There is one essential marketing step that is easy to get wrong. What could it be? Competitor analysis. We often overlook many factors that influence who our true competitors actually are. Don't worry, we've gathered everything you need to know in this blog post!
What is competitor analysis and why is it important?
Competitor analysis is a market research method used to examine a company's current market position and the intensity of competition. This process is a key element in building a proper and effective marketing strategy. It is a complex task, and if you want to use it effectively for your own business, it is worth considering contacting a team of expertsto help you with it.
Competitor analysis is a valuable tool for many marketing processes. These include social media communication, website development, launching advertisements, or—most importantly for our article—building an SEO strategy.
To build a strong presence for your business, it is essential to thoroughly review your competitors' activities as well. This gives you insight into what your potential customers want to see and where you should improve or change your own marketing strategy. It is particularly worth focusing on this regularly in the field of SEO , as the pages appearing on search engines are in constant competition with each other, and due to rapidly changing algorithms, those who fall behind truly miss out.
#m1-p#What is the benefit of competitor analysis?##
- You can gain insight into what your customers want to see on your website and social media channels.
- You can get ideas on where and how you should change your current strategy.
- You can learn about the strategies of other businesses in your market.
- You can find solutions to rank higher in search results, benefiting both your customers and search engines.
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What information can we gain during a competitor analysis?
The first and most important thing to consider when preparing a competitor analysis is your goals.
#m1-p#What questions should we ask ourselves?##
- What do we want to learn from this competitor analysis?
- How do we intend to use this data in the future?
- Which of our marketing channels are currently generating the most traffic?
- Where do we currently stand in our market? Who is performing better or worse than us in specific areas?
These and similar questions are the first things that will come to mind for a professionalwhen they want to conduct a competitor analysis. If we think through these questions, several types of competitor analysis may be considered, depending on whether we are looking to launch a new product or perhaps improve our current market ranking.
The SEO competitor analysis can also provide a wealth of information, with each insight offering ideas for improvement in different areas. For example:
- You might discover keywords and content types that we haven't focused on before.
- Furthermore, new SEO techniques may emerge that can help improve our rankings.
- You might also identify “new” competitors that we hadn't previously considered.
- Market gaps may even come to light that we previously overlooked, which we could leverage to get ahead of our competitors.
How is an SEO competitor analysis conducted?
Competitor analysis is a complex process that combines several steps into a large, valuable knowledge base, which we can use to build our new, effective strategy. In this section, we have summarized the three most important steps for conducting a competitor analysis.
Identifying competitors
Finding and identifying competitors is a multi-step process. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, we tend to overlook certain factors, and this is also true when we think about our competitors. We have often found that our clients come to us with a specific idea of who they consider their competitors. However, deeper competitor research has frequently revealed that they were focusing on companies that were not their direct competitors—for example, even if they operate as educators in the same sector, it doesn't matter if one only offers online courses while the other only offers classroom-based training.
The first step is to select the keywords relevant to the company. Following this, it is worth checking which companies appear in the top 10 results on Google for the 5-10 most relevant keywords. It is very important to gather as much relevant information as possible about our competitors, and many SEO analysis tools can help us with this. We will write about these tools in more detail at the end of our article so that you know what they are and how to use them effectively.
Keyword and content analysis
As a next step, we use software to determine how our competitors are performing for our 4-5 most relevant keywords and compare this data with our own rankings. A similar situation can arise here as the one we described earlier: if we don't look at potential keywords with an expert eye, we might end up trying to rank for keywords that are not specific enough for our business, causing us to get lost among the search results.
For example: We have a business that makes cakes, and we have decided that one of our main keywords should be cake ordering . However, our company exclusively makes wedding cakes and only delivers to certain parts of the country. In this case, by using such a broad main keyword, we are trying to target too general a group, which results in us ranking lower on the list. This is why it is worth conducting keyword research as a preliminary step.
Why is this useful? During this process, we can find many keywords and ideas for which it is worth creating content in the future. At the same time, it may also come to light which keywords the competition has not yet written content for, giving us the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.
Through content analysis, we can learn how their site is structured and which articles or landing pages have generated more traffic. As we mentioned in our previous article, Google increasingly prioritizes quality content. This is why it is worth placing special emphasis on high-quality, non-AI-generated content that provides real value, as well as user-friendly websites.
Reviewing backlink profiles
The link building process is a central element of an SEO strategy, making it an important step in better understanding our competitors' strategies. It is worth using software for this as well to find out which sites their links come from and whether they are truly employing quality link-building practices. During this process, we can uncover which sites might be valuable from an SEO perspective. It also shows us what kind of link-building strategy we should choose to increase the number of our organic visitors.
#m1-p#TIP: It is worth establishing ongoing relationships with sites closely related to your industry; this way, you can help each other build site authority and improve your search rankings together!##
Software to help with your work
We have mentioned this several times in previous sections, so as a summary, we have brought you the 5 most important software tools that can assist your work during competitor analysis.
Similarweb
The Similarweb platform allows you to view statistical analyses of a website's traffic. Simply enter the URL of the website you are interested in into the search bar, and a wealth of interesting and important data about your competitors will be revealed.
#m1-p#Among other things, you can see the following data on the interface:##
- the website's global ranking
- its ranking within its own category
- its traffic volume over the past few months
- the time users spend on the site
In addition to this, you can uncover many other useful statistics with this tool. The system offers a free trial period, after which the starter package costs $149 per month. This—especially for Hungarian companies—is not necessarily cheap for a single piece of software, but in return, you can learn a lot of useful information about your competitors during the free trial, and later, with the paid package, you can monitor them continuously.
SEMRush
The SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO-supporting systems. With its complex structure, we can not only gain useful information about our competitors but also receive assistance in many other areas.
#m1-p#How can SEMRush help?##
- it helps identify trends in the industry
- it searches for link-building opportunities
- identifies valuable keywords
- helps identify keywords used by competitors and provides an overview of their rankings
- provides insight into how we compare to our competitors
- offers guidance on what and how to change on our site to improve search engine rankings
The list here is also nearly endless. SEMRush is also subscription-based, with the smallest plan costing $130 per month. Since it is not only for SEO, but also PPC (paid advertising) is a very useful tool in this area as well, we believe it is worth the investment.
Ahrefs
The Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO software tools, which, beyond backlink checking, has so many other features that it is easy to get lost in them.
#m1-p#What data can you see on the interface?##
- shows the backlink profile and organic search data for any site
- view new and lost backlinks
- lists anchor texts, phrases, and expressions for you
- shows referring domains and pages that link to the given site
- displays organic keywords - shows new keywords and lists the strength of existing ones for you
We could go on for a long time about what else the Ahrefs interface is worth using for. It can be very useful if you want to strengthen your SEO presence. Of course—as with all software—their service is paid, with the smallest plan costing $99 per month.
Summary
In the field of SEO, you cannot succeed with just a single sprint—building and executing an effective strategy is a constant task that yields long-term results. For this, however, continuous optimization, monitoring, and analyzing the activities of our competitors are essential—because if we don't know what our competitors are doing and how, how do we expect to compete with them in our industry? We have tested every system mentioned in our article without exception, and we highly recommend using them if you want to significantly simplify and speed up the time spent on competitor research and monitoring your SEO results.
#promobox-en#Looking to build an effective SEO strategy for your business? Get in touch and let our expert team help you achieve your goals!##
