As any online marketer, we have all experienced the sinking sensation of seeing a competitor blow us out of the search engine rankings. We watch as they handle the very keywords we are competing for and attract the very audience we so desperately crave. But we should not look at these competitors with jealousy. We should look at them as blueprints. If you aspire to become the best rated SEO in West Palm Beach, understanding and learning from the strongest players is essential.
A competitive SEO analysis doesn’t have anything to do with imitating what’s working for everyone. It’s all about understanding what works within our own industry and identifying the gaps within our competitors’ armor. We can then use these insights about our competitors’ winning methods and turn things around for our own sites to steal traffic from the strongest competitors.
Identify Top Competitors
The very first step in any competitive strategy is knowing who we are competing with. We like to believe we know our competition based on brand recognition, but they may be very different from our search competition. These are domains competing on pages one and two on Google for the terms that drive our revenue.
First, at Trigger Digital, we rely on SEO tools and enter our targeted search engine keywords. The domains that appear within the first three to five ranks are our actual search competition. We look for patterns here. At times, it will be a small domain beating out a large corporation due to domain-specific authority. When we have identified three to five domains as our mains, we can embark on taking apart their strategy to steal traffic from your competitors.
Competitor Keywords Analysis
Once we have identified who our competitors are, we have to see which terms they are receiving traffic for. We are interested in finding high volume and high intent keywords that they rank for, but we don’t. These are missed opportunities.
We zero in on what we call the “low-hanging fruit” – those keywords for which our competition ranks on page two or at the bottom of page one. These rankings show that they have good, but perhaps not outstanding content.
So, if we have something better, we have a good chance at beating them. We then examine the purpose for which these keywords are being searched. Whether people are searching for info or are ready to make a purchase matters. We target keywords pertaining to purchases because we then steal your competitors’ traffic that can convert.
Content Gap Analysis
Once we have our keywords, we then carry out a content gap analysis. The result of a content gap analysis will help us identify matters that our competitors are covering that we have completely missed.
We analyze their best-performing pages so we can see what they have that lets them rank. Do they have more comprehensive content? Do they have more engaging graphics? Do they have more information on this issue and do more research? We analyze their organization and readability. The objective at this stage is thus to develop ‘10x content’ – a result that is ten times better than what ranks today. We fill in the gaps they failed to fill.
Backlink Analysis
Content is king, but links are the fuel that drives your rankings. A domain with high domain authority will probably have done so because they have created excellent links with authoritative domains. We can achieve something similar with reverse engineering.
We search for sites that link to several competitors, but not us. These are considered excellent linking opportunities. A site linking to similar sites will be more likely to link to us if it finds value in our content. We also search for sites with broken links pointing to our competitors. To encourage these sites to repair a broken link, we contact them with our work samples as an alternative solution that will solve a user experience problem.
Technical SEO Audit
Content and links would not amount to anything if we have a crumbling technological base. We have to make sure our site works properly so we can beat our competitors, who may be content with what they have. Understanding how to steal traffic and visitors of competitors’ website requires a strong technical foundation to ensure any content or link strategies are effective.
We analyze our site speed, mobile optimization, and core web vital metrics. We search for crawl issues, duplicate content, and broken internal links. We may have competitors who have old sites with technical debt. A clean, fast, and optimized site with better technical merit will put us ahead from an SEO perspective. We make sure our schema markups are set up properly so we can obtain rich snippets, potentially boosting our click-through rate even if we rank slightly lower.
Future-Proofing Our Strategy
Traffic theft isn’t something that happens once. It’s an ongoing process. It requires constant observation, adjustment, and optimization. By continuously observing our competitors, finding gaps in their content, acquiring high-quality links, and staying technically sound, we can turn our competitors’ success into an opportunity for us. We don’t want to just rival our competitors. We want to raise the bar so that our competitors have something to focus on. Contact Trigger Digital to learn more!