Dominate your competition

Get ideas to make your website more competitive

Quickly understanding how to optimize your site to move the needle is how you stay competitive in today’s SEO landscape. Efficiency is key given how fast Google is rolling out algorithm updates and knowing that all your competition is mobilizing to win the SERPs.

Prioritizing your SEO to-do list—tasks like improving site speed, enhancing content quality, optimizing technical SEO, or acquiring high-authority backlinks—well means ensuring efforts are focused on strategies that drive the highest ROI. 

The data insights you use to prioritize what you do are key to your success. You need perspective based on real-world outcomes, and you need to be in tune with the latest on what your competition is doing so that you can make decisions based on reality.

Avoid wasting resources on low-impact tactics and instead give your site a clear roadmap for growth. It all starts with meaningful competitive insights.

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Why competitor analysis is important

Competitive analysis is crucial for SEO because it helps you identify what’s actually working for your competitors and how to outperform them. You may discover tactics you didn’t think of, or new approaches trending in your industry. If your competition does A/B testing, you can directly profit off their findings. You could also report on your progress in parallel to competitor performance and hold your team accountable for getting ahead.

By analyzing the competitive landscape of keywords, content strategies, backlinks, and technical SEO, you can refine your approach to rank higher in search results. It also allows you to spot gaps in the market, target underutilized keywords, and create more valuable content. 

Understanding competitors’ strengths and weaknesses helps you stay ahead of industry trends and algorithm changes. Ultimately, it’s about gaining a strategic advantage to drive more organic traffic and conversions.

How to make sense of your competitor analysis

Start by getting a high-level overview of how your competition’s domain is performing.

Compare your site to your competition’s, and you can prioritize your work based on where you spot the biggest gaps.

For example, in today’s E-E-A-T world, knowing your (and their) Authority Score can help you pinpoint how much effort you need to spend right now on flaunting the expertise behind your domain. Maybe you need an internal campaign to feature credentials more prominently. If you see yourself lagging in your number of referring domains, you might choose to try and catch up by investing more heavily in your off-page SEO and earning some high quality backlinks.

Measuring your keywords and traffic versus your competitors’ can help you understand exactly who’s doing better at securing your target audience. While it might be tempting to compare your number of ranking keywords directly, make sure you consider organic search traffic in parallel. 

From there, you can view top-performing pages and catch a glimpse into other organic competitors to get a full lay of the land.

Next steps to get the most from your competitive analysis 

Data analysis is only as helpful as the action items you can take based on your findings. How do you translate your knowledge of the competition into meaningful action?

• Pinpoint keyword gaps. Spotting significant gaps in total keyword rankings could require urgent due diligence to ensure you’re not missing any essential topics for your industry and niche. The Keyword Gap Analysis tool can give you this information, or help you find niche audiences that you hadn’t previously considered.
• Build keyword strategy. Take your newfound insights around keyword ranking needs and turn them into an action plan using the Keyword Strategy Builder. Identify pillar pages missing from your site, and expand your content plan to account for the subpages and blogs you need to generate to stay sharp in the SERPs.
• Discover backlink opportunities. Did your competitive analysis reveal that you’re lagging in referring domains? Use the Backlink Gap tool to deep dive into competitor backlink profiles, so you can characterize the types of sites you need to rank, from categories (e.g., news sites) through specific URLs. 
• Stay up-to-date on the latest. Get daily updates on your site’s performing vs. your competitors with the Position Tracking tool. You can track organic and paid keywords, keep an eye on estimated traffic and share of voice, and monitor keyword fluctuations.

Competitor analysis is just one direction with which Semrush can help. Explore the full range of tools available to support your SEO, PPC, and content marketing efforts across channels, including rapidly-evolving AI-powered insights tailored to your domain.