Nothing about a search engine is single player.
To get your pages and keywords ranking, you’re going to have to compete.
As we all remember from good ole Sun Tzu: “Know thy enemy.”
Competitive analysis is one of the cornerstones of every successful SEO campaign.
At Green Religion Digital, we have the expertise and the experience to perform extremely detailed competitive analysis and synthesize our findings into actionable recommendations for our clients.
Why You Need Competitive Analysis
We like to think about competitive analysis as two processes: Broad and Narrow analysis.
In a Broad analysis, we take a few steps back and look at the search results and the industry as a whole. We try to get an idea of how much competition there is, how well established that competition is, and where the best opportunities to compete are available.
In a Narrow analysis, we zero in on the details of a specific competitor. This allows us to reverse engineer their SEO strategy and understand their successes (and their shortcomings.)
Think of each of your competitors as a case study in what SEO tactics work and which ones do not.
On every one of your competitor’s web pages is a potential treasure trove of keyword data, ideas for untapped markets, and a living snapshot of what the search engines want to see.
Competitive analysis is a necessary part of the SEO toolkit for websites both old and new.
For a new website, competitive analysis gives you the lay of the land. It lets you get an idea of what you have the potential to rank for, the scope of the industry, and what some of the best practices in your niche are.
For an existing website, competitive analysis provides a roadmap to improving any aspect of your SEO which isn’t up to par with your competitors.
Keywords and Competition
To put it bluntly, you can’t even begin to have a coherent content strategy before performing some serious competitive analysis.
Understanding which keywords you have the potential to rank for is about much more than simply identifying the right words and putting them on your website.
Ranking for keywords which have been targeted by other websites requires a more involved SEO strategy.
Competitive analysis and keyword research are processes which should go hand in hand. As relevant and potentially lucrative keywords are identified, their search results should be analysed to assess the level of competition.
This type of analysis allows you to carefully focus your effort on the keywords which you are most likely to rank for based on your website’s current metrics while eschewing keywords you might not be able to compete for (yet!)
Mind the Gaps
Examining what your competitors have to offer is an excellent way to quickly expose the gaps in your content strategy.
A careful competitive analysis will reveal the gaps not only in your own content, but also in the content available on the search engine results at large.
Keyword research is vital for sniffing out potential keywords to expand your website with, but it doesn’t show you how well (or how poorly) the competition is doing at providing quality content.
Competitive analysis affords the opportunity to find untapped veins of search traffic where your competition has failed to snatch up keywords.
It may also allow you to displace low effort or poorly optimized pages which are only ranking due to lack of quality content for those search terms.
By creating useful and informative content to help fill these gaps in the search knowledgebase, we have an opportunity to bring new traffic to your website and new leads to your business.
All thanks to our competitive analysis.
When Is It Time For Competitive Analysis?
Any time you are looking to expand your business, increase your search presence, or need new ideas for improving your SEO strategy, it’s a good time to seek a high quality competitive analysis.
To keep your business at the top of the search results where it belongs, we recommend competitive analysis on an ongoing basis.
Your competition isn’t resting. Neither should you!
How frequently you should perform a competitive analysis depends on the competitiveness of the particular keywords you are hoping to rank for, as well as other factors related to your SEO strategy.
As a general guideline, we recommend performing a competitor analysis at least four times a year to keep up with trends and changes in your competition.
The best time to schedule a consultation about Green Religion Digital’s competitive analysis services is right now!
Head over to our contact page to get in touch with us today for a free initial strategy session where our experts can determine the best way to put our competitive analysis expertise to work for your brand or business.
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