Whether you are look­ing for ways to increase prod­uct sales, pre­pare for a new mar­ket entry, or just want to make sure your clients find you online by work­ing on SEO, the bet­ter pre­pared you are, the eas­i­er it is to act.

The same approach works per­fect­ly well with any type of online mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties, includ­ing search engine opti­mi­sa­tion. If you are well-pre­pared and have done good research first, you’ll have a very clear idea on what you should do next. Before you start with an SEO plan, there are three things you should do:

• SEO Key­word Research
• SEO Com­peti­tors Research
• SWOT Analy­sis

Let’s cov­er more about SEO Com­peti­tor Research in detail, as this par­tic­u­lar step has a cru­cial role in prepar­ing an SEO strategy.

What is competitor research?

Com­peti­tor research is an overview of the SEO activ­i­ties that your com­peti­tors do. Ide­al­ly, it is a com­plete overview of ALL online mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties that your com­peti­tors do, including:

• SEO
• Con­tent and email marketing
• Paid adver­tis­ing
• Social media activity

At this stage, the main focus stays on SEO and con­tent activ­i­ties. For the rest — you need to dis­cov­er only the basic things:

• Do they have online advertising?
• Are they active on social media?

Why should you conduct competitor research?

Every busi­ness can ben­e­fit from well-made com­pe­ti­tion research in many ways.

• Define the needs of the cus­tomer. It’s one of the quick­est ways to con­firm what the goals and needs of your cus­tomers are. It can help you dis­cov­er mar­ket trends, devel­op new prod­ucts and series, and utilise all mar­ket­ing channels.
• Define a niche in the mar­ket. Well-done com­pe­ti­tion research will help you iden­ti­fy the right niche, and build a tone of voice to speak to your audi­ence. It can help you find gaps in the mar­ket where your brand fits perfectly.
• Be aware of what your com­peti­tors do. Com­pe­ti­tion research also helps you keep your “ene­mies” close. The best way to make sure you’re doing every­thing bet­ter than oth­er brands is to keep a close eye on their activ­i­ties. Even if you come up with a total­ly new way to posi­tion your prod­uct or ser­vice, you need to make sure it is unique.

All this can help you cre­ate bet­ter mar­ket­ing, SEO, and social media strategies.

Before div­ing into the top­ic, bear in mind that what works for a brand sim­i­lar to your busi­ness does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it will work for your own brand. Always make sure that your prod­uct fits well with what your tar­get audi­ence wants, and be flex­i­ble to changes.

How to do SEO Competition Research?

When it comes to SEO com­pe­ti­tion research the first thing you need to take into con­sid­er­a­tion are the most impor­tant rank­ing factors:

• Con­tent strategy
• Back­links
• Web­site per­for­mance and design
• Domain author­i­ty
• Match­ing SEO Key­words and search intent

With over 10 years of expe­ri­ence in SEO and online mar­ket­ing, we have estab­lished a sol­id 5‑step plan to get an all-round com­peti­tor research.

Before you start, you might want to use the SEO Com­peti­tor research tem­plate we have pre­pared for you.

Just open it, make a copy and let all the fun begin!

Step 1. Define your competitors

Start by find­ing out who your direct com­peti­tors are.

Direct com­peti­tors are busi­ness­es who pro­vide prod­ucts and ser­vices which are sim­i­lar to yours and based in the same loca­tion. An exam­ple of direct com­peti­tors is Net­flix and HBO GO. Both com­pa­nies pro­vide sub­scrip­tion-based ser­vices and offer an online view­ing expe­ri­ence for their audience.

Your indi­rect com­peti­tors are busi­ness­es that offer dif­fer­ent solu­tions to the same prob­lems of your tar­get audi­ence. An exam­ple of indi­rect com­peti­tors can be a piz­za place and a burg­er restau­rant. Both busi­ness­es sat­is­fy the same cus­tomer needs but pro­vide dif­fer­ent prod­ucts to do so.

When doing com­pe­ti­tion research for SEO pur­pos­es you should only focus on your direct competitors.

Your direct com­peti­tors are the web­sites that are com­pet­ing togeth­er with you for the same posi­tions in organ­ic search with the same keywords.

Start by fig­ur­ing out what your poten­tial cus­tomers might search for to find your website.

Let’s have a look at a web­site from our own port­fo­lio — ergo­Er­go

Ergo­Er­go sells ergonom­ic stools that com­bine the ben­e­fits of active sit­ting with a con­tem­po­rary design.

Accord­ing to the SEO key­word research we have done pre­vi­ous­ly, it makes sense to check busi­ness­es who rank well for the best-per­form­ing key­words in our region. In our case it’s “ergonom­ic stools”.

To be more pre­cise, you might want to look for “ergonom­ic stools+location”, or use an action-based long-tail keyword+location, like “ buy ergonom­ic stools in New York”.

For you the for­mu­la here will be:

“your pri­ma­ry key­word + action desired + location”.

Google will define a list of all your competitors.

On the first page, there are some retail­er web­sites that pop up such as Ama­zon and Way­fair, some arti­cles with prod­uct lists, and some rel­e­vant com­peti­tors that sell ergonom­ic stools and chairs.

Let’s start adding those web­sites to a spreadsheet.

To help you gath­er all the impor­tant infor­ma­tion on com­peti­tor research, here’s the tem­plate of one we do our­selves, which you are wel­come to copy and use.

We’re using the Ahrefs Key­word Explor­er tool to iden­ti­fy whether peo­ple are actu­al­ly search­ing for this term.

We see that the key­word has a great search vol­ume, so we are on the right track.

From here, you can iden­ti­fy your com­peti­tors by analysing the search engine results page (SERP). You can get that infor­ma­tion from the Key­word explor­er tool as well.

Тhe Ahrefs site explor­er gives us almost the same results as the man­u­al Google search we did — arti­cles with prod­uct cat­a­logs, mar­ket­places, big­ger com­pa­nies that sell ergonom­ic fur­ni­ture in gen­er­al (includ­ing ergonom­ic stools) but no com­pa­nies that focus on sell­ing ergonom­ic stools.

This is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty in terms of SEO! This sim­ple key­word check showed that there are no com­pa­nies that pro­mote the same exact prod­uct as ours and that are focus­ing on the exact key­words. They tar­get key­words such as “ergonom­ic chairs” or “ergonom­ic furniture”.

To do more in-depth key­word research you can use free SEO tools such as:

• Uber­sug­gest
• Google Key­word Planner
• Google Trends
• Answer the Public

or paid ones such as:

• Ahrefs Key­word Explorer
• Sem­rush Key­word Research Tool
• Moz Key­word Explorer

Let’s go fur­ther and enter the web­site URL into the Site Explor­er tool. Go to the “Com­pet­ing Domains” from the sidebar.

Here is the list with domains that Ahrefs iden­ti­fies as our com­pet­ing domains.

With fur­ther research, we can see that these web­sites are not rel­e­vant com­peti­tors to our web­site. Even though these web­sites are rank­ing for sim­i­lar key­words to ours, almost no one is actu­al­ly sell­ing ergonom­ic stools.

Be care­ful when using this fea­ture. Some­times, the research might include irrel­e­vant web­sites with sim­i­lar brand names and web­site domains.

We’ll now use Ahrefs Site Explor­er and gath­er gen­er­al infor­ma­tion such as DR, num­ber of back­links, organ­ic traf­fic, organ­ic key­words etc. We’ll write the results in our spread­sheet.

Make a note of the web­sites that per­form the best in terms of SEO. This means that they pay atten­tion to their online mar­ket­ing. When analysing SEO strate­gies, focus on those websites.

Pro Tip: If you’re try­ing to find the com­peti­tors for an e‑commerce web­site, or for a web­site that offers dif­fer­ent prod­ucts or ser­vices, it’s best to see which web­sites are rank­ing for all dif­fer­ent prod­ucts or services.

The mar­ket can shift and your main com­peti­tors can change. That’s why it’s impor­tant to keep an eye on your mar­ket reg­u­lar­ly for new play­ers or new tac­tics. We rec­om­mend doing com­pe­ti­tion research for your brand at least once a year.

Step 2. Analyse the organic keywords of your competitors

When you’re done with iden­ti­fy­ing your com­peti­tors, and you have a list of domains, analyse the com­peti­tor’s web­site for key­words they are rank­ing. This can help you get insight into the key­word strat­e­gy they use.

Since we did­n’t find direct com­peti­tors in the SERP, we’ll check out web­sites sell­ing ergonom­ic fur­ni­ture and see which key­words they’re tar­get­ing in the ergonom­ic stools category.

We are using the Ahrefs Key­word Explor­er fil­ters to fil­ter key­words with the word “stool” in them, but you can use any afford­able tool such as Uber­sug­gest or Google key­word plan­ner to do the key­word research and man­u­al­ly find the tar­get­ed keywords.

We analysed our com­peti­tors and added the rel­e­vant key­words they tar­get in our spread­sheet.

When you’re done with the analy­sis, answer these questions:

• Which of these key­words can you tar­get as well?
• Are those web­sites per­form­ing well in organ­ic search or are they rely­ing on ad campaigns?
• Are there rel­e­vant key­words that your com­peti­tors are not yet targeting?

Learn more on how to do prop­er key­word research.

Step 3. Analyse backlinks

After iden­ti­fy­ing organ­ic key­words, it’s time to focus on the com­peti­tor’s link-build­ing efforts.

Start by check­ing how often your com­peti­tors acquire a new link. You can do that in the back­links explor­er in Ahrefs. Enter the domain name in the site explor­er bar and choose new refer­ring domains from the sidebar.

We can see that one of the main com­peti­tors fully.com acquires new back­links from refer­ring domains on a dai­ly basis. For the last 90 days, the web­site has 2,187 new refer­ring domains.

Let’s dive deep­er into the com­peti­tor’s back­link profiles.

You can click on the back­links option in the side­bar to analyse the type of back­links your com­peti­tor has acquired.

You can see what the Domain Rate of the link­ing domains is, which anchors have been used, which types of web­sites are link­ing to the con­tent, how many links there are from one domain, and more.

We did a quick analy­sis and wrote down the results in our spread­sheet. Feel free to dive deep­er and under­stand how they acquire good links.

If you don’t have access to Ahrefs, you can use the free tool Uber­sug­gest.

Step 4. Analyse competitor’s content efforts

When analysing the con­tent of your com­peti­tors, start with key­words that your site does not yet rank for. This is called а con­tent gap.

The Ahrefs tool has an amaz­ing option where you can check mul­ti­ple com­peti­tor domains and find key­words that they rank for but your brand still does not.

You can do that man­u­al­ly in a spread­sheet by going to the key­word research for each domain and not­ing key­words you find that you can rank for.

The next thing you can do is look into what type of con­tent your com­peti­tors have on their web­sites. Let’s have a quick look and write that down in the spread­sheet.

Do they have a blog? Are they using the blog to rank on tar­get­ed key­words or are they writ­ing con­tent that is not intend­ed for improv­ing SEO? They can sim­ply share cus­tomer sto­ries, inter­views, etc.

If they are tar­get­ing organ­ic key­words with their blog post, find out whether you can “steal” those key­words by cre­at­ing bet­ter con­tent that answers all user ques­tions when read­ing it.

If the web­site is for the pur­pose of sell­ing goods or ser­vices, analyse their ser­vice pages as well. How well do these pages per­form in the search engine? Do they man­age to take a fea­tured snip­pet? Do they con­tain a FAQ sec­tion? How well do they describe the ser­vices they offer?

Pay atten­tion to the visu­al con­tent they use as well. Are their images clean and min­i­mal, or fun and bright? Do they use videos? Do they use illus­tra­tion to bet­ter con­vey their mes­sages? What about animation?

What can you do bet­ter to “steal” their rank­ing positions?

Step 5. Do a SWOT Analysis

After col­lect­ing and eval­u­at­ing all impor­tant infor­ma­tion, you can per­form a sim­ple SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analy­sis is a strate­gic research tech­nique that can help you iden­ti­fy strengths, weak­ness­es, oppor­tu­ni­ties, and threats when it comes to busi­ness competition.

The SWOT analy­sis can help you answer such as:

What are the strengths of your com­peti­tors? What do they do real­ly well? Is it social media mar­ket­ing, con­tent mar­ket­ing, or sales?

• What are the weak­ness­es of your competitors?
• What makes your com­peti­tors bet­ter than your brand?
• What makes your brand bet­ter than the competitors’?
• Are there any oppor­tu­ni­ties that your com­peti­tors haven’t yet identified?

By using a SWOT analy­sis to iden­ti­fy the strength and weak­ness­es of your brand, and of your com­peti­tors’ brands, you can uncov­er areas of improve­ment that may nev­er have been a part of your plans. Take the time to per­form this analy­sis at least once per year, to stay on top of your industry.

Spend­ing the time to do prop­er com­pe­ti­tion research can help you enhance your busi­ness strate­gies. Ignor­ing what your com­peti­tors are doing might have a neg­a­tive effect. You might miss oppor­tu­ni­ties to “steal” the atten­tion from them and direct it to your brand.