Written by Fernando Maciá
Índice
- What is the use of a competitive analysis?
- Who is your SEO competition?
- What terms does your competition attack and you don’t?
- With which terms has your competitor lost or gained positions?
- What terms represent an opportunity for me?
- Are mobile search keywords different?
- How difficult is it to rank for a search?
- What content is your competitor ranking your own website with?
- How can you validate whether to attack a term or not?
- Full presentation of Aleyda Solis at the eShow Barcelona 2016
Steps, tips and criteria to use tools such as SEMrush, Sistrix, SimilarWeb, URLProfiler or SEOmonitor to develop a competitive SEO analysis that allows you to identify opportunities on which you can capitalize and establish a winning SEO strategy. Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Founder at Orainti.
Aleyda talks about competitive SEO analysis. It starts by posing questions that we can answer with popular tools.
What is the use of a competitive analysis?
When we talk about SEO, we talk about keyword terms. But that is not enough. When we want to target that audience we have to fight with other competitors for those keywords.
Sometimes, those people have more brand, more time, more authority, more effort and then it is difficult to face them. Then, we must know who we want to replace in the top positions. With this we can better prepare our strategy.
It is critical to analyze why the competition is well positioned, what did they do so well: content, keywords, actions, strategies, links…. We have to study it to take advantage of that knowledge in our own strategy.
Useful tools: Similar Webs, SEMRush, URLProfiler, SERPWoo, Sistrix… They help us to analyze and answer these questions. These are the tools to be used.
Who is your SEO competition?
Not necessarily the companies with whom you compete in the traditional world. But with those that we compete in the search results for the keywords where I am interested in having visibility. They are where you want to be. With SimilarWebs, it shows us the top sites by sector. And more specifically, it shows us the competitors by keywords. This is the first input.
With SEMRush and Sistrix we can analyze which websites are targeting the same keywords as me. SEMRush gives me the competition for matching words but also the top ranked sites for the most related keywords.
With Sistrix, we have similar data: it shows the competitors and the visibility levels of each competitor.
We can analyze zara.com’s competitors: we can see that it competes with Zalando, with mango, with kiabi… But Zalando also targets many more keywords than the others because of the variety of product and content it has.
So the reference would actually be Zalando.es. Not just who is similar, but who is the industry leader.
Once the competition has been identified: what is the positioning of that competition with respect to me. What is the distance that separates me from my competitors? SimilarWeb is used to verify the share of organic traffic of competitors over time, with which keywords they obtain it and with what content they achieve it.
After this analysis, I can ask myself if I have the right content to compete or if I do have it but it is not well optimized, and I can make decisions about it. Sistrix compares all metrics at the same time for different websites. It is important to distinguish the keywords in the top 10, which are the ones that generate the most traffic. And the average position.
Zalando achieves 11K positions vs. 6K for Zara or 4K for Mango on Sistrix. It is important to have this starting photograph to see how it evolves over time.
I am also interested to see what is the content with which each domain achieves its positions: is it better content? Is it better optimized? Do you have more links?
With SEMRush we can see the impact of positions on the total organic visibility for each website. What gives Zalando the most traffic growth are the words in the top10.
We also look at the volume of keywords vs. traffic captured over time to see if the competition is attacking the long-tail. For example, zara.com achieves more traffic with fewer keywords, which can mean higher rankings or more popular searches.
What terms does your competition attack and you don’t?
It is very easy to see it with SEMRush in its Domain vs domain. It shows us searches where the competitor is better positioned than us or where they are well positioned and we are not. We can also extract the data from Sistrix and compare in Excel.
For which terms are your competitors ranking better than you?
Sistrix and SEMRush give us this information directly in their competitor analysis sections. We can look at those keywords to see if they are relevant to us or not.
With which terms has your competitor lost or gained positions?
We can identify keyword trends for certain keywords where my competitors rank: it tells me if there have been penalties, SEO work, linkbuilding, new content, migrations, etc. We see this in SEMRush position changes for a given domain. We can see searches where they no longer rank, see if they no longer have that content and create that content and even detect links that may have been broken to try to recover them.
In Sistrix we see the changes in Ranking Changes: improvements, losses, new or lost keywords. It is interesting to see the new keywords in top10.
We can also see who benefits when we lose: what they have done or what we have done to lose it.
With SERPWoo you can track keywords over time. It is a very visual tool that updates daily positions, both for us and for competitors. After a Google update, when there are big position movements, it allows me to see who it affected.
What terms represent an opportunity for me?
Interesting keywords for me where my competitors do not yet rank well. Sistrix directly offers an opportunity report. We can generate a list of terms where I should position myself.
By default, Sistrix identifies the average positions we have to give guidance on how to improve the position.
What percentage of these terms come from mobile devices?
This is important because of the growing volume of mobile searches. Already 50% of searches come from cell phones, especially in certain categories: restaurants, food delivery…
We can see the potential in Sistrix by differentiating traffic by device. We also see it on Similar Web. Sistrix shows visibility differentiated by device.
Are mobile search keywords different?
By segmenting by mobile, we can see how different user behavior is on mobile searches: “anything near me”. We see that TripAdvisor ranks very well for these searches. They do it very well.
The behavior in different markets is different: in Spain this search formula is not detected. Instead, many opinions and comments are sought. That is what I can distinguish in Sistrix for each report by visualizing separately the data for DT and mobile. We can discover which specific services are being searched for from mobile, and optimize accordingly.
How difficult is it to rank for a search?
With SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool we can analyze which are the most complicated keywords by the authority of the best positioned ones.
Search for images, videos, universal, news…?
In Sistrix we can also distinguish which results we get for each of these types of results. We can thus see the visibility for each type of result we are interested in.
What content is your competitor ranking your own website with?
We can discover product ranges, services, etc. Pages that generate more traffic to our competitors and for which keywords they rank. Am I interested in offering that product or service? Do I create content to attack them? I see all of this in SEMRush.
SimilarWeb offers Popular Pages that I can also differentiate by device: pages that receive more desktop and mobile traffic.
I can also do the analysis by directories.
URL Profiler consolidates imported data from other tools: ScreamingFrog, Moz Analytics, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. I can see the quantity and quality of the links.
Are your top pages optimized for mobile search?
With URL Profiler I do the analysis specifying if the page is mobile friendly from Search Console, etc. Moz DA, etc.
How can you validate whether to attack a term or not?
SERPlook is a tool she has made with SEMRush that verifies for any country and keyword the ranked page, the inbound links, if it is ccTLD, etc. To give a difficulty figure.
With all this, we are much clearer about who our competitor is and how to attack them.
Full presentation of Aleyda Solis at the eShow Barcelona 2016
