Are you struggling to outrank your competitors in search engine results? The key to success lies in conducting a thorough SEO competitor analysis. In this article, we'll walk you through the step-by-step process of identifying and understanding your app's SEO competitors.
Why Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis?
Performing an SEO competitive analysis allows you to learn what works and what doesn't in your industry, capitalize on your competitors' weaknesses, replicate their strengths, prioritize SEO tasks going forward, and understand how difficult outperforming them is likely to be. By doing so, you'll gain valuable insights into the app user experience of your competitors and uncover opportunities to improve your own.
When to Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis
You should perform an SEO competitor analysis when:
- You have a new website
- You're planning your SEO strategy
- Competitors are outranking you or when your keyword rankings have dropped
Let's pretend we're a new infographic design tool. Here's how your hypothetical SEO competitor analysis will look like:
1. Identify Your SEO Competitors
Your SEO competitors are the websites competing for your desired target keywords in organic search. These may not be the same as your direct business competitors.
For example, HubSpot ranks for "how to make infographics" even though it's not a direct business competitor of any infographic design tool:
Identifying SEO Competitors Fast
- Go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Organic competitors report
This report shows you competing websites that rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as your website.
If your site is new, this may not give you great results. So here's what you can do instead:
- Go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
- Enter some keywords potential customers may use to search for your product or service
- Go to Traffic share by domain
For this example, we can see that our potential top-ranking five competitors are sites like Canva, Visme, Venngage, Piktochart, and Adobe.
2. Investigate How They're Getting Traffic
You can look at your competitor's website architecture to understand where most of their search traffic is going.
Here's how to see your competitor's website structure:
- Go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor's domain
- Go to the Site structure report
For example, we can see that Venngage gets 260,000 estimated monthly search visits to its template subfolder, which is 9.9% of its total organic traffic.
3. Find and Cover Content Gaps
Content gaps (also known as keyword gaps) are keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don't.
Here's how to find content gaps for your site:
- Go to Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis tool
- Enter your domain in the Target section
- Enter your competitors' domains in the Competitors section
- Hit "Compare"
- Click the Content Gap report
Hit the Main positions only toggle to exclude your competitors' rankings in SERP features like "Top stories" and "Image packs."
Look through the report and identify keywords that are relevant for your site.
4. Spy on Your Competitors' Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are quick answers in search results that Google pulls from a page ranking in the top 10.
If you can find featured snippets your competitors own where you rank in the top 10, you can potentially "steal" these featured snippets.
Here's how you can see these opportunities:
- Go to Ahrefs' Competitive Analysis tool
- Enter a competitor's domain in the Target section
- Enter your domain in the Competitors section
- Hit "Compare"
- Click the Content Gap report
- Set the SERP features filter to "Where target ranks" and check "Featured snippet"
- Set Target's position from "No" to "Any"
Look through the report to see if there are any keywords where you could optimize an existing page to grab the featured snippet.
5. See Where Your Competitors' Traffic is Coming From
Knowing which countries your competitors get the bulk of their organic traffic from helps you understand whether you can get more traffic by translating or creating your content in other languages.
Here's how to see this:
- Go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor's domain
- Look at the Traffic by country section
We can see that the U.S. is where Venngage gets the bulk of its traffic. So as a competitor, you'll naturally want to focus on English-language content.
However, there are opportunities for countries like Mexico, Philippines, Brazil, and India too. You could potentially translate your homepage and landing pages into Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Hindi. You could even launch a multilingual blog to maximize traffic from these countries.
6. Find Backlink Gaps
Links are an important Google ranking factor. Generally speaking, the more links you have, the higher you'll likely rank on Google (and possibly other search engines).
If you can figure out how your competitors have been acquiring links, you can potentially replicate the same strategies.
Here's how to do it:
- Go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Link Intersect report
Enter your competitors' domains in the
By following these steps, you'll gain valuable insights into the app user experience of your competitors and uncover opportunities to improve your own. Remember to focus on replicating their strengths, capitalizing on their weaknesses, and prioritizing SEO tasks going forward.