Compare Your Website with Competition

If you want to rank on the top pages of SERP, you must be aware of how to do an in-depth competitor analysis. There’s no denying that the challenges and obstacles to making it to the top pages are continuing to grow. Competitor analysis has thus become the need of the hour for every website owner. 

Even though there have not been many changes in Google webmaster guidelines over the years, the core algorithm has undoubtedly gone through many updates. The introduction of Knowledge Graph, Hummingbird, Rank Brain, BERT, and SMITH algorithms has made it compelling for SEO professionals to abide by all search engine guidelines and adopt only White Hat techniques.  

Here are three tips that you could follow to compare your site to that of the competition to analyze where and how you could improve your SEO endeavors. 

So, let’s dig deep!

  1. Evaluate Your Competition’s Website Technology 

It’s essential to have a fast, easy-to-use, and easy-to-crawl website. There are no fixed guidelines on the technology to be used while building a website, but if you are building a new website, it’s better to analyze your competitors. Try to gather information on there – 

  • Analytics and tracking.
  • Widgets.
  • E-commerce.
  • Frameworks.
  • CDN.
  • Mapping.
  • Mobile.
  • Payment.
  • A/V Media.
  • CMS.
  • JS libraries & functions.
  • Advertising.
  • Verified links.
  • SSL Certificates.
  • Web hosting providers.
  • Name servers.
  • Email hosting providers.
  • Web servers.
  • Operating systems & servers.
  • Syndication techniques.
  • Webmaster registration.

Furthermore, you should understand your competitor’s website architecture as it would help you establish parent and child page hierarchy and narrow down the content gap. The best way to do this is to create a competitor analysis sitemap. It’s also essential to pay attention to the core web vitals. This includes but is not limited to page speed, Chrome UX report, Search Console, and Lighthouse reports. 

  1. Perform an Audit of Website Content

Here is how you can perform a competitor analysis on the web content – 

  • Narrow Down the Organic Keywords

It’s a mandate to develop the right list of keywords. In all probability, your competitors have already invested a lot of time conceptualizing a keyword strategy. You can try using Ahrefs for keyword analysis. Ahrefs has a huge database of search rankings by the website. Ahrefs makes it extremely easy to determine which phrases would be difficult to rank or has the maximum potential to drive traffic. Besides keywords and rankings, they also provide a list of top-ranking pages. 

Before finalizing the keywords you intend to rank on, you must consider the search terms your competitors are already ranking for, the opportunities they are missing, and obviously, the content gaps. This is a great strategy that would help you find the keyword and business opportunities. 

  • On-page Optimization 

Google may not be excessively dependent on meta tags since the Knowledge Graph update, but it’s always better to have a clear roadmap at the disposal of both users and search engines. 

A great strategy is to analyze how your pages are performing against the competition. Try using a Webpage Similarity Comparison Tool. The tool will give you a detailed comparison of the page title, meta description tag, keywords, text and word count, and top keyword phrases. 

  1. Analyze Competitor Backlinks

Gone are the days when the number of backlinks played a crucial role in SEO. With Google’s Penguin update, the quality of links matters over quantity. Google now penalizes all the irrelevant backlinks obtained through backlink mining. You need to be careful about the inbound link you are looking to obtain. Determine if it’s worth the effort required to obtain and the relevance it holds to your niche. You can again use Ahrefs to analyze the links that your competition has already built. 

Content and backlinks will remain the crucial aspects of Google algorithms. That’s why it’s essential to understand and neutralize any advantage that your peers might be enjoying.

So, here was a detailed guide on you can quickly compare your website with your competition. If you feel we have missed out on discussing something crucial, please feel free to comment below. 

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to gain a competitive edge. Contact our team for expert assistance.