In this article, we’ll discuss how to do an SEO competitor analysis — using SEMrush, ahrefs and using google operators by manually verifying the websites.. There are plenty other ways to do competitive analysis!
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SEO competitive analysis
The name “SEO competitive analysis” is a little misleading. True, you’ll be researching your competitors, but you won’t be trying to match their SEO strategies. Instead, you’ll be focusing on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their sites, so that you can take advantage of them while they miss the mark.
A more accurate title would be “how to perform a competitor analysis,” as that’s really what it is. You’re going to compare your competitor’s site with yours, identify the differences between the two, and then use this knowledge to design a more effective SEO strategy for your own site.
So is there a specific type of analysis that helps you do this better than the others? The answer is yes…
Black Hat vs. White Hat Analysis
Most people would argue that “black hat” SEO analysis is the best way to perform a competitor analysis. This type of analysis involves using less ethical tactics to gain an edge over your competition. It involves “spying” on your competitor’s site, finding out as much as you can about their content, statistics, and rankings. Then you’ll use this knowledge to improve yourself and your own ranking position in the search.
The problem with black hat analysis is there are so many ethical guidelines involved with it now that even the most unscrupulous people can’t break them all. And this is too bad because there are some really great benefits to performing black hat analysis.
For one, there’s a truly measurable difference between black hat and white hat tactics. You can put your site at the bottom of the page for months and your competitor’s site will be ranked in the top three positions. But if you start spamming your links around, you’ll bottom out before them and never recover.
Black hat analysis involves a level of carefulness and strategy that can’t be matched by other analysis techniques. Sure, you’re going to do a little bit of spying on your competitor’s sites, but this doesn’t mean you should stop working on yourself as well.
White hat methods are the best, since they’re completely ethical and follow all of the guidelines. You’ll find this book to provide the best results from black hat analysis you can get.
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Competitive Analysis using SEMRush
There are a number of competitive analysis tools available on the market today, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs, which are commonly used by webmasters to investigate their competitors’ backlink profiles.
One of the main advantages of using this research tool is that it allows webmasters to conduct comprehensive research in a short period of time. This helps them obtain valuable information concerning keyword rankings, search engine rankings, key phrases, and related websites.
Also with this tool, it is possible to compare websites in different categories and compare the data gathered after monitoring them almost daily for several months.
Competitive Analysis using ahrefs
Ahrefs is another tool that is commonly used for competitive analysis. It provides webmasters with full details on their competitors’ backlink profiles including the total number of linking root domains, links from and to a site, backlinks from pages and domains, anchor text distribution, and many more.
Backlink profile
This is an important aspect of competitive research which involves analyzing backlinks to a particular website. This helps webmasters know whether the website has more or fewer links compared to its competitors or if it has a similar amount of inbound links. This information helps them analyze their competitors’ link-building efforts and then find out ways through which they can attract more quality link-building activities.
Read our blog How to become a search engine optimization specialist
Competitive analysis using manual audit and google operators
It is possible to gather competitive data by conducting a manual audit and by using Google operators. This technique helps in identifying important information that is not easily detected through automated tools.
However, to collect data through a manual audit, it is critical that the webmasters must have knowledge of various resources and limitations of the search engine giant, Google. Also, it is important for them to have knowledge about various operators used for analyzing backlink profiles, the number of pages indexed, and so on.
Google operators provide an easy way to search for important and related information regarding competitors’ sites. Some of the commonly used operators include inurl, site, cache, intext, incontent, inurl{keyword} + guest post and much more.
There are several benefits of performing a competitor analysis to design a better SEO strategy. One of the most important and useful benefits of doing competitor analysis is that it enables you to understand your competitors’ positioning process. This helps you gain a good understanding of how your competitors got their position and you can use this information to place yourself higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Another important benefit that comes with competitor analysis is that it helps you gain extremely crucial insight into your competitors’ content. You will be able to find out which keywords they use in content, their focus keyword, URL length, how many backlinks are found on their website, etc.
Conclusion
So, with help of the blog post, you will be able to explore tools like SEMrush, ahrefs, and steps to do a manual audit of the website and use google operators like the site, URL, inurl, intext, content etc.
