Competitive Analysis Leads to a Better B2B SEO PROGRAM?
A key element in influencing your SEO program is understanding your competition.
If you are not checking competitors online, you might be missing occasions — and potentially overlooking points of weakness in your SEO.
Whenever we start a new program, obtaining a list of key competitors is a fundamental first step. This helps us comprehend the market and expose various competitor tactics. We often learn a lot by evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in keyword strategy, site architecture, content marketing, link building, social media.
Many times, we are asked to present our competitive findings to management and ultimately organizational leadership. In this blog, we’ll outline an example of how to create a competitive analysis and how we uncover opportunities that better aid our client’s SEO program.
Keyword Performance
The principal step in SEO-specific competitive analysis is in understanding how well (or poorly) competitors accomplish for various keyword targets. There are three elements of keyword performance to consider:
- Competitive visibility for priority keyword opportunities
- How competitors perform about each other for priority keyword opportunities
- Additional competitive keyword visibility and opportunities
- We don’t have access to competitive traffic and visitor performance. As such, keyword rank or keyword visibility is one of the few public-facing metrics we can equate against. The priority keywords are defined, compare competitive performance individually and across targeted organizations.
Site Structure
Estimating site performance is the next step in the process. Here are some overall site structure factors we pay attention to but this list can change based on client priorities and circumstances.
Navigational analysis of key site components
Integration of SEO tagging best practices like HTML Titles, Meta Tags, Headings, etc.
Site speed/performance using Google’s Site Speed Tool.
Mobile optimization initiatives
For every client, the goal of our competitive analysis is to provide simplicity in direction of our ongoing program. We ensure that we are not missing opportunities and have a greater understanding of some of the obstacles we might meet along the way. This kind of competitive analysis aids set the stage for performance measurement of our program over the elongated run, as well.
There are other opportunities and metrics to consider in competitive analysis. Each organizations’ competitive environment call for a tailored program and focus. Possibly, some of these tools and resources may not even apply to every client.