How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis in 6 Steps | A 2024 Guide

In this developing digital landscape, many businesses in Malaysia are trying to compete and win the online market. If you are a business owner wanting to dominate your niche in the digital market, you should do SEO competitor analysis. 

You can uncover opportunities for improvement and hack into their results by examining your competitors’ keyword targeting, backlink profiles, content strategies, and general SEO approaches.

Then, what is competitor analysis in SEO and how do you conduct one? Figure out the answer in the explanation below!

What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis or competitive analysis is the practice of studying your direct search competitors’ target keywords, backlink profile, content strategy, and other aspects to decode the most effective components of these strategies into your SEO plan.

In addition, rather than speculating on what to write, how to target keywords, or how to get links, you can study your competition, figure out what works for them already, and build on their success.

Why Should You Perform SEO Competitor Analysis?

You must realise that in the market, you are not alone. Many businesses and websites are similar to yours or even offer the same services or range of products. Additionally, they, and you, are fighting for the same Google positions.

Therefore, you must understand their strategies to find out how they win the online market and fill in the gap between you and them. 

By doing a competitive analysis, you can reveal their winning tactics and replicate them, capitalise on their weakness, find the holes and chances they've passed on, and compare the SEO performance you are now achieving with theirs.

Not only that, SEO competitor analysis helps you figure out your actual competitors, the keywords you should target, your niche, the topics you should write, and the way to find valuable links. 

As a result, you can rank higher, increase conversion, get more loyal customers, and gain more traffic. 

How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis?

There are some SEO competitor analysis checklists you can do to understand your competition better. Below are 6 ways to perform SEO competitive analysis. 

1. Determine Your SEO Competitors

The first step is to identify your SEO competitors. It is important to know that SEO competitors are different from business competitors. SEO competitors are websites that appear in organic search results for the same keywords you’re aiming to rank for.

So, they are not the businesses selling the same products or offering the same services as your brands. To figure out your SEO competitors, you can identify them by looking up who appears in the top 10 results when you search for your target keywords on Google. Or, to make it easier, you can use the research tools on the internet. 

2. Analyse the Keyword Gap

After figuring out your SEO competitors, you can begin researching for keyword gaps to find the chance to target keywords that your rivals use to rank on the search engine, but you have not targeted or ranked for. This is because you have the opportunity to increase traffic with each of those keywords. 

By discovering the keyword gaps, you can use these keywords to optimise the content you already have and develop new pages specifically for the keywords that are missing from your website.

3. Study Competitors’ Content

Since content brings in traffic, you must study how your rivals rank for their content and duplicate their strategies to your content. By examining their content, you can determine whether to create listicles, reviews, or how-to guides type of content. 

Additionally, to improve the user experience on their pages, you should see if your rivals employ infographics, videos, and photos. Should that be the case, you ought to think about implementing these in your writing as well.

If done well, you can rank for similar types of content or even outperform your competitors in the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

4. Examine the User's Intent

You probably will target the same audiences as your SEO competitors; therefore, you must understand the audiences’ intent to provide the relevant information to them. By analysing the search intent, you will discover how to evaluate the SERP and how your rivals satisfy the demands of your target market.

5. Analyse the Backlinks

Google tends to rank pages with more backlinks higher, particularly if they come from reliable and pertinent websites. 

Then, why is backlink analysis important? It will be more difficult for you to outrank your competitors if their backlink profiles are stronger than yours. 

If you are in this condition, what you can do is construct a comparable backlink profile. 

Therefore, you must do a competitor backlink analysis to see their backlink profile and look for strategies to compete with the profile. Some tactics you can do to figure out the rival backlink profile are as follows:

• Comparing the quality of backlinks.
• Examining follow and nofollow backlinks. 
• Finding backlink gaps. 
• And many more.

6. Perform Technical SEO Analysis

Last but not least, you should also evaluate its technical components to compare your website to your rivals in terms of functionality and user experience. Some aspects you can study from your rivals’ website are:

• User experience and website performance. 
• URL structure.
• Site mobile-friendliness. 
• Schema markup, etc. 

Conclusion

Those are the SEO competitor analysis templates you can adhere to outshine your business competitor in the SERPs. In conclusion, despite doing well on your SEO tactics, you should also pay attention to how your competitors rank on search engines for your niche so that you can find ways to outrank them and win the market. 

If you are a business owner in Malaysia looking for more hands in implementing SEO best practices and SEO competitor analysis, cmlabs is here for you. 

SEO Services by cmlabs can help you optimise your site, from the on-page, off-page, and technical approaches, to the content optimisation. We can also customise our plan based on your business needs and messages. 

So, book a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!