In a nutshell:
- Local competitor analysis determines your regional SEO strategy—if you only look at your own site, you’ll miss keyword gaps and content opportunities.
- We’ll show you how to systematically analyze competitors in your region, develop a content plan based on that analysis, and rank faster than you would by relying on gut instinct.
Do you know your online competition, and do you understand your strengths and weaknesses so you can address them with your team? If not, an SEO competitor analysis could help. Here, you’ll learn why such an analysis should be part of every SEO strategy and what you need to consider.
What exactly is an SEO competitor analysis?
You may be familiar with competitive analyses from traditional marketing. However, this article isn’t about Porter’s Five Forces Model, but rather about analyzing your competition on Google. Better rankings can be the result, as you uncover organic potential you weren’t fully aware of before.
An SEO competitive analysis, also known as an SEO competitor analysis, examines the strengths and weaknesses of your direct competitors and compares them to your own website. This allows you to derive actionable steps for your SEO strategy.
Why is an SEO competitive analysis important?
With an SEO competitor analysis, you can find out what strategies your competitors are using and how you can optimize your own strategy to get more organic traffic.
You can determine your market potential, discover new competitors in the market, and identify the strongest competitors based on their organic traffic. Even if you already rank at the top of search results for all your most important keywords, there will always be another website trying to outrank you and exploit your website’s weaknesses.
What makes a local SEO competitive analysis unique?
The most important benefit of a local SEO competitor analysis is that you can identify the specific keywords your competitors are using for local SEO that you aren’t using yet.
This helps you improve your SEO strategy and boost your ranking in local search engines. The four key pillars of SEO competitive analysis include:
- SEO Keyword Analysis
- On-page SEO
- SEO Content Analysis: Website Content
- Link profile or backlinks
What does a local SEO competitive analysis entail?
As always, there are many ways to analyze your online competition, and every expert will give you different advice. However, the four pillars mentioned above are essential for the analysis. Other aspects include:
- Visibility: How visible is the site in search results?
- How do you rank for our keywords?
- Discoverability: Can Google find the pages easily?
- Social Media: How active are you on social media, and is the website linked to social media?
What are the best tools for a competitive analysis?
A local SEO competitive analysis is a key component of a local SEO strategy. It’s a process where you identify the top competitors in local search and analyze their rankings compared to your own in local search engines.
Below, we’ve summarized a few tools and competitor analysis methods you can use to conduct your SEO competitor analysis:
- Quick Search – Competitor Overview
With Talkwalker’s powerful social media search engine—Quick Search—you can quickly get an overview of your business online. Comprehensive reports provide insights into all relevant customer touchpoints, such as social networks, news sites, blogs, or forums. Your brand, influencers relevant to your topic, and trends in your industry are also analyzed in real time.
It’s easy to do: simply enter multiple companies into the search bar and analyze sentiment, for example. Other data you can view includes target audience demographics, gender, user location, or the number of brand mentions. With the help of filters, you also have the option to delve deeper into trends and topics and find social media stories that impact your brand image.
- Wappalyzer – the Firefox add-on
This free add-on is an interesting tool for analyzing the competition thanks to its features. It works as a Firefox extension and can identify the tools and technologies used on a specific website. This gives you a quick overview of the software your competitors use, for example, for content management or traffic optimization.
- WooRank for Competitor Analysis
WooRank is a digital marketing tool that helps you check your website and your competitors’ sites for SEO optimization potential. It can compare up to three different websites simultaneously. In the following areas:
- SEO optimization
- SEO keyword check
- Website usability
- Keyword usage
- Backlink quality
- Social Media Engagement
WooRank’s Keyword Tool also helps you improve your website’s SEO performance by measuring and tracking keyword rankings and SEO impact. With the free 14-day trial, you can view your competitors’ keyword rankings and landing pages to gain a competitive edge.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
The Google Ads Keyword Planner is free for anyone with a Gmail account. With this tool, you can search the internet for the right keywords for your business and discover and monitor your competitors’ keywords. It helps you develop new ideas that appeal to your target market and stay up to date on current trends.
- SEMrush for Backlinks
SEMrush is an indispensable tool when it comes to search engine optimization. With more than 30 different tools that analyze 3.7 billion keywords and 4 trillion backlinks, it’s a comprehensive suite for all areas of digital marketing, including SEO, PPC, keyword research, social media, and content creation.
Conclusion – SEO Competitor Analysis with Waterproof Web Wizard
Here’s what we can conclude: The goal of SEO competitive analysis is to identify competitors’ strategies in order to gain insights for your own efforts. While this sounds quite simple in theory, it can quickly become overwhelming in practice.
At Waterproof Web Wizard, we work with a variety of companies across different industries and can adapt flexibly to your needs—including for your SEO competitive analysis. By the way: We’re an agency that listens to what you need first before imposing a solution on you.
Your goals are our top priority, which is why we discuss all decisions with you and your team first. That way, we can succeed together. Whether it’s an SEO competitor analysis, an online store, or the needs of offline customers: if there’s no connection between the two, nothing can really work well.
Need help? We at Waterproof Web Wizard are happy to assist you. Be sure to read our client testimonials first to get a better sense of who we are. Beyond that, we’re specialists in SEO strategies, which are a vital part of marketing. Here are the areas we cover:
- Brand Concept
- Search engine optimization
- Local SEO
- Technical SEO
- SEO Audit
- Online Stores
Feel free to contact us: You can reach us by phone at +49 751 95 89 92 17 or send us a message via our contact form.