First and foremost, you should be aware that your SEO rivals may not always be the same players as your direct business rivals.

So what exactly is an SEO rival? Websites that rank for the organic search terms you are also vying for are your SEO rivals. This implies that your SEO rivals will vary depending on the topic. Before publishing or optimising any pages aimed at ranking for a particular keyword, it’s important to know exactly who you are competing with – and for what. Finding search competitors that you might not be aware of is where the first step of competitor analysis comes into play. This is a very important step to take if different parts of your website focus on different business areas and have numerous competitors across industries.

Guesswork is not the proper strategy for this first step. Even though you might believe you know who your rivals are, analysing the data is the most reliable way to identify your SEO rivals. Utilizing an enterprise SEO platform, such as Siteimprove SEO, to automate this process is something you should think about doing because you may be analysing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of web pages and keywords.

Finding your most pertinent rivals is simple with Siteimprove SEO’s competitor-surfacing metrics, such as “Discover competitors” and “Top-ranking pages by keyword.” Utilize the information provided by these features to learn more about your top-performing pages’ search competitors based on the keywords you are tracking. From here, you can keep a close eye on your rivals, both established and up-and-coming, and learn why their content is causing them to rank highly in search engines.

You can start your analysis in earnest once you are aware of who your actual SEO competitors are.

When should you analyse your SEO competitors?

Your SEO performance is always compared to your competitors; it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It is also dynamic. You cannot take your foot off the gas when it comes to SEO because of changes to search engine algorithms, the introduction of new rivals, and the tenacious efforts of the rivals’ digital marketers to outperform you. You can find areas for improvement before they have a negative impact on your rankings by regularly analysing your competitors to understand where you stand (compared to them).

Here are some crucial actions and occasions that you should never miss when conducting an SEO competitor analysis.

By creating content, you can make sure that your page provides a better and more thorough response to user search intent than your rivals.

Creating content Finding out what your rivals are doing right and then giving it your own special spin is a great way to increase your website’s relevance in search results. The amount of work necessary to outrank rivals for a particular topic can also be determined using SEO competitor analysis.

To find out what your search competition is doing to suddenly outrank you after a sudden drop in ranking; to find out what is currently working and not working in your industry.

When a page’s performance in the SERPs stalls: Competitive analysis can show you where there are opportunities for optimisation if your page is stalling and isn’t among the top search results.

If the search engine results pages (SERPs) have changed: If another website has surpassed you for the top spot for a particular search term, you should use SEO competitor analysis to identify those websites’ advantages so you can copy them.

SEO competitor research for keywords

Finding valuable keywords that your search competitors are ranking highly for but for which your website isn’t allows you to use that information to send their visitors to your website. This process is known as competitor keyword analysis.

What keywords should I take into account when analysing my competitors?

Not every keyword is worth the same amount of work. You should concentrate your efforts on keywords that are pertinent to your business, are highly searched for, and are not too challenging to rank for.

You will still have a huge selection of options to choose from. The “Top keywords by domain” filter in Siteimprove SEO is a useful tool for reducing the shortlist. Search for a specific domain to reveal the top 100 keywords likeWest sydney SEO agency by search volume a competitor ranks for. Determine which keywords you should be actively monitoring and optimising for using this information. From there, you can make a list of all the content topics you can customise, ideally outranking them for.