Analyse the SEO strategy of your competitors

Analyse the competition is the first step before even thinking about your SEO strategy. Start your SEO audit by determining which sites are best positioned for the keywords of your topic. Evaluate the strengths and weakness of your competitors, identify a potential pattern liked by the SERP and the SEO opportunities.

Pick the other sites ranking currently where you want to be so in the Top 3 (better look at the top 5 to define a pattern easier) !!!

On-site SEO strategy

Look at the On-Site SEO of the main competitors:

• Check your competitors site structure:

  • Numbers of pages. Are there products pages, category pages?
  • How is the menu navigation? Do all the pages have a link on the homepage? Etc…

• Check your competitors content:

  • Optimisation of the text; is there lot of text or not?
  • Check the keywords present in their text and in what ratios.
  • Do they use more exact match, broad match, phrase match or even branded match or related match?

Off- site SEO strategy

Analyse the link outreach of the main competitors: 

• Internal linking SEO strategy:

  • Check if the sites shared a similar inner linking scheme.
  • Where do they choose to put their internal links?
  • Are product pages only accessible from the Menu navigation?
  • Do they have internal links with keywords in the anchor text? Etc…

• External links SEO strategy:

  • Check how many links are coming to their websites?
  • What are the types of those links?
  • Do they use keywords in the anchor text?

Some tools online can help to compare Onsite SEO, Links, and position of websites. I will list the ones we use but you can also do it simply with your eyes!

Useful tools for your SEO strategy

Tool	For what	What to look at
Semrush	To compare your ranking position to the competition & To determinate the best keyword your competitors are focusing on	Position ranking of the keywords you focused on and position of your competitors Visibility global of your site compares to your competitors To see the keywords your competitors are ranking for, the landing page for each keyword
Keyword density	to check the	analysis and reporting of your keywords
Internet officer	To see the redirection of a website	Check the code de redirection of redirected pages of a website
Free online SEO checker: internet marketing ninjas seo mastering tools seo book Keyword density small seo tools	Allows you to compare two pages using multiple seo aspects to see the optimization of the content of a website	Check the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring in the different pages.
Majestic	– To check the backlinks of a website to analyse competition – To check quality of a website for link-building	Numbers of backlinks of a website Trust flow and Citation flow score
Moz	To check the authority of a domain and the number of backlinks	Domain Authority value of a website, and number of backlinks
Whois.net	To see the information about the owner of a website	Give you some information about the history of a website. When was it first online, did it change name etc.

Compare the different SEO strategies

• Compare the results of your analysis of one website to another to see the overview
• The analysis helps you identify a pattern that seemed to be favoured by Google for the Keyword Phrase you want to rank for.
• Based on that you can make the right SEO plan!

Once you have found all the information about the SEO strategy of your competitors, you can highlight the good point of each website.

Your analysis can help you identify a pattern that seemed to be favored by Google for the Keyword Phrase you want to rank for. According to that, you can make your SEO plan!