Conducting an SEO Competitor Analysis

Here’s a step-by-step guide on conducting an SEO competitor analysis.

Determine Your Competitors – Your SEO competitors are websites that achieve high rankings for your target keywords in organic search engine results (such as Google).
Start by searching for your target keywords on Google and examining the websites listed at the top of the results page.

You can also utilize Semrush’s Organic Research tool to pinpoint your SEO competition.

For example, let’s explore Home Depot’s competitors. Open the tool, enter the domain, and click “Search.” Then, navigate to the “Main Organic Competitors” section of the report. This displays websites that compete with Home Depot for the same keywords. To view a comprehensive list of competitors, click “View all competitors.”

Additionally, consider competitors within a specific segment of your overall market.
For instance, Home Depot’s organic search competitors encompass other hardware stores like Lowe’s, as well as other stores that sell tools, such as Target and Walmart.

Using the Market Explorer tool, you can discover your competitors more broadly.
Access the tool, choose “Find Competitors,” input your URL, and click “Research a market.”
Afterward, navigate to the “Growth Quadrant” chart and select “Search” to display only organic search competitors (excluding any keywords acquired through pay-per-click (PPC) strategies).

The Growth Quadrant chart classifies competitors into four fundamental groups:

1. Innovators: Up-and-coming companies with a relatively smaller audience size but experiencing rapid growth.
2. Pioneers: Companies with both a substantial audience and a fast growth rate.
3. Industry Stalwarts: Companies with large, well-established audiences.
4. Niche Contenders: New or relatively small companies with limited audience size and a slow growth rate.

Within the Market Explorer tool, you can examine competitors by going to the “All Industry Domains” tab. Here, you can assess your position among competitors in terms of website traffic.

Determine Who Not to Compete With – Only some competitors you encounter will be your true competitors. For example, trying to outrank sites like Wikipedia is generally not worthwhile. Although these websites might be your organic search rivals, they may not necessarily be your direct business adversaries.
Your competitors include websites that provide similar products or services or websites within the same niche that serve a common target audience.

Discover (and Fill) Keyword Gaps – Focus on the keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t. These gaps present opportunities for you.
To discover keyword gaps, utilize Semrush’s Keyword Gap instrument.
Launch the tool, enter your URL along with up to four competitor URLs, and then click “Compare.” Select the “Missing” tab to view the keywords your competitors rank for (but your website does not). Examine each keyword separately, as not all of them may be pertinent to your enterprise. For example, “checkers board game” probably isn’t a pertinent keyword for Home Depot. However, other keywords, such as “Bissell cross wave” and “little green machine,” are probably suitable and worth targeting.

In many cases, you’ll need to make new pages addressing these keywords. But if you already have appropriate existing pages, focus on improving their keyword targeting. We’ll discuss this further later on.

Pinpoint Strengths and Weaknesses – Every website has multiple weak points, even large e-commerce sites like Amazon or eBay.
Determine your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses by considering the following factors:

Authority – Authority is a metric ranging from 0 to 100 that gauges a site’s SEO performance and overall quality based on various factors. A higher score indicates a better chance of ranking higher for appropriate keywords.

Normally, if your competitors have a higher authority score than your site, it will be more challenging to outrank them. Use Semrush’s Bulk Analysis tool to compare your authority score against your competitors. To begin, input your URLs and up to 200 competitor URLs, then click “Compare.”

As stands for the Authority Score column. To enhance your authority, build high-quality backlinks. These serve as “votes” of relevance and authority for Google crawlers.

Content- Examining your competitors’ content can help address questions like:

• Is their content of high quality?
• Are there any related articles that need to be more comprehensive and in-depth?
• Do they concentrate solely on product pages rather than topical pages or how-to guides?
• Are they creating only one type of content or multiple types?

Evaluate each competitor’s content and note the strengths or weaknesses you observe.
You can emulate their strengths and exploit their weaknesses, ensuring your content outperforms your competitors.

Semrush’s Content Audit Tool can assist in reviewing your content and identifying areas for enhancement.

First, launch the tool and click “+ Create project.” Input your URL and name your project. Click “Create project” again. Next, choose the subfolders you wish to audit. In this example, we’ll select the “blog” subfolder. Then click “Start Audit.” After the audit, you can examine the results by content sets. Content sets classify content based on the type of improvements required.
For a more thorough examination and analysis of each content piece, click “Start analyzing.”
You will be presented with your content’s metadata and metrics. Additionally, you can make notes or establish tasks for enhancing your content.