In the fast-paced digital landscape, staying ahead of the competition is crucial for businesses striving to achieve online success. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in improving website visibility and attracting organic traffic. To gain an edge over competitors, it is essential to have insights into their strategies and tactics. This is where SEO competitive analysis tools come into play. In this blog post, we will explain what SEO competition research is, why it is important, what are the benefits of doing it, and what are the best tools to use for it. We will also provide a step-by-step guide on how to conduct SEO competition research and use the insights to boost your SEO results.
What is SEO competition research?
SEO competition research is the process of analyzing and learning from the websites that rank higher than you for your target keywords. It can help you discover the best practices, strategies, and tactics that your competitors used to achieve high rankings, traffic, and conversions. By applying this knowledge to your own website, you can improve your SEO performance and outrank your rivals.
Why is SEO competition research important?
SEO competition research is important because it can help you:
- Understand the competitive landscape and the level of difficulty for ranking for your target keywords.
- Learn from the best practices and successful strategies of your competitors and avoid their mistakes.
- Identify the gaps and opportunities in your niche that you can exploit to gain an advantage over your competitors.
- Create a unique value proposition and a compelling content strategy that appeals to your audience and differentiates you from your competitors.
- Build a strong backlink profile and authority by finding relevant and high-quality link sources that your competitors use or miss.
- Optimize your website for technical SEO, user experience, and conversion rate by analyzing how your competitors perform on these aspects.
What are the benefits of SEO competition research?
SEO competition research can provide you with many benefits, such as:
- Saving time and money by avoiding trial and error and focusing on proven methods and tactics.
- Increasing your organic traffic and visibility by targeting the right keywords and creating the best content for those keywords.
- Boosting your conversions and revenue by optimizing your website for user intent, engagement, and action.
- Enhancing your brand awareness and reputation by building trust and authority in your niche.
- Staying ahead of the curve and changing SEO trends by monitoring and adapting to your competitors’ moves.
How to do SEO competition research?
SEO competition research involves analyzing and evaluating your competitors' websites and strategies to gain insights and identify opportunities to improve your own search engine optimization efforts. SEO competition research can be done using the following steps:
- Identify your SEO competitors
The first step is to find out who are your main SEO competitors for your target keywords. You can use SEO keyword competition analysis tools to enter your domain or keywords and see who ranks higher than you. You can also use Google Search to manually check the top results for your keywords. You should focus on the competitors that are relevant to your niche, audience, and goals.
- Analyze their keywords
The next step is to analyze what keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking for. You can enter your competitors’ domains in any of the SEO keyword competition analysis tools and see their top keywords, search volume, difficulty, and ranking positions. You can also compare your keywords with your competitors’ keywords and find the gaps and opportunities. You should look for keywords that have high volume, low difficulty, and high relevance to your niche.
3. Analyze their content
The third step is to analyze what content your competitors are creating and how it performs. You can use SEO competition research tools to enter your competitors’ domains and see their top pages, traffic, social shares, and backlinks. You can also use the SEO competitive research tool to enter your competitors’ keywords and see their top-ranking content, word count, readability, and optimization. You should look for content that has high traffic, high engagement, high authority, and high relevance to your niche.
4. Analyze their links
The fourth step is to analyze what links your competitors are getting and from where. You can use SEO keyword competition analysis tools to enter your competitors’ domains and see their backlink profiles, referring domains, anchor texts, and link types. You can also compare your backlink profile with your competitors’ backlink profiles and find gaps and opportunities. You should look for links that have high authority, high relevance, and high diversity.
5. Analyze their technical SEO, user experience, and conversion rate
The final step is to analyze how your competitors are optimizing their websites for technical SEO, user experience, and conversion rate. Using SEO competition research analysis tools, you can see their site metrics, such as domain authority, page authority, site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, etc. You can also use tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console to see how your competitors are performing on user behavior metrics, such as bounce rate, time on site, pages per session, etc. You can also use tools like Google Optimize to see how your competitors are optimizing their websites for conversions, such as calls to action, landing pages, forms, etc. You should look for the best practices and benchmarks that you can apply to your own website.
How to use SEO competition research to improve your SEO results?
SEO competition research can help you improve your SEO results by providing you with valuable insights and actionable steps. Here are some ways you can use SEO competition research to boost your SEO performance:
Target the right keywords
Based on your keyword analysis, you can choose the keywords that have high volume, low difficulty, and high relevance to your niche. You can also find the long-tail keywords and semantic variations that your competitors are missing or ranking low for. You can use these keywords to optimize your existing content or create new content that matches the user intent and satisfies the search query.
Create the best content
Based on your content analysis, you can create content that is better than your competitors’ content in terms of quality, quantity, uniqueness, and optimization. You can also find the content gaps and opportunities that your competitors are not covering or covering poorly. You can use these gaps and opportunities to create content that provides value, solves problems, and answers questions for your audience.
Build more links
Based on your link analysis, you can build links from the same or similar sources as your competitors. You can also find the link gaps and opportunities that your competitors are not getting. You can use these gaps and opportunities to build links from new and relevant sources that can boost your authority and trust.
Optimize your website
Based on your technical SEO, user experience, and conversion rate analysis, you can optimize your website for speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, usability, engagement, and action. You can also find the best practices and benchmarks that your competitors are following or exceeding. You can use these best practices and benchmarks to improve your website performance and user satisfaction.
What are the best tools for SEO competition research of your niche keyword?
There are many tools that can help you with SEO competition research, but some of the best SEO Competition Research Tools are as follows:
1. Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that helps you plan, research, create and optimize content all in one place. It uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to generate content that ranks well on search engines. The SEO competitive research analysis is part of the Keyword Planner and also the best SEO competition research tool that offers an overview of the best 30 competition sites that have written articles on your desired keyword. You get to see their Page Statistics, such as organic keywords, word count, SEO score, avg. no H tags, avg. no. of Images, metric trends, competitors' backlinks, etc., all in one place.
Pros
- It helps you create long-form content that ranks well on search engines and engages your readers.
- It analyzes the top-ranking content for your target keyword and provides you with actionable insights and suggestions to improve your writing.
- It helps you with competition analysis, NLP key terms, outlines, and social listening to get all the insights and semantic key terms you need to outpace your competition.
- It maximizes SEO success with AI-driven content optimization and suggests keywords and answers from different platforms such as Reddit and Quora.
- It offers a free SEO analyzer tool that helps you audit your website and identify issues that affect your SEO performance.
- It offers a 7-day free trial.
Cons
- Scalenut may have a slightly steep learning curve; however, it provides a dedicated help center with comprehensive documentation and video tutorials to assist you in quickly overcoming any challenges and reducing the learning curve.
Pricing
- Essential: $39/mo
- Growth: $79/mo
- Pro: $149/mo
2. Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers various features for SEO competitor analysis, such as keyword explorer, site explorer, link explorer, rank tracker, and more. You can use Moz Keyword Explorer to get a detailed report on your top competitor's site, their keywords, content, links, site metrics, and ranking changes. Moz offers a free version that allows you to perform up to 10 queries/mo and access some basic data.
Pros
- A user-friendly interface
- A large keyword database
- A true competitor engine
- A widely-trusted domain authority metric
Cons
- Has limited backlink data
- Provides slow site crawls
- Has fewer data sources compared to other SEO tools
Pricing
- Standard plan: $99/mo
- Medium plan: $179/mo
- Large plan: $299/mo
- Premium plan: $599/mo
3. SEMrush Website Competitor Analysis Tool
SEMrush is another powerful SEO tool that provides a wealth of data and insights on your competitor websites, such as organic keyword research, keyword gap, backlink gap, content analyzer, traffic analytics, position tracking, and more. You can use SEMrush Website Competitor Analysis Tool to discover your competitors’ organic and paid strategies, their traffic sources and distribution, their content performance and gaps, their backlink profile and opportunities, and their ranking fluctuations. SEMrush has a free plan that allows you to perform up to 10 queries per day and access some basic data.
Pros
- A huge keyword database
- A comprehensive competitor analysis suite
- A traffic analytics tool that can estimate any website’s traffic
- A content marketing platform that can help you create and optimize your content.
Cons
- A steep learning curve
- A complex interface
- Instances of some inaccurate or outdated data
Pricing
- Pro plan: $119.95/mo
- Guru plan: $229.95/mo
- Business plan: $449.95/mo
- Enterprise plan: Custom pricing as per specific user requirements
4. Ahrefs Site Explorer
Ahrefs Site Explorer is a tool that helps users get an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL. It also provides metrics like keyword rankings, organic click-through rate, domain rating, and more. Ahrefs Site Explorer combines three powerful SEO tools in one interface: organic traffic research, backlink checker, and paid traffic research.
Pros
- A massive backlink database
- A fast and accurate site crawler
- A keyword difficulty score that reflects the real competition
- A content explorer to find the most popular and relevant content in your niche
Cons
- A high price tag
- A limited keyword database
- No integration with Google Analytics or Search Console
Pricing
- Lite plan: $99/mo
- Standard plan: $179/mo
- Advanced plan: $399/mo
- Enterprise plan $999/mo
5. BuzzSumo Competitor Intelligence
BuzzSumo’s content marketing tool can help you with SEO competition research. You can use BuzzSumo’s Competitor Intelligence tool to find the most popular and engaging content in your niche, analyze your competitor’s content performance and strategy, identify the best platforms and formats for your content, and discover the influencers and websites that can amplify your content reach. BuzzSumo has a free plan that allows you to perform up to 10 queries /mo and access some basic data.
Pros
- A large and updated content database
- A social media analysis tool to measure the social engagement, and sentiment of any content
- A content discovery tool to find the latest and trending content in your niche
- A content alerts tool to monitor your competitors’ content activity
Cons
- Limited keyword data
- No backlink data
- No traffic analytics
- No content optimization features
Pricing
- Basic: $119 /mo
- Content Creation: $249 /mo
- PR & Comms: $249 /mo
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
6. Serpstat Competitor Analysis
Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that includes integrated competitive research features. Its Competitor Analysis Tool allows you to find relevant online competitors, the keywords they use for promoting, analyze successful ads and identify organic traffic to their sites.
Pros
- Large database of keywords and keyword suggestions for Google and other search engines. Serpstat claims to have over 7 billion keywords and 570 million ads in its database.
- Competitor analysis tools for SEO and PPC that allow users to discover their competitors’ traffic sources, keywords, backlinks, ads, and top pages. Users can also compare up to 100,000 keywords in one report across five databases.
- Technical SEO audit that helps users identify and fix issues on their websites, such as broken links, duplicate content, slow loading speed, and security problems. Serpstat also provides recommendations and tips on how to improve the site’s performance and usability.
Cons
- Limited regional databases compared to some of its competitors. Serpstat currently supports 230 regional databases for Google and 9 for Yandex3.
- Lack of some advanced features that are available in other SEO tools, such as content analysis, social media analytics, backlink gap analysis, and keyword difficulty score. Serpstat also does not provide data on click-through rate, bounce rate, and dwell time for keywords and pages.
- Inconsistent data accuracy and reliability, according to some user reviews. Some users have reported that Serpstat’s data on keyword volume, difficulty, and ranking positions are sometimes inaccurate or outdated compared to other sources. Some users have also experienced bugs and glitches with the tool’s interface and functionality.
Pricing
- Lite: $69/mo
- Standard: $149/mo
- Advanced: $299/mo
- Enterprise: $499/mo
7. SE Ranking Competitor Analysis Tool
SE Ranking is famous for its rank tracking capabilities; however, it also boasts of having one of the largest databases of backlinks and keywords, making it an invaluable tool for competitor research.
Using the user interface is incredibly simple. To begin, go to the Competitive Research tab and enter your domain. Then, just scroll down to find your organic competitors list. It provides a comprehensive breakdown of all the websites that are competing with you for ranked keywords, arranged in order of their visibility. By clicking on any of these competitors, you can instantly access their website within the same Competitive Research report. This grants you access to a wealth of insights regarding their SEO and PPC performance. With a quick glance, you can gather estimates of their monthly organic and paid traffic, the overall value of that traffic, and the number of keywords they have achieved rankings for. (Check SE Ranking alternatives here.)
Pros
- A large database of quality keywords for the US and other countries
- Can analyze any website for specific details such as traffic, keywords, backlinks, ads, and historical data
- Can compare up to 5 domains and find untapped backlink opportunities to outrank competitors
- Can discover the most profitable ads and keywords that competitors use in their PPC campaigns
- Can identify content opportunities by analyzing the top pieces of content that competitors use to rank for important keywords
Cons
- It may not have as comprehensive data as some other SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
- It may not be very accurate in some metrics, such as traffic cost or keyword difficulty.
- It may not have as many features as some other SEO tools, such as site audit, keyword rank tracker, or keyword manager.
Pricing
- Essential: $29.40/mo
- Pro: $65.40/mo
- Business: $143.40/mo
Conclusion
In the competitive world of SEO, having access to the right tools can make a significant difference in your online success. The SEO keyword competition analysis tools mentioned in this blog offer powerful features that will help you gain valuable insights into your competitors' strategies. By utilizing these tools effectively, you can refine your SEO efforts, discover new opportunities, and stay one step ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape. You can sign up for a 7-day free trial with Scalenut to explore our all-inclusive SEO and Content Marketing Tools that help with content optimization, website ranking, and SEO competitive research analysis.
About Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that helps discover and create relevant content for your customers. Be it brainstorming a content strategy, creating comprehensive briefs, generating the content, or optimizing it per the best SEO practices, Scalenut has made the process extremely easy. Click here to create a free account and explore the many features of this tool.
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