Stalking Is Not Always Bad: The Keys to Performing a Successful SEO Analysis of Your Competitor Websites

Have you ever wanted to be as famous as the XYZ dental healthcare website? Have you been racking your brains for the answer? Well, you don’t have to anymore. Contrary to what most men of honor will tell you, imitation is a fine game when it comes to SEO and search ranking.

If you have always wondered what extra bit your competitors are doing to stay on the first page of Google search results, this is the time for you to find out. Identifying winner’s strategies will help your business grow and attract more traffic.Performing advanced keyword searches and installing new SEO plug-ins are never enough to keep your SEO game up-to-date. So here are a few of our time-tested ways to keep your website on Google’s favorites list –

1. How to identify effective keywords?

Now, this does not need hacking skills. You can download and use any of the following tools to find out keyword strategies from your competitors –
SEMRush
SimilarWeb
SpyFu

These tools are miracle workers in the field of keyword analysis and SEO these tools can be your North Star. Simply provide the tool with your competitors’ URL and watch as the list of SEOkeywords and their positions unfurl.They will present you with a list of SEO keywords at the end of every search.

For example – if you use SEMRush to check a popular dental healthcare website like DHCC, you may just provide the URL of the same and the keywords for which it ranks #1 in Google SRL.

2. Identify your competition –

This is quite akin to the proverb, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. You need to figure out the websites that almost always squeeze into the first page of Google SERP for particular keywords.

Our go-to tool for this is the SEO PowerSuite. You can use it for as less as $299 (forever) and it is indeed powerful enough to conduct deep research. You can also try out AWR Cloud, SEOmator and RankTrackr for similar results. These are all amazing tools designed by professionals for other professionals for accurate rank tracking.

Ranking high on the SRL will not be a mystery to you anymore once you use any of these rank tracking tools for analyzing your competitor websites.

3. It’s not illegal to crawl a little on the top ranking sites –

This is the most exciting part – once you have identified which websites rank the highest delve deeper into specific research. Examine each website’s content for the following traits –

1. The trend on content and the quality of the same
2. The style of using title tags, header tags and meta description on each post
3. Understand the strategy of internal linking and determine their quality
4. Characterize the content – is it long form, is it dense, is it in the form of infographs or just in the form of bullet lists?

By identifying these key characters of content preference among top SEO websites you will be able to work on your own strategy towards making your own content search engine friendly. Pay astute attention to the distribution and frequency of keywords, and the rate of links. Soon their strength and weaknesses won’t be a complete mystery to you anymore!

4. Which websites are linking to your competitors?

The best way to improve your own backlink quality is to check your competitors’ websites for internal backlinks. This is a very basic, foundational SEO strategy that has colossal rewards if done right.

You do not need to be a pro-hacker to figure out how websites are backliningto other websites. You just need reliable tools. We suggest the Majestic SEO tool, well because it’s majestic. But more so because it has a really intuitive user interface that is perfect for newbies. Majestic also has the largest directory of backlinks among all tools from the same niche. Using this one you can track backlinks, anchor texts and citation flow.

For example – if you want to check how frequently a webpage from the XYZ dental healthcare website links to reputable websites like WebMD, Mayo Clinics and NIH, you should turn to tools like Majestic immediately. It will specifically show the preferential selection of texts like “healthcare initiative”, “foolproof remedy” and “dental health” that bear the hyperlinks to the websites mentioned above.

5. Conduct a social media content audit –

Now that you know for a fact who your true competition are and what strategies they use, you can start with researching their social media strategies. You can start by evaluating their blogs, Tweets frequencies, Facebook shares and LinkedIn activities. Try keeping a regular, updated social media questionnaire that can be used here.

Include key points like the count of their active followers, their engagement ratio and activity levels.

A detailed analysis of the curated data will help you understand how active your social presence needs to be. What should be the ideal frequency for you to share your blog on social media platforms?To reap the most benefits couple your research with social media monitoring tools like Addict-o-matic and Brandwatch; they can collect data about the mention of your brand name from over 80 million sources.

Be it rental or dental, your website can occupy the #1 spot on Google’s SRL if you have your SEO strategies right. And the best way to ensure that your website’s SEO is on fleek is by remembering the 5 cardinal rules of imitating your best inspiration(s) – know your competitors, perform keyword analysis on their content, determine the backlinks, crawl a little and leave it to social media for the rest!