Getting Started with Competitive Insights Reporting

Competitor analysis is a key pillar in SEO research. In this session, we'll cover what SEO competitor analysis is, why it's important when to perform it, and the two primary approaches you can take.

Competitor analysis in SEO is the process of identifying websites and brands that rank higher than you on the SERPs for high value queries related to your product, service, or company. Learning what's working for your competition enables you to apply those insights to your own SEO strategy.

Think of it as the old saying, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Using SEO competitive analysis, you can see where your competitors are spending their time and resources, as well as how they're responding to industry trends. It also allows you to uncover gaps in your competitor strategies. Whatever the case is, you can use your findings as inspiration to create new content and target high impact keywords.

We generally recommend running a competitive analysis at least twice a year and perhaps even once a quarter depending on your industry and level of competition. Just be careful not to draw too many conclusions from this analysis. Remember, your competitors aren't perfect and they aren't doing everything right all the time, so it's best to use their strategies inspiration without creating a carbon copy.

One important thing to keep in mind is that you will inevitably come across two types of competitors. Business competitors or direct competition refers to the companies or publishers who sell or market the same products as your business. Your customers will often evaluate both you and your direct competitors before making a purchase decision or converting.

An SEO Competitors or indirect competition refers to the companies or publishers that don't sell or market the same products but are in competition with your business digitally. They may write the same type of content as you and be competing for the same keywords. In short, they're competing with you for your customer's attention and effective competitor analysis will likely uncover and include a mixture of both.

Let's now cover two main ways to approach SEO competitor analysis.

The first approach is keyword based. Basically, you start with a list of important keywords and analyze the websites that are performing well in search engine results for those keywords. The goal of this approach is to uncover who your search competitors really are, and you can use this approach to then benchmark your performance against both known and discovered competitors. In Conductor, you can use the market share feature to easily analyze which websites are appearing most frequently in the top 10 search engine results for the keywords you track. Quick tip for this analysis, you'll get better and more accurate results if you segment your keywords by product lines and topics as the competitive landscape is often going to vary across different subsets of keywords.

The second approach is a competitor based approach. This analysis works by starting with a top competitor of your choosing and analyzing the keywords they're targeting and are visible for in search engine results. Results, benefits to this approach include being able to dig into your competitor's SEO performance and content strategies and discovering new topics and keywords to target in the process. In Conductor, you can use the Explorer tool to input a competitor's website or page and pull back all the keywords from the index that they rank for. It's a good idea to categorize your competitor list by product line so that you can more easily find relevant keyword opportunities by particular topic.

The best competitor analysis will use a combination of both approaches and can help you more efficiently develop your own SEO and content strategy to gain an advantage and online visibility.