The Art of Analyzing Your Enemy - Basic Competitor Analysis Strategy

Sun Tzu stated that “knowing your enemy and being able to understand yourself will make sure that in a hundred battles you will never be in peril”. What sun Tzu stated is not for warfare only but for business as well. For any SEO Company or any other business to succeed it is critical to have excellent competitive intelligence capacity. When comparing business to war it means that there is vigorous and unending competition to conquer the market, win the customer and achieve the sale. Your competitor wants your business and, if possible, all of it. To achieve these he will do all he can to take your customers away from you. Although the entrepreneurial environment has shifted to a virtual platform it is important to understand the core principle of competition as it is innate.

Website competitive analysis tools

1. Search Engine Performance Analysis : Understanding your competition in search engine rankings is really important. Performing SEO analysis of your competitor will help you learn how to beat them. First, you need to check what phrases they are ranking for, to give you an idea on new phrases to target and how high they are ranking. This will enable you create better pages and content on those topics and increase your ability to outrank them and capture those visitors. Checking your competitors’ keyword density will give you direction on how aggressive you need to be with your keyword placement. Also analyze their Meta description on how they have written their data, if they are using LSI keywords, if there is a clear call to action and how strong their copy is. Finally analyze your competitors’ site architecture to understand how authoritative their website is and try to figure out their internal linking tactics. Make your site’s architecture strong to help you get most out of your backlinks and improve your Google rankings. 2. Keywords Analysis : If your competitors are using keywords their sites will rank well in search engines. If you don’t know which keywords they use, try checking if they use your keywords. While doing this you might find many useful keywords and start optimizing your site for them. Let these keywords help you compete and win. You can find what keywords your competitors are ranking for. To gain rankings and traffic, you can choose the best keywords from your competitor’s list of keywords and rank for them. 3. Content Analysis : Pages with more content rank better, this means that when creating content your ultimate goal should be to create pages that are far more superior to what is ranking for your target keyword. You should analyze and get a general picture of your competitors’ content in terms of the word count, how you unique their content is, types of media used and if they are linking out. You objective will be to create more lengthy, crafted and researched content. Also, Use videos and images in your content to make it more digestible and improve user experience. If it happens that your competitors are not linking out, take advantage of the situation, and do it yourself. 4. Social Media Analysis: Social media has a very great impact on SEO since it will help you build relationships, market your content and interact with your customers. So if your competitors’ are engaging in social media look at their social accounts to see how active they are and create your individual page to also engage customers. Take advantage of video marketing in YouTube whether your competitors are doing it or not. 5. Back Links Analysis : Analyzing your competitors’ link profile, will enable you to find link opportunities and know whether you should replicate their link profile. When trying to replicate do not copy link spam and always mirror competitors who have quality backlinks such as membership links, sponsorship links and geo targeted directory links. As competition is getting fiercer online Monitoring becomes an unending task. The beauty of competitive analysis is that you are able to know how businesses similar to yours are performing. All the activities listed above may be time-consuming but it’s important to perform your analysis if you don’t wish to be left clueless about the world around you. Start analyzing today!!