you figured out the keywords, you can check who ranks for them and these are your competitors.
Recommended tool: CKA
Understand the risk level in your industry
By analyzing the link risk levels in your industry using a tool like CDTOX you can gauge how many bad links their competitors have, and what they probably disavowed. You should then compare the risk for your domain with the overall DTOXRISK in your niche. This way, you can get an idea will how many and which links you are supposed to remove or disavow without shrinking your backlink profile too much.
Reverse Engineering their Link Building
If you already went past that struggle, then it is time to start outperforming your competitors. To do this, you need to understand WHY your competitors are ranking better than you and WHAT you need to do to blend in and do just a little better. You need to consider many metrics as well as different ratios like keywords and Follow / NoFollow links to understand how your niche works.
Recommended tools: QDC, CLA, CDTOX
Understanding Link Velocity
When you have decided on a link building strategy to outperform your competitors, it is still imperative to understand the concept of Link Velocity. If you build all your good links at once, you will get a sudden boost in your rankings, followed by an algorithmic penalty (or worse). This is why you need to understand the natural link growth in your niche and then start building at the right pace.
Recommended tool: CLV
Conclusion
The Competitive Analysis Tools are very powerful for finding the right competitive SEO strategy. Use them before taking action and always be one step ahead of your competition in the rankings. If you understand how your competition got their rankings, you will know exactly what links to look for and can proceed by prospecting for link opportunities.
Competitive Landscape Analysis is a synonym for competitor research and gave a component in LRT its name.
LinkResearchTools Product
The Competitive Landscape Analyzer was the first competitive link analysis tool on the market in 2011 that introduced analyzing specifics of backlink profiles compared to each other, as opposed to only aggregate metrics like PageRank.