As in every field, when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), competition is one of the right parts of the business. For this reason, one of the most important parts of SEO should be SEO competitor analysis. Knowing what your main competitors are doing and improving yourself accordingly will, of course, bring success. When it comes to SEO, copy-paste logic may be one of the first ways that come to mind for most people. However bad as it may sound, it is no different than stealing. Besides being unethical, it is an action that will not benefit you. The Google algorithm understands this very well, and it will not be difficult for it to declare your website of poor quality. In SEO, it is right to take your competitor's strengths and weaknesses to improve your performance.

When a business or website begins its SEO strategy, it often ignores competitor analysis. Generally, the focus is directly on keywords, links, and content creation. Although these are indispensable for the SEO strategy, there may be wasted effort without competitor SEO analysis. Because in competitor analysis, you may encounter something you never thought of and shape your planning accordingly. If you are involved in SEO action, the only way to see where you stand in your field is to do a competitor SEO analysis. SEO competitor analysis provides key answers from your keywords to your backlink purchases that will influence your every step. So how do you do a good SEO competitor analysis? If you are wondering about the answer to the question and want to create your roadmap, we tried to give the answers you are looking for in this article. It will be useful content to get an idea of ​​where to start and how to position yourself relative to your competitors.

The process of SEO competitor analysis may differ from brand to brand or from industry to industry. Your niche audience, general target customers, and business goals are the determining factors for the competitor SEO analysis process. Some critical steps for a good analysis will apply to all brands and websites. In the continuation of our article, we aim to present a recipe where you can create your basic planning by including these critical steps. Rather than seeing them as a step-by-step guide, we should say that you can see them as tricks and tips and use them according to your needs in your area. Of course, before you go into the process of using these tips, you should know and embrace who your competitors are.

Know Your Competitors

As we mentioned before, in order to find and apply the right answers to the question "How to do competitor analysis for SEO," you need to know your opponents well. This rivalry recognition issue, which seems to be very easy, may not be as easy and smooth as you think when you get involved. You probably know your direct business competitors very well. When this is the case, you spend all your time and effort on improving your products and expanding your customer base. Of course, your commercial competitors may be among your SEO competitors. But the critical point here is that your competitors won't be the only ones.

When it comes to SEO, competitors can come from different areas or from a place you never expected. In this case, competitor SEO analysis can make the issue difficult. To put it simply, the website you come across with a keyword you target is one of your main competitors, regardless of the industry. For example, you provide services in the field of healthy nutrition and diet. You can have a blog where you produce content about being healthy, possible health problems, and ideal nutrition. Your keywords won't just come from other healthy nutrition service brands or individuals, as you might expect. You will realize that websites such as health magazines, news sites with a health section, or lifestyle magazines are your main competitors, even if you think they are irrelevant. Like news sites, websites have high authority in general. Therefore, you will need good planning so that you can reach the top by rising above this authority. Before determining your SEO competitors, you should determine your keywords and see your competitors and your own place for them. In this case, it means you need to do competitor keyword analysis. 

To find pinpoint keywords for accurate targeting, you have to put yourself in your customer's shoes. For this, creating the consumer identity targeted by your brand may be the right step. Then you can make a list of possible titles and long-tail keywords related to these topics. Testing the applicability of the keywords you list is an easy step that can be done with a tool like Google Keyword Planner. These types of SEO competitor analysis tools provide useful information such as the volume of your keywords and competitive rate. Based on the information you get from these competitor analysis tools, you can decide which keyword or words will provide the best conversion.

Once you have the right keywords, performing the right competitor SEO analysis will be easy. The first point you will use as a criterion should be SERP (Search Engine Results Page). The websites listed as a result of your searched keyword are your main competitors. You should register the top three websites in the SERP as your biggest competitors. Then research on the SERPs of your keywords will tell you the pages and areas you will compete in. Once you know who your competitors are and have adopted them, it's time to analyze the weaknesses and strengths of SEO strategies. At this point, it seems like things have gotten complicated, and you don't know how to create your strategy from beginning to end in a way that will bring success, or if you want to make it much better, you can get SEO Consulting.

Backlink Analysis

Of course, SEO isn't just about keywords. When doing competitor SEO analysis, it is absolutely necessary to know what your competitors are doing in different areas and how they are positioned. A website that has achieved a high SERP ranking must have an effective backlink network. You can review this backlink strategy and take essential steps for your SEO planning. The most important point here is where your competitors get backlinks from. Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain this information manually.

For this reason, you should get support from an SEO tool again. At this point, SEO tools like Moz or Semrush can be good supporters for you. In this type of SEO analysis tool, you can also compare your competitor's backlink analysis and your own website and reshape your backlink strategy accordingly.

You may see unexpected differences from your competitors' backlink networks. They may have achieved a conversion by getting backlinks from different websites. In that case, it may be possible for you to explore different investment areas by thinking differently. If your competitor you are comparing ranks much higher than you, you will be taking the right step towards competition by directing your backlink purchases to the places they buy. As a result, you should always know that it cannot be done without measuring backlink competition.

Content Analysis

Until this part, we talked about off-page factors for competitor SEO analysis. It's not just the off-page factors that need to be looked at. In order to evaluate the factors within the web pages and make the competitor SEO analysis more useful, you should have information about your competitors' content. At this point, it should be important to base the quality of the content in general. There are different factors when evaluating the content quality of your competitors. At this point, how relevant the content is to the website or industry it is in, how well the content meets the needs of the reader, and the scope of the content are very important factors. Content that is not related to the area it is in but is written only for ranking or that does not meet the reader's needs negatively affects the user experience and means a negative conversion to the brand.

The scope of the content is at a very sensitive point for the Google algorithm as well as its importance for the reader. Writing the full scope of the subject covered is much more useful than short and vague content. While doing SEO competitor analysis, you may have to spend a lot of effort in the content stage because SEO tools are useless this time. You will need to adopt the contents and make a subjective assessment. This way, you can accurately compare content quality with your own content. So you get an idea of how to improve your content.

Main Message: Know Your Competitor

Knowing your competitors well is the best move you can make to ensure that your brand provides the best service and always stays in mind, both in the physical trade environment and in the digital environment. Knowing exactly what your competitors are doing and getting to know them enough to predict their next steps allows you to take the best improvement steps for your brand. For SEO, knowing your competitor is through competitor SEO analysis. In this way, you will make a start by determining your competition. If you say you don't have enough time to be effective in your SEO strategy or you want to advance a professional process, you can work with an SEO Consultant. An SEO strategy journey that you embark on with all the information we have included in this context means the most development process for you.