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Strategy and planning are the foundation for an effective online strategy. How your website gains traction will depend on the methodologies you will implement throughout the campaign. But, the effort doesn’t stop there.
As much as you plan for every online effort to improve your website performance, you also need to understand how your competition moves. Without a clear idea of what your competitors are doing, how will you go forward and ensure you stay ahead?
Knowing How Your Site Matches Against the Competition
You need a point of comparison to gauge the overall performance of your website. After all, you can’t be the only one running an ecommerce business. Moreover, you’re not only competing with other websites who are in the same business, but also with other websites that are trying to rank for the same keywords you’re using.
Through competitor analysis, you can set parameters and determine how your site matches up against others. This provides you with a more cohesive strategy to boost your website performance.
- Identify the Main Players in the Competition
In this aspect, we look at your competition from an SEO perspective. Your competitors will be those who appear on the top search results for the same keywords you’re ranking for. You may also have direct business competitors who you know nothing about—this may be the case if you are only starting your SEO process and starting from scratch.
The tricky part here is sorting your major competitors. For easy filtering, include those who are already ranking in your niche—don’t include large retail brands, as these may affect the balance in your metrics.
- Analyze Their Keyword Performance
Keyword performance is the first thing you need to measure when doing a competitor analysis. As a guide, here are the factors you have to consider:
- Keyword relevance: What keywords are they using for their pages?
- Current rankings: Which search phrases are they ranking for?
- Search volume: What keywords drive the highest search volume to the site?
By analyzing the keyword performance of your competitors, you get more insights about industry trends and the behavior of online users. More than that, this gives you an idea of potential search terms that offer added competitive visibility.
- Determine the Page and Domain Authority of Your Competitor Sites
Knowing how authoritative your competitors are on the search results will help you make realistic expectations and goals. By knowing the Page and Domain Authority of your competitor sites, you can set the benchmark for your own metrics.
The Page and Domain Authority of your competitors can help you come up with a framework that you can apply to your website. As this measures the strength of the entire domain and individual pages of your competitor site, you can approximate how competitive that site is performing on search engines.
- Compare the Stats You Find with Your Own Site Data
Those figures will amount to nothing without any context. Once you’re done scraping data on your competitor’s site, analyze your own website profile and compare findings.
Here are a few things you need to look at:
- Backlinks competition: Current and lost backlinks of your website against competitors
- Keyword rankings: Top keyword rankings of your site and their ranking trends
- Traffic source: Where most of your visits are coming from
- Referring domains: The number of referring domains linking back to you and competitor sites
By this point, you should have a clear understanding of how your website can go against the competition. Keep in mind that competitor analysis doesn’t end when you have all the metrics stacked together; it’s a continuous effort if you want to outrank others.
When it comes to competitor analysis, Siteoscope provides you comprehensive data that will help you measure your website performance. With our daily scheduled reporting, you get updates on metrics that you can leverage.
Sign up today and get the full features for your competitor analysis needs.