SEO Competitor Analysis Checklist 2022

Some say that by spying on your competitors, SEO is one kind of distraction. But, I am highly focused on my own business, so why I must look out for my competitors? This makes a little sense. Simultaneously, the distraction will pay off really big. Checking out your competitors, you will find many opportunities for improving your own SEO strategy. This allows you to check their mistakes, know their stronger points & stay updated in your niche in the year 2022. Let us know what we will learn!

Follow below SEO Competitor Analysis Checklist for the year 2022

Keyword Analysis

It is required to determine the kind of keywords that your competition targets through the website. This involves taking a close look at a title tag of the competitors’ site pages, which include the Home Page, About Us Page, and Main Product Pages. When it is done for your competitors, you need to organize the spreadsheet to compile the significant keywords, which are used by the competitors. You can enjoin the column for the Search Volume & Competition (number of pages of Google for every term), and taking the help of the tool such as Wordtracker (offers a free trial) or AdWords Keyword Tool. The keywords with very high search volume and lower competition are more desirable than ones that have low search volume and high competition features. With this connection, you can try to see if you may locate any other keyword that your competitor has ignored in terms of the high search volume since this can help you to determine your competitor’s SEO strength.

Content Analysis

It is needed to determine the kind of content that your competitors post on the websites how often they’re updating the content and how they will brand the website by using the content. This can give you the opportunity of improving your content just by implementing some important features that may have slipped out the composition and gain one step over your competitors. You have to visit all your competitors’ sites to compile the references on:

• Keywords and themes in the main heading
• The level of branding is incorporated in the content
• Call to Action within the website
• Styles of the new content include Resource Tools, Product pages, Case Studies, Blogs, and more.
• Internal Linking Structure & Link anchor text

All these references can help you to develop a new content strategy that can prove very effective than your competitors.

SEO Technical Analysis

It comprises some ‘technical’ tests that need to be performed, irrespective of the SEO skill level. Thus, these will be listed to react individually.

• Perform the site: url.com to check if ever Google has listed any important pages like Main Products, Home initially. Note down if the major website pages are on the top, and minor ones are treated well.
• Search for every competitor in Search Engines & note down how the websites are listed. See if they’ve used any schema markup data. You can also check if the blogs have any authorship and have videos and images that are indexed.
• Take a close look at the source code and check if they appear optimized and clean.
• Check whether all the pages are indexed, pick five to ten of your competitors’ main site pages & search for the URL in Google.
• Check out for the sitemap.xml just by adding sitemap.xml at the end of the domain name (for example www.name.com/sitemap.xml).
• Check out the 404 pages just by adding some letters after the domain. Do the custom 404 pages arrive to redirect the visitors to the website if they enter the wrong URL? Does the page look like the rest of the website?
• Open some pages on the competitors’ websites and check how long every page takes in loading. Suppose these take a little longer time than yours, then you lead.

All these small technical checkups will help you to determine if your website is optimized adequately compared to one belonging to the competitors.

Link Analysis

This will help to determine how famous and well-liked your competitor’s websites are among online communities and yours. But, to draw the conclusions, you might need some additional tools to help you out. But, for the quick backlink analysis, you have to consider the following areas.

The Competitor Website Analysis will indicate that

• Backlinks number gives you a brief overview of the backlink profile.
• Unique domains number gives you a better picture of how many websites link to their website
• Backlink profile growth tells you who is steadily acquiring the new backlinks or which competitors get a significant number of the backlinks at a point of time.
• Detailed backlink analysis gives you pages on the competitor’s websites that get the most backlinks, anchor text used, and percentages of the links with images and no-follow links.

Backlink checking categories

Although your competitors have many categories and types of links to form in the websites, not all are equal in value. But, the main purpose behind making the mental assessment of the links is determining how powerful or strong is the backlink profile compared to yours. But, here are some of them;

• Associations & organizations are the members
• Forums they’re participating at
• Blogs they use for guest posting
• Purchased and spam links to determine their backlinks status.
• Conferences and events they sponsor

Link acquisition strategy

Just assessing the link acquisition strategy, your competitors are adopting will give you the right idea of how aggressively the competitors are progressing, so you too will take similar and better steps for increasing your Google rank. Nonetheless, you might take a close look at some strategies that your competitors may adopt to gain the march on you.

• Using the viral content including videos that have the potential to get linked by websites
• Including Blog posts that are written by the guest bloggers
• Ushering in the interviews with the industry leaders and promoted over sundry sites.
• Organizing Contests that are shared and generate traffic
• Using free tools and widgets shared over multiple websites