Before you plan out a competitive analysis report on your Website, a clear idea of SEO strategy creation is required for your online presence a boost. When you choose the internet to share your voices, sell your choice of merchandise and connect with your customers/audience and hopeful readers getting hands over the robust SEO strategy creation is what you must ensure.

So, what is SEO?

SEO(Search Engine Optimization) ranks your page higher than the competition. From a consumer perspective, when you look for a particular keyword(a word or phrase) and enter the same in Bing or Google search bar, the SEO-optimized pages will appear higher in search results. 

There are four types of SEO optimization exercised in SEO strategy creation–

• Off-page SEO strategies– Off-page SEO refers to SEO elements and tactics used to spread your Website’s awareness or business’s online presence to the target audience.
• On-page SEO strategies– On-page SEO refers to SEO elements and methods that focus on improving the significant aspects of your Website that you have control. 
• Local SEO-Local SEO is an approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that makes your company appear more prominently in Google’s local search results. Local SEO benefits any company with a physical location or serving a specific region.
• Technical SEO-Technical SEO is improving your Website and server so that search engine spiders can crawl and index your site more efficiently (to help improve organic rankings).

Hope this clarifies the concept of SEO to you. Now let us learn-

Why is SEO Competitive Analysis Significant?

If you want to ace the game of this digital marketing industry, running an SEO competitive analysis becomes integral to SEO strategy creation. This lets you understand the complete digital market, the demands, and the competitors. Besides, the report generated thoroughly helps you picture the current search landscape, which works precisely for essential keywords.

Is it imperative even though you rank amongst the highest in the search results? Well, sure, it is. You have to keep monitoring the SEO performance to secure your position amidst the competitive digital landscape and not lose to rival brands. 

What is SEO Analysis in SEO strategy creation?

A straightforward interpretation says that the method of understanding the nitty gritty(strengths and weaknesses) of your Website and your competitors is SEO Analysis. Here you explore the gaps between your competitors and websites. But this corncerns SEO strategy creation rather than the marketing strategy. 

So, how a competitors analysis helps you-

• Set a benchmark for your SEO performance.
• Check the areas that require improvement. 
• See what the gaps are in competitors’ websites.
• Find out what’s your competitor’s winning schemes.

Let’s get back to the primary question of this blog now, i.e.,

How to Perform an SEO Competitive Analysis in SEO Strategy Creation?

Understand who your rivals are in the industry.

Getting a list of the competitions is very important. If you are working with a client, talk with their marketing department. However, if not, try to see which names most pop up at the top of the Google search result with your list of keywords and phrases. The brands which are repeating themselves are your competitors in the industry. Further, you can take assistance from social media platforms too. 

Understand who are not your competitors.

It’s an important SEO strategy creation step. Sites such as Wikipedia and Pinterest are beyond reach. Their popularity amongst the online population is massive. Well, there are other notable names too. To identify those brands, watch over your-

• Current ranking,
• Time investment,
• Resources

These three factors will help you watch out for the names which can impact your audience and traffic to the Website significantly.

Examine your competitor’s top-ranking page.

After concluding the list of competitors, it’s high time when you examine which pages from their websites are at the top of Google search results.

So check-

• The pages ranked for which type of keywords.
• The pages with a considerable number of traffic.
• The pages that have the highest number of overall traffic.

Since it is a competitive analysis, never settle with the number you have because it keeps on updating. Hence keep doing the research work. It’s vital in SEO strategy creation.

Note and close the keyword gaps if there are any.

Have a detailed check over the keyword which made your page rank the highest in the Google search result. Now look over the keywords used by your competitors, which made you rank slightly less than them.

What are these significant factors such as –

• Why are they ranking higher but not you?
• Do they have good additional content that includes those specific keywords?
• Do they have more backlinks to those particular pages, which are helping them to rank higher?
• What measures do you need to take on your site which will help those targeted and individual keywords? 

Recognize what’s your strength and weakness. 

You should understand that every notable brand in this digital industry does have a weak point. Asking for a second opinion from your employees(especially if your employees are working in customer support) might be significant. 

Every brand comes with a set of aspects identified as strengths. As a website and brand owner, you have to determine those substantial aspects, also tweaking the same from time to time. 

What else? Here are some points from SEO strategy creation which will help you out-

Authority- Your audience must experience assurity and reliability when visiting your Website. For instance, websites with .org and .edu exhibit responsibility and authority much more than .xyz. Besides, if the rival names utilize competitive keywords, it would be a tremendous challenge for you to outrank the situation. Look out for keyword gaps for such complications. 

Find out-

• Whether your competitive site is authoritative or not?
• Do they have important links coming to their site regularly?

Contents- Include quality content in your Website. Interactive, interesting, educative, informative, and engaging content impressively helps the Google bots to crawl your pages effortlessly, ultimately ranking these pages in the search result. So, see what the competitor brands are up to-

1. Are they regular with their contents?
2. Do the contents produced are less thorough?
3. Are they focussing on product pages?
4. Are they making supporting pages for their content?
5. Are the contents made versatile in their approach or targeted?

E-Commerce handles– This is particular for e-commerce sites. If you need help ranking, verify the rival brand’s Website and determine where you are going wrong. Read what they have on their product page. These questions listed down will generously help you come to an understanding-

• How is the rating and reviews of their products presented?
• How user-friendly is the Website?
• Do the websites have tutorials to help and assist the customers?
• Do they have special video/blog links to guide the customers?

Technical SEO– Some dominant technical faults might need to be fixed for your Website to perform. Also, page speed matters. The Google PageSpeed insight is there to guide you through resolving the faults. Besides, when you are expanding your site every day, legacy code and large scripts can bog down the performance of your Website too. The additional technical issues which might impact your site are- 1. Broken links, 2. duplicate content, 3. indexability, 4. Crawlabiliy 5. HTTPS implementations.

Mobile compatibility-Check the smoothness of the rival brand’s Website running on your mobile device. Navigate through the contents. The dominant names in the industry have superb mobile compatibility. However, the new names in the digital sector might show slight shortcomings, which can benefit you, of course. Plan on making your site mobile friendly since the generation loves exploring everything on their mobile. 

Interlinking– Interlinking is essential for a website to perform online. In addition, you better manage your site hierarchy and its architecture as well. These are the critical areas of SEO strategy creation that are required for your site to rank. Auditing your competitor’s site can help you understand your mistakes and improvement areas. Well, you better understand that poor interlinking makes the site less Google-bot-friendly.

Lost Keywords Rankings– Ensure that you look over the keywords your competitors have recently lost. Look for the one with the highest ranking. Also, watch over the pages that ranked higher in Google search results because of the keyword and find the reasons behind their poor order. See if the competitors have lost a keyword; better take advantage of the situation. It would be great if the rival brand is unknown to its situtaion, though.

New Keywords Rankings– This is a crucial inclusion in SEO strategy creation. Keep a watch over the new keyword rankings and maintain regularity for general SEO motives.  

Investigate every single webpage.

For investigating the webpages, begin with- 

• Title-Yes Google does rewrite the Title of the content; however, putting emphasis on the same is crucial in SEO strategy creation as a content owner. Additionally, most of the time, keywords are not even in the Title. Adding it in the Title Tag is what you need to make sure.
• Meta description tags- Yes, Google might not consider using the same(specifically for large sites). Still, it helps Google bots for analyzing the motive of the content. Meta description lets you compete better in the industry.
• Meta keywords tags-The single yet important motive behind Meta tag keywords is that it gives you an idea about the keywords your competitors are using.
• H1 and the following(H2,H3,H4….). Well, it’s important in SEO strategy creation.
• Breadcrumbs and URL structure- These two pointers allow Google to grab a first-hand understanding of the hierarchy of the content. Check how this area builds a connection with the other page that might help you go up in the ranking.
• Keywords and their placements in the content are vital in SEO strategy creation. Why? Since it adds value to your content. Therefore choose your keyword, giving it some time. 

Review and recheck the backlinks.

Backlinks increase the worth of the Website’s ranking. Therefore, understand and take time to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality backlinks. You must always consider quality before quantity. 

Inspects the types of content

If you own an e-commerce site, pay attention to the style, design, and formula used in crafting the product page by your rival brand. It’s integral for SEO strategy creation. Now your next step includes observing how your competitor brand has produced-

• NEWS content, 
• Blog articles, 
• Help/Support/How-to Content, 
• Videos, 
• and Images,

Find out whether they are posting regularly or not. Also, grab a quick look at the Search Feature of your rival brand.

Check their search feature.

Well, you might feel very exhilarated coming third to the Google search result. After all, why not? You have worked dedicatedly on SEO strategy creation all this time. However, the situation might fall apart if the search features videos, ‘People also ask,’ and images. So plan accordingly.

Take a look at the featured snippets.

Yes, this is one of the vital parts of SEO strategy creation you can’t ignore. Design a robust featured snippet for your content. Suppose it is informative and educative to your reader. In that case, they will click on the link to the Google search result. A featured snippet typically is image content with a brief introduction to what the reader would find after clicking the link.

Steps to do after Prominent algorithm updates

Well, it is significant in SEO strategy creation that you run an algorithm update to keep up with Google. It is essential because-

• It lets you retain your rank in the Google search result.
• Allows you closely monitor your competitors and their performance in the search result.
• Also, it enables you to discover your new competitors in the industry.

While wrapping up,

The professionals are always here to guide and assist you in your SEO strategy creation and SEO audit from time to time. But it’s highly suggested that you experiment with each of the steps when you have enough time on your hand. Undoubtedly the digital marketing platform is massive; hence having a clear idea of what you will be dealing with is essential to stay in the game undefeated.

Hope this blog answers most of your queries. Without any further delay, implement these steps, and see a notable change in your Website’s performance.