Crash Course in SEO Competitors Analysis – Become a Pro in Less Than an Hour

Can you believe that it is almost time to decorate Christmas trees? Me neither! 2020 is right around the corner, which means that many marketers are currently going full steam ahead with their 2020 SEO strategy. A quick Google search confirms that tons of posts are already out there to help you with taking the right approach:

Of course, everybody wants to place high in trendy categories. But it is not the only way to become visible - spend some time reviewing the current competitive landscape to identify gaps in your competitor's SEO strategies. This exercise will help you find less crowded niches to focus your SEO efforts on rather than chasing the unreachable ones.

For instance, my favorite example that is nearly impossible to rank for is the keyword “link building.” Why impossible? As you can see in the screenshot below, many top referring domains URLs have over 1k referrals:

Surely, you don’t want to find yourself going after unattainable niches that require bending over backwards and acquiring thousands of links. So what is the solution to getting in front of the target audience? Fortunately, I have some advice for you! In this post, I will share how exactly you can do a quick SEO competitors’ analysis to boost your 2020 SEO strategy.

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Metric 1: Check the level of competition across keywords that you’re targeting

This analysis takes a few minutes but can save you hours later on. It will help prioritize a list of keywords based not only on their search volume but also on how competitive they are.

Tools like SEMrush allow you to bulk upload a list of keywords along with the difficulty of content promotion. The SEMrush keyword difficulty is based on analyzing the current URLs and sites that are ranking in the top 10: the more powerful the current ranking is for a page and domain the higher the competition. For instance, here’s a screenshot with some keywords related to link building which I analyzed with the help of SEMrush Keyword Difficulty tool:

So ranking for the keyword “seo links” will be much tougher than for “link building expert.” This is just an example of a quick “at first glance” analysis. SEMrush offers a lot of other powerful tools to get into the weeds of the SEO analytics and figure out your game plan.

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Metric 2: Get a list of pages that bring your rivals the most organic traffic

It’s always good to know the kind of pages that bring the highest number of organic visitors. Having this data will help you understand where exactly your rivals are putting their efforts into and then investigate those pages more closely.

This screenshot from Ahrefs shows you the top pages in terms of organic traffic for an online travel company skyscanner.com:

Obviously, most related topics are about flying. But, wait! There is one page about car renting that receives over 50k visitors per month. This could be a great service idea to investigate and potentially launch!

Now let’s imagine you are trying to launch a service or product that is very similar to your competitor. By analyzing your competitor’s performance you can estimate how much traffic you should expect.

By the way, if you want to use Skyscanner’s strategy of creating landing pages for groups of queries, here is a great post on correctly setting up landing pages that can give you a head start.

Hint: Wouldn't it be nice to always be one step ahead of your competition? Well, you can! Typically, your competitors’ pages that receive the most traffic are their key strategic pages. So when they modify anything on those pages they are either talking about new products or trying to optimize their SEO to get more traffic. SE Ranking Page changes monitoring tool can send you alerts once any changes were made to any pages you want to track allowing you to quickly analyze the modifications and come up with your game plan.

Metric 3: Investigate whether your rivals are investing in building links

This is another great thing to check that will not take much time. Nearly any backlink analysis tool that can show you a historical graph of referring domains can provide some insights. Here’s a historical growth of referring domains of a site that is investing in link building:

As you can see, there is a consistent growth pattern which is a great indicator of link building investments.

Quick note: nowadays people rarely link back to specific content pages. So if a blog post has at least a few links it is considered a big success. And if a content page has many links it’s almost certain that the company spends a lot of resources on link building especially if they want specific pages rank in top results. Ahrefs can provide you this level of detail with a tool called “Best pages by links”.

Below you can see the results of my good friends from Moosend trying to boost certain pages via link building. That’s quite impressive as they’ve already built over 90 links to their post about Mailchimp alternatives:

This type of data will help you select the right angle for your future SEO strategy as well as evaluate the level of competition based on how heavily your rivals are geared towards building links.

Recommended: Underrated Link Building Tactics that Work Surprisingly Well

Metric 4: Check a general growth trend of SEO traffic of your key competitors

Before you finalize your SEO plans for 2020, you need to understand how exactly your competitors are growing. Remember earlier I mentioned that SEMrush has lots of other tools to check out? Well, the SEMrush Chart tool is one of them. It can compare 5 domains concurrently, giving you a bigger picture. As an Excel lover, I also appreciate the fact that I can download the data into a spreadsheet and figure out the yearly growth rate.

Thanks to SEMrush chart tool’s visuals you'll see who invests the most in their SEO. Once you uncovered those who're growing faster than the rest of others, it's time to dig deeper into the strategies of those competitors and see what is working for them the best. If you have never done a similar analysis before, this post can show you how to gain the most insight from this exercise.

Hint: you do not need to spend a lot of money for your initial research. There are lots of free SEO tools for your disposal that can give you a nice jumpstart. And once you figure out what kind of data is most beneficial for your SEO goals, then you can look into more advanced programs.

Knowing the growth of your competition can fuel your motivation to do better and become number one. Just imagine walking into your boss’s office to tell them about your firm performing better than the rest of the market! If that thought inspired you, you can learn even more about ways your competitors are getting traffic by reading a new Roberts Richards post.

Metric 5: Figure out what sites and pages are currently ranking in SERPs for your most prioritized keywords

It is very important to know which pages are in Google’s top and how manageable it is to compete against them. Quite often, SEMrush difficulty might be a bit misleading when it shows a low difficulty level even though thousands of links are required to rank high. For example, the keyword “link building” shows that the difficulty is 75%, which is pretty tough but not impossibly tough:

And now let’s check what domains are ranking in the top for Ahrefs:

As you can see, you need a domain rating of 85 or higher plus 1k+ referring domains to be in the lead. As a person who was in charge of Nightwatch link building efforts, this nearly impossible to achieve. To give you some numbers, it took us a year to build 400 new domain links.

Recommended: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks for Your WordPress Blog in 2019

And I have one last important thing worth mentioning. There are some highly competitive search queries with a well-established list of top ranking pages. However, sometimes newer pages break through and push the competitors down the list. When that happens it's a sign that your page might also have a shot to rank high. But if you see that there have been no significant changes in the top results for a certain query - trying to squeeze in is basically pointless.

SERP positioning history can help you check if any new pages have recently appeared in the top list:

Ringing in the New Year with a great 2020 SEO Strategy

Taking the time to analyze your competition and the market will pave a winning path to your 2020 SEO strategy. I would strongly recommend checking out every single one of them to get a good idea of where you are and where you need to be. Once you crossed your t’s and dotted the i’s make sure that you create a fantastic presentation to sell your ideas to your boss. If you follow my steps, I am sure they will be impressed!