How to Analyze your Competitors

For the purpose of improving the growth of your business, SEO is said to be one of the most vital strategies. It will enable you to generate a more high-quality organic traffic and also help to improve your website's rankings in the search engines.

However, before designing your SEO Strategy you need to conduct a thorough competitor analysis. This will in turn enable you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

The following are seven easy and simple ways in which you can conduct a thorough competitor analysis:

1. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR KEYWORDS:
   The first step involves identification of keywords. When you do a detailed research of your keywords it will lead to better understanding of your competitors. There might be some keywords that your competitors might not use however you can use the same which can give you leverage over your competition.
   
   
2. 2. IDENTIFY YOUR COMPETITORS:
   After identifying the potential keywords, the next step is to create a list of your competitors. Different tools can be used to identify the most aggressive competitors from your industry. After determining your competitors you can than analyze their top ranking content.
   
   
3. 3. ANALYZE THE BACKLINK PROFILES OF YOUR COMPETITORS:
   Backlinks quality tends to have a direct impact on the rankings of your website. Having high-quality backlinks will enable you to gain the trust of your target audience and it will also give you higher rankings. You need to therefore make sure that the links coming to your website are of high-quality.
   
   
4. 4. ANALYZE SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES:
   You also need to analyze the social media profiles. This analysis can help you get an idea regarding what strategies your competitors are using to improve their ranking.
   
   
5. 5. AUDIT YOUR COMPETITORS' CONTENT:
   You need to have a thorough audit plan for the content on your competitors' website and on yours as well. Certain parameters to be considered while auditing the content include outbound links,word count and uniqueness.
   
   
6. 6. DETERMINE DOMAIN AUTHORITY:
   This is one of the most critical parameters in competitor analysis. With the help of The Open Site Explorer you can determine the domain authority of your competitors.
   
   
7. 7. COMPARE YOURSELF WITH YOUR COMPETITORS
   Lastly, after the above you need to compare yourself with your competitors. Get an idea regarding what is working and what is not which will in turn help you to determine which strategies are most ideal for application and which ones need to be avoided.