Understanding the Competition: Analyzing SEO Tactics of Market Leaders

Intro

SEO has always been a lot of hard work, and the competition to outperform others is now dicier than ever. However, the reasons are not far-fetched.

• Search engines like Google roll out dozens of algorithm changes every year.
• Tens of thousands of websites go live every quarter.
• Your competitors are emptying their resource coffers and strategies to stay on Google’s front page.
• Let’s not forget the millions of blog posts directly or indirectly ranking for your primary keyword already.

All these factors make it so difficult to gain true traction for your brand on the internet.

To successfully scale your business SEO, you need an unusual approach that actually moves the needle, contrary to the commonly regurgitated hacks from self-acclaimed experts.

And that’s where analyzing the SEO tactics of top competitors in your industry comes in.

In this article, we will share some steps to dig out what your competitors and market leaders are doing and how you can leverage their weaknesses to steal the spot.

Why you should analyze the seo strategies of your market leaders

Analyzing the Search Engine Optimization tactics of your market leaders means doing a microscopic review of your competitors and other leading businesses in relevant industries.

You want to know exactly why they are able to clinch the high spots on search engine result pages (SERPs) or why they are seen as a go-to-market authority when it comes to the same services you offer.

Here’s why this approach is quite effective:

Less effort, more results

When it comes to SEO, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Well, you can if you want to, but that might not necessarily be the best approach. New SEO strategies require tests and trials, and there’s no guarantee they will work out the way you expect them to.

And if you decide to go with the regurgitated tactics online, you’ll likely waste your time moving around in circles. Alternatively, you can just check out what others are doing right, improve it, and tailor it to your website. Viola!

According to Jesse Hanson, Content Manager at Online Solitaire & World of Card Games, “Brands that consistently rank on the front page of search engines like Google definitely have some valuable tricks up there. They’ve tested several strategies, seen the ones that work, and created a navigable SEO roadmap for their success. Your job is to spy on that roadmap and leverage it.”

Understand their SWOT and take advantage of it

SWOT means strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats.

Analyzing top competitors and other market leaders helps you determine where their SEO strategy excels or is lacking. For instance, some websites have really good content quality but load too slowly. You can take advantage of that weakness when building your own strategy.

In some cases, competitor analysis helps you explore other variables and opportunities market leaders are not yet implementing. There’s always a 1% cheat code that no one else is using – and it might be your SEO ticket to ranking high on SERPs.

Benchmark your performance

“There are tons of tools that estimate SEO scores based on certain metrics. However, the results provided are often superficial. Nothing accurately depicts where your SEO strategy stands more than comparing your performance with your competitors’ performance”, says Sergey Taver, Marketing Manager at Precision Watches.

When you benchmark your organic traffic, backlinks, and content, you gain a clearer view of the effectiveness of your SEO approach—whether it is really working, what part is lacking and needs improvement, and so on.

6 ways to analyze seo tactics of your market leaders

Google takes 86.99% of the market share among other search engines, and the number one website on SERPs gets about 27.6% of all clicks on this leading search giant.

Now imagine what you could achieve by analyzing what your industry's number one websites and market leaders do and implementing a notched-up version of their SEO strategy for your business. A potential goldmine approach.

Let’s quickly see how you can do this.

1. Identify your top competitors and industry leaders

Tim White, Founder of Milepro, believes it’s a big mistake to assign the same priority score to all your competitors. He says, “You probably have dozens of competitors if you’re in the B2B SaaS industry or thousands if you're in B2C. It’s, therefore, unrealistic to target everyone. Instead, pick out the ones that are performing really well on SERPs, with a reputable social media presence and strong public relations (PR). Those are your focus.”

At the same time, you need to know who your direct and indirect competitors are. The direct ones provide the same services as you. For instance, Nike is a direct competitor of Adidas. On the other hand, indirect competitors don’t offer the same products, but they target similar audience segments. A perfect example is Ranktracker and Search Engine Journal.

While the indirect competitors might not cover as many keywords relevant to your brand as direct keywords, you can still spy on their SEO strategy to create something nice.

To dig out your top competitors, do the following:

Use keyword tools, such as Ranktracker’s SERP checker, to analyze your primary keyword. You will see other competitors ranking for it—both directly and indirectly. Take a look below.

Source: Ranktracker

• Check out your primary keyword or service on search engines like Google. Here’s what a query for “SEO tools” brings out.

Zapier is an indirect competitor for businesses providing SEO services and tools, yet it takes the first position. In contrast, direct competitors like Ahrefs and Moz take the second and third positions on SERPs, respectively.

• Ask your existing customers or readers for other alternatives they’ve used before. Let’s say you run a freight factoring company. Send out polls and surveys to previous clients and ask for other freight factoring services they’ve used before switching over to yours.
• Dig out other well-performing market leaders, even if they are not in your industry. For instance, you could find the top ten websites receiving the most traffic globally.

2. Conduct competitor research to understand their focus

Compile a list of your top competitors and market leaders after identifying them. For a start, at least ten will do.

Afterward, drop each competitor into your preferred SEO tool for competitor analysis. Check out the keywords they rank for, the relevance of these keywords to your services, and the audience they are mainly targeting.

Competitor analysis with SEO tools also gives you a generalistic view of your competitors’ SEO score, alongside other details like backlinks, content, and internal linking strength.

For the backlinks, figure out how many unique backlinks they have and the domain authority of websites linking to them, and compare this to your backlink profile.

Knowing who links to your competitors and the market leaders you’re analyzing is an over-maxed cheat code. You simply need to reach out to these websites with a more valuable proposition and ask them to link back to your website. That saves you the stress of finding websites worth getting backlinks from.

3. Analyze website content for quality and relevance

The bulk of SEO analysis is done with SEO tools, but you also need to conduct some manual analysis personally.

Move from webpages to blog posts and see how competitors tailor resources to the audience. Are they using more infographics to optimize for image SEO? Or do they leverage original survey data to draw in leads and build authority in the niche?

You can also check out the word count used per post, sources often referenced in blog content, media use, brand voice, pattern of keyword insertion, and internal linking. For SEO, Hubspot’s data suggests a range of 2100 to 2400 words for an optimized blog post. So, it’s unsurprising to see website content on the first page having above 1500 words.

“Some brands have really good copy and attention-grabbing designs, which are focal points for retaining visitors. Others, like Search Engine Journal, Hubspot, and Forbes, have extremely strict editorial guidelines that ensure only verified content is published. This has helped them build credibility in the internet space,” says J. Tucker Merrigan, Managing Partner at Sweeny Merrigan.

4. Evaluate their website's technical aspects

Once you’ve assessed on-page and off-page elements such as content, title tags, descriptions, backlinks, and internal linking, you can evaluate the more technical ones like page speed, mobile-friendliness, and site structure.

The average loading speed for websites on Google’s front page is 1.65 seconds. While 2 to 3 seconds is a good benchmark, you might want to see how fast your competitors’ websites are. Then, use that as a baseline to optimize your loading speed.

To do that, use Google’s page speed insights tool and insert your competitors’ URLs one after the other for speed analysis.

Source: Pagespeed

In a world where 92.3% of internet users use their mobile phones to access the internet, the importance of mobile-friendliness can not be overemphasized.

You should also evaluate other things, such as site structure, as they determine how easy it is for crawlers to move through and index your pages.

Most importantly, site architecture largely decides whether you can provide an excellent user experience—a crucial signal search engines consider. If your pages are clustered, layer upon layer, with a difficult-to-navigate menu, that’s terrible news for UI.

5. Review social media SEO

Social media SEO might not seem like a big deal, but it’s an essential ingredient for success in any industry.

For instance, Facebook has about 3.5 billion active users, and getting your social media content to just a fraction of this can result in a significant publicity boost for your brand. When someone has previously engaged with your brand on social media, it’s easier for them to interact with your website if it appears on Google search the next time.

Other benefits of social media include generating website leads through post excerpts and bio links, backlink opportunities, and sales.

Go to different social media platforms. See what your competitors and other marketing leaders are doing. Review their content format and see which one performs best.

6. Benchmark findings with your SEO efforts

At this stage, you already know the SEO performance of your market leaders and some of the things they are doing that stand out. Compare and contrast these findings with your current SEO strategies and results.

You might already be ticking some boxes. For instance, your meta elements and image tags might be in a good place, and you could be targeting the right keywords already. So, there’s no need to waste your time on those aspects.

Instead, focus on the areas where your approach pales in comparison. Most of the time, these revolve around content quality and your backlink profile. Forbes is a perfect case study.

Besides its excellent off-page and technical SEO, Forbes provides data-backed, personalized content on a variety of topics through its contributors – all of whom are notable niche experts. This fulfills Google's E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) criteria and helps Forbes rank high for quite a number of topics, even if it does not provide the related service.

If you’re in the same industry as Forbes, you should be doing the same thing and following an editorial guideline of almost the same level to achieve a similar degree of content advantage—or even better.

Conclusion

The purpose of analyzing your top competitors and market leaders is not to copy-paste their strategies. You simply want to see what’s working for them and what’s not in order to improve your strategy or craft a new one.

For a quick recap, first, identify your top competitors and other market leaders, especially those in relevant industries. Conduct a competitor analysis on each of them to find out what they rank for, their backlink profile, and other SEO checklists. Their social media SEO and off-page technicalities, such as loading speed, are also worth noting.

Lastly, benchmark these findings against your existing SEO roadmap and leverage their approach to create your supercharged strategy.