Ways to perform competitor website analytics

How to perform competitor website analysis_ Regardless of which content you like to target, the competition is always fierce. If you want more organic traffic, your site doesn't need to be good - it needs to be better than your competition. That is why it is important to know how to perform competitor web analytics.

Analyzing your opponents simply looking at what they do helps you figure out how to defeat them. For example, if they are targeting the same keywords as you (and you can identify them) you have ways to improve your own content, improve rankings.

Why monitoring a competitor's site is important

In short, monitoring online competitors helps to bring in a huge amount of information. Moreover, it gives you an idea of what search engine optimization (SEO) is. For example, you can find out which keywords they are targeting, the terms they are going beyond you, where the traffic is coming from.

In general, your goal is to know as much of that data as possible and reverse engineer. You can unlock what makes those websites successful, absorb those strategies on yourself, and hope to improve.

How to perform competitor website analysis (in 5 steps)

For this tutorial, we will focus on free SEO analysis tools to help you run competitor web analytics. If you decide to subscribe to premium tools, you will have access to more data, but the process remains the same.

Step 1: Identify your top competitors

You may already have a good idea of other major competitors in the niche market. However, the shortlist you have in mind may not match the data you discover.

The best way to know who your top competitors are is to find out which sites share the most ‘audience overlap’ with you. In other words, identify other websites that your audience visits, as they also target many of the same keywords as you.

To do this, you can use Alexa. It's a website traffic analysis service that tracks over 30 million websites, and if your site has decent traffic, Alexa is probably following it.

To run Alexa, go here and enter the website URL.

In this example, we will use wordpress.org:

Alexa reports often return a great deal of information. This includes the opportunity for your keywords, top queries, and web to share duplicate audiences:

If you scroll further down, you also see separate Alexa rankings for each of those opponents:

With the free version of Alexa, the list of sites you get is limited to five. Even so, there's plenty of information to keep you going. Write down the name that appears for your site and move on to the next step.

Step 2: Take a look at the top content of competitors

Knowing what content drives traffic to your competitors is a great way to better understand the strategy they have. You find out what kind of posts they focus on, how deeply their content is, what keywords they are targeting, and more.

In the real world, you need to hire a spy to find out this information. But online, all you need to do is sign up for a free account with a service like SEMRush:

Like Alexa, SEMRush provides web traffic analysis services. However, it has advantages when it comes to keyword data, which is why it's ideal for this step.

SEMRush is an expensive tool, but its free package allows you to run up to ten analytics every day, enough to run rival web analytics.

To get started, enter the URL for one of the competitors you find in Alexa.

For example, we will enter yoast.com, one of wordpress.org's top competitors.

There is a large amount of data to extract here. For now, focus on the sections ‘Organic Keywords and Top Organic Keywords. The former shows you the problem of where your opponent's readers come from, while the latter includes specific keywords. As soon as you look at the Volume Column, you will see the traffic that each keyword brings.

If you do a Google search for any keyword in your competitor's web site, you'll get a list of top content.

To limit your search to a competitor's site, you can use site: competitor.com search query operator.

You will want to repeat this process for all your top competitors and their top performing keywords. That will give you a clear overview of what content is driving traffic.

Step 3: Search for the keywords you have, competitors also

As an appendix to step two, it's good to look for keywords you have in common with your competitors. This gives you an idea of what content you already have, if improved, that sometimes helps bring more access.

You should also use SEMRush to find that data. Log into your account and navigate to the Domain tab versus Domain on the left menu. Here, you can enter multiple domains so SEMRush can compare them directly:

This will return the top keyword list to both shared domains. For each keyword, you get an overview of each month's search and rankings for each site:

Your goal here is to identify words that you are a little lower than your opponent. The overall idea is to improve the content and give yourself the opportunity to overcome your opponent.

Step 4: Determine the keyword distance you can target

When you have a top keyword list from competitors, one thing will become clear: they will target a lot of terms you don't have. Missed points in a content campaign form the ‘keyword space’. The goal is to fill the void with content that can rank, so you can also get a bit of organic traffic.

However, because we are talking about competitors' keywords, they can be highly difficult search queries. Let's review domain name analysis from step two:

A quick glance is enough to let us know it's a pretty competitive keyword. With this, imagine you have a gap in your keyword strategy covering one of those terms. Trying to eliminate a first position opponent for a top keyword will be difficult. A smarter move might be to look for an alternative to the word ‘long tail’.

Google Keyword Planner is great for this. Here are a few words that it suggests when we look up ‘conversion words’:

With this data at hand, you can target keywords and make it easier to rank.

Step 5: Analyze the competitor's backlink profile

We've talked a lot about keywords so far, but they're not the only factor when it comes to SEO. As you know, backlinks are a high value signal search engine. Knowing which sites link to your competitors can give you a list of publications to create your own additional backlinks.

For this step, you can take advantage of the proper Backlinks tool. Enter the competitor's URL and it gives you a list of backlinks:

The backlinks you get, are organized depending on the source domain score. Higher domain scores translate into more reputable backlinks:

You should also filter backlinks by dofollow or nofollow attributes and export the full list to a CSV file for you to analyze them comfortably. Once you have the list, you should start the difficult task of identifying potential backlinks opportunities and conducting outreach.

Epilogue

To be successful in any industry, you must deliver better products / content to your competitors. The only way to do this is to know what they are doing. This means carefully scrutinizing their activities and forming a strategy to defeat the opponent.

Competitive web analytics will give you insight on how to beat them when it comes to SEO. This relates to:

Determine who is the top competitor.

Take a look at the top content they are.

Find the keywords you have in common.

Determine the keyword distance you can target.

Analyze rival backlink profiles.

Of course, understanding all of the above factors is not enough. You also need to set up a website to rank for those queries. Finally, you will want to learn about WordPress SEO and on-page SEO so you can be sure that the site is ready to rank.

Do you have any questions about how to perform competitor web analytics? Let us know in the comments below.