Competition Analysis
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At HQ SEO our core strategy to rank websites involves using an audit, plan and execute framework. The audit stage includes keyword research, content auditing, technical SEO audits and competition analysis. Competition analysis is one of the most important elements, it enables us to see how other websites have ranked and simply replicate this same strategy, but in a better way.
As every specific business niche has its own quirks and unique models, so does an SEO campaign. Applying the exact same SEO framework to every business type will not work. Our thorough competitor analysis means we are able use a highly specific data driven approach. This ensures our campaign is targeted precisely for your business niche.
Business Niche
Reflecting on the SEO techniques being used by your business niche competitors is a logical place to start. If you do not reflect the business elements in your specific niche, you are likely to miss out on a large volume of organic traffic.
Competitor Analysis
As we outlined above, every business has a nuanced approach to their own niche. Consequently, so does our SEO campaign. Our SEO competitor analysis covers a wide area, including technicals, on-page, content, user experience and backlink profile. Using this data, we are able to reverse engineer our campaign that can outrank the leading competitors.
The competition analysis process allows us to build a clear picture of what Google is looking to rank in this specific niche. Google is now moving very quickly towards showing results based on intent of the keyword than the specific search terms. This is why competition analysis is so important as we must evaluate the type of content, page, product, or listing that Google wants to see in the search results and replicate this, but improving on each individual element.
User Experience (UX)
Although user experience, or UX, does not have a direct impact on search engine rankings, it does relate to customer expectations. Target audiences expect different levels of user experience depending on the business niche. For example, accountant websites will have a completely different user experience to a gothic clothing ecommerce store. Consequently, during the competition analysis we take an overview of the overall website structure and user experience.
Technicals
Technical SEO covers a variety of fundamental website functions from SSL, mobile usability to site speed. Although most websites now use SSL as standard, ensuring mobile usability and site speed are better than the competition is essential.
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Backlink Analysis
Another critical aspect of competitor analysis is backlink analysis. Reviewing your competitions backlink profile ensures that when we are link building, we can provide an even better performance.
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Keyword Intent
Keyword intent is essential to any optimisation campaign, purely because if Google determines a search term to be relevant to a content piece or perhaps a video or a product page itself, trying to rank another webpage (say a normal static page) even if this page is perfectly optimised will result in no organic visibility.
Additionally, in the competition analysis report will be the overall quality of each of the top-ranking competitors. This will be based on the number of high quality backlinks pointing to their site. This audit shows us how many high quality, relevant links it would take to out-rank the competitors. This is an essential metric as link building is the most resource intensive element of a search engine optimisation campaign and something that if done by an amateur can hinder results drastically or even result in a penalty.
The information and data discovered from the competition analysis stage helps us to build out the overall website architecture, content and link building campaigns. By reverse engineer what competitors have done well and poorly we can optimise each individual element to a higher level and as a result will achieve higher rankings. All our SEO campaigns are highly systematic from auditing and analysis through to implementation.
If you have any questions about our competition analysis services please feel free to get in touch.
