When we start a new SEO campaign, one of the first things we do is a bit of competitor analysis. It allows us to gain much more understanding about the client’s industry. By reviewing the top 10 sites for a given keyword, or the sites that the client perceives to be their main competitors, we can learn much more about the focus of the industry.
It can also help us focus our keyword research – It lets us see which keywords the competitor is interested in so we can consider whether they’d be good or relevant keywords for us.
We can have a look to see which mistakes the competitor is making and if we can use this to our advantage. Not talking sneaky tricks here – but if a low authority site is ranking for a keyword without really having any optimising for that, we can guess that a bit of on page optimisation is going to provide us with really good results.
We can identify any slightly dodgy tricks they might be using – there might not be much we can do about this short of reporting it to Google but it’s still best to know what a competitor is up to
We can use it as a guide for why competitors might be ranking for a given keyword by analysing their back links and quantity of on page content that is about a given subject – This helps us work out how the client’s website needs to be focussed.
We don’t just file away the results, we act upon the findings. Furthermore, we continue to perform this analysis throughout the campaign too, for example when a new competitor sneaks into the top 10 for a benchmark keyword. It’s an invaluable exercise for us and gives the client a bit of insight to the competitors too.
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