We carry out SEO competitor analysis’ on every account in the agency but last night I was thinking about a new ecommerce website I have launched and after carrying out on page optimisation and getting some good page 1 ranks, I realised that I personally wasnt sure where I should focus next.
Should I invest in digital PR and linkbuilding? Should I get my developers to optimise the wordpress woocommerce codebases further for speed and usability?
I wasnt sure. So I thought, lets analyse the competition to give us some direction.
I will therefore be analysing my top competitor based who Ive selected based on them:
- not being a brand (uneven competition)
- having the most consistent highest ranking for my product keywords (its an eccomerce website so Im focusing on product name SEO first)
Now I am going to analyse this competitor by focusing on a product or category at a time, taking their ranking landing page, and comparing its
technical seo factors (code etc)
onpage seo factors (keyword density etc)
backlink profile
Im going to create a simple list of data points and this will clearly tell me where I need to focus to improve my websites digital reputation and therefore gain more traffic.
If I wanted to go a step further, Id actually carry out the same process for all sites that have a top 5 average ranking for my keywords, and then look at the difference across their profiles against their positions. What this will give me is a trend of data points high to low as each website has more or less visability.
It may not be a clear sliding scale but an experiwnced SEO expert Ill be able to identify whats leveraging a competitors SEO performance.