Competitor Analysis – The Best Way to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

In a modern commercial race, every business owner wants to outrun his or her competitors. I’m sure, you are not an exception. You’ll be surprised, but your competitors are the first people who would help you to become better and get more traffic to your blog.

Here I’ll try to explain how to improve your business strategy and increase visitors through competitor analysis.

What’s In It for You?

Proper competitor analysis allows you to:

1. Learn others’ mistakes and avoid similar ones in your strategy

2. Find competitors’ strong points and use them for yourself

3. Be up-to-date within your niche.

Getting Started with Competitor Analysis

#1. Find Your Competitors

You may already know them so you can skip this step. Remember that competitors in real life and on the Internet may differ, so don’t confuse them.

A good way to find competitors online is to do a Google search. Just run your main keywords and choose only appropriate websites from the given list. If you have a blog, pay your attention to other blogs; if you have an online store — to other similar stores, and so on.

You can use any of the free or paid SEO tools for this research. The major ones include Serpstat, Mondovo, Ahrefs or SEMrush. Most of these tools will give you the full list of your competitors with keywords they are ranking for.

#2. Research Keywords

You should learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for to find some new and useful ideas for filling gaps in your site’s optimization. This information also can give you some ideas about content for your future articles.

You may see competitors’ keywords on the same tools as in the previous point because this information is not in the commons.

One more really obvious but efficient way to know the difference between your website and your competitors’ is comparing the data. You can get tons of useful information by just comparing the important aspects. You should just look through each page of competitor’s website, understand which keywords from their content are the main keywords and match them to yours. Here is an informative article which will help you to cope with this way of comparing.

You can compare separate pages instead of the whole domain if you want to know more about a specific topic or a definite article.

Choose a few keywords your competitors are ranking for and optimize them as per your website. But make sure to not target all the keywords at once. Pick only those that are easy to target and rank. It means that you should keep the balance between keyword’s popularity and competition (how difficult it’ll be to rank for it).

You can find out these indexes on Google AdWords or other SEO tools.

#3. Analyze Your Competitors’ PPC Strategy

You can save your money by learning from your competitors’ mistakes. You’ll know which keywords will be worth competing and which ones nobody cares about, what style of text an audience likes, etc.

When analyzing your competitors’ ads, you should pay attention to the number and quality of queries and ads, the quality of the titles and texts, keywords and landing pages.

You can’t get this information in general access. So to make this analysis, you should use different SEO tools. 

From the report, you’ll understand if there is a demand for some topic and if it’s worth writing. These reports will give you the list of ads and keywords which are used, the position of the ad, cost and so on.

Analyze the ad copies and their titles and make sure not to make repeat your competitors’ failures. Keywords which are used by competitors in PPC campaigns can give you some ideas for your future ads. Also, check landing pages of ads, time, and devices on which these ads are shown. 

Even if you’re not running your own PPC campaign, conduct this analysis anyway. It’ll give you a lot of useful information. Since this keyword is used in someone’s PPC, it has a big potential.

#4. Analyze Competitors’ Websites’ Usability

Design of your blog plays a great role in its traffic. The more beautiful and comfortable the site is, the more visitors it’ll get. Analyze usability of your competitors’ sites and find some innovative features for your own site.

Making this analysis, you should look through the design of the whole domain and design of every single page on your site. Also, pay your attention to the menu design and site navigation.

Always remember, your blog should be original, not a copy of competitors’. Even if you take some of their ideas, implement it in your own unique style.

To Summarize

Competitor analysis will help you avoid critical errors as well as find a lot of opportunities to improve your blog and strategy. Here’s a quick summarization of all the above-mentioned steps:

• Find your direct organic competitors;
• Learn their keywords;
• Compare your website and keywords with competitors’;
• Find and analyze your PPC competitors;
• Analyze competitors’ site usability;
• Use any of the free or paid SEO tools to automate this work and save time

This way you’ll become an SEO star, save money, and even can get more targeted visitors to your website.

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Inna Yatsyna

Inna Yatsyna is the Content Marketing Specialist at Serpstat.com an all-in-one SEO platform which consists of five modules: Rank Tracking, Backlink Analysis, SEO-audit, Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis. She follows a passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing growth a big part of her life.

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