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Are You Sick and Tired of Losing?
Well, when it comes to your blog you don’t have to. We are going to help you and your blog be the best and stay the best by using competitor analysis to your advantage.
It’s time to investigate the competition.
In this post, we are going to show you how to do Competitor Analysis and go over some of our favorite analysis tools. This is something that is handy when just starting out and throughout you're blogging career.
Are you ready to outperform your competition?
Let’s dive right in!
What is Competitor Analysis?
Analyzing competitors is done differently in every industry. For you as a blogger, it’s looking at a number of different elements of your competition.
Let’s dig a little deeper. Ultimately you want to:
- Find what your competition is doing well
- Figure out how they are doing it
- Develop a strategy to do it better
Do not reinvent the wheel! Come up with a way to make it spin just a little bit better.
At this point you're probably asking: So where do I start?
Well, it’s not an easy task and it’s time-consuming. But trust us when we say, it’s well worth it!
Just imagine that moment when you outperform your competitors…..
A proper Competitor Analysis requires a strategy and tools. The key components to analyze as a blogger are your competitor’s:
- Website
- Online presence
- Targeted Keywords / SEO
- Paid Ads
- Social Media
Once you analyze every key component, you’ll have an idea about the industry standards. You need to match these standards, or even better: Rise above and beyond industry standards and explore areas where your competitors are lacking.
There are many tools you can use to check out your competiton. Some of our favorites are Buzzsumo, Ahrefs and SemRush. Head to the last section of our article to find out more about these tools and how they can help you.
Remember: Capitalize on the areas where your competition is lacking! It’s a golden opportunity.
Act on Your Analysis Results
Don't be a sitting duck, you must act on the results you get from analysis. For example, if your analysis shows that Instagram campaigns yield way better results than Facebook campaigns.Change your focus!
It’s important to analyze your competitors before starting.
Here’s why:
• To get a better understanding how your competitors are ranking.
• You can do A/B testing with the new content you create VS theirs. Let’s say the page content length of your competitors is around 2000 words? Aim to write 3000 word articles. Then you can use analysis tools to see how they stack up against each other.
• It’s key to be able to identify successful strategies and improve upon them. This way you can create something unique and valuable!
Use Your Competitors to Your Advantage!
It’s essential that you take action. Nothing will change when you only read how to outperform your competitors. It’s not a fast process, but step-by-step you will be able to accomplish your goals using the right information.
Google is your friend!
Start by Googling the top 10 competitors in your industry. There’s a bunch of different tools in order to analyze specific metrics of your competition.
I will explain more about some awesome tools further down!
In order to improve your blog, you need to be able to identify the most important areas of the top 10 competitors and formulate new strategies based upon that information.
You’re going to use that information to identify your own loopholes and key areas to focus on when developing a strategy. Further down the road, once you’ve managed to reach the same level as your competition, you’ll then deepen your strategy in order to stand out from your most fierce competition!
A strategy, even a great one, doesn’t implement itself!
Does this sound familiar?
Of course it does. It’s like anything in life, you have to work for it!
6 Key Competitor Research Topics
We’ve created a list of the 6 most important key competitor research topics that should be included in your competitor analysis strategy.
Creating awesome content is one thing. However, you need to promote your content in order to get eyes on your awesome piece. This means it’s important to identify content that has triggered a lot of engagement and shares from its readers.
Analyze your competitors and identify what blog posts or articles received the highest number of social shares and replies.
Think about it…..
Can you improve the quality the blog post or article? If your piece is better, likely the people who previously shared it are interested in doing so again.
Do you see a trend?
What types of blog posts are generally doing better? Most shared content might be in the form of a list or a round-up on a specific topic. You could take a different approach and pick different topics, but use the same content-style.
Chances are, you’re able to generate a highly engaging piece when writing your own trend post, focusing on a new area in your niche.
2. Keyword Competition
Analyzing targeted keywords of your competitors is very valuable. The easiest way to find them is to use SEMRush and check what keywords your competitor is ranking for.
It’s best to retrieve the keyword optimized article that has been published on their website or blog. This will be a great example for you to reference when writing your own piece.
Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to find new keywords and it’s free. Their keyword research shows “Volume” and “Cost per Click” too, this is especially good if you plan to run an ad campaign.
3. High Ranking Pages
Okay, at this point you want to look at individual pages. There are a few tools, paid & free, that rank pages and give you an indication how the page is ranking. Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs have all created their own algorithm to calculate it.
• Moz: Uses Page Authority (PA), which tells you how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages.
• Majestic: Has two different ways to show page ranking.
∗ Citation Flow: Predicts how strong a URL could be based off of how many sites link to it.
∗ Trust Flow: A number that forecasts how credible a page is by looking at what trustworthy sites link to it.
• Ahrefs: Uses Domain Rating (DR). This predicts the capability of a website or domain to rank in search engines.
Each of these tools might show slightly different results. However, you’ll get a clear understanding of the bigger picture.
Check out pages scoring high in the above-mentioned categories. The blog posts and articles you can find there are perfect to get some new ideas.
4. Monitoring
Wait…isn’t monitoring content-related conversations a huge waste of time?
NO.
It the actually one of the most important things you can do. You can gather a ton of valuable content ideas and analyze what your biggest competitors are sharing. It’s a great opportunity to become active on these platforms and join the conversations.
Wait, it gets even better!
Becoming part of the conversation and being mentioned on different platforms creates awareness. In other words, it will possibly drive significant organic traffic to your website.
When Google recognizes that people are specifically searching for your website or blog’s name, you will gain more authority.
5. Get Them Backlinks!
The above-mentioned tactics are great for new content strategies. However, in 2017, and for the expected future, backlinks are still and will be super important.
And you know what?
Analyzing backlink profiles will show you what websites are driving a lot of traffic to your competitors. It’s a great way to find new link opportunities for a new potential outreach for your blog.
Pro Tip: Did you find an outdated post on a high authority website? This is the perfect opportunity to rewrite that article with all new data and reach out to them.
Another option would be to “mirror” your competitor’s backlink profile. With an identical profile, you should get similar results.
Be careful with low-quality and spammy links. It will only harm you.
6. Social Media
Nowadays, social media has a great impact on our lives, SEO, and your blog’s ranking.
Social media can help you to:
- Build business relationships
- Build client relationships
- Promote your content
Are your competitors very active on social media? Follow in their footsteps. Analyze their accounts and how often they upload something. See what their followers are sharing and commenting on. Use that to your advantage.
If your competitors aren’t active on social media, this could be a potential possibility to outperform your competitors!
We’ve learned a lot so far.
Stay with me…
We’re almost there!
Make Your Life Easier with Competitor Analysis Tools
Now that we’ve explored the Competitor Analysis strategy, it’s time to take a closer look at Competitor Analysis tools.
Tools are great attributes for you to analyze and beat your competitors with.
Obviously, there are hundreds of tools available online. It would be impossible and inefficient to list them all. We listed the ones we think are most important for YOU!
The Tools
BuzzSumo
A must-have tool for bloggers! This is one of the best tools out there that allows you to find out what content is hot & trending and filtered by any topic or website.
Semrush
Semrush is an awesome tool when it comes to keywords in particular. It shows your competitor’s top keywords and also how much traffic is going to a specific page. Extremely easy to identify what keywords your competition is ranking for!
The best thing about Semrush is? They have an excellent FREE version available!
Very easy to use. Many people would argue that Ahrefs is the best link analysis tool on the market. Ahrefs has an insane database. Great for downloading website data of your competitors, checking organic traffic and ranking metrics. We love using Ahrefs when downloading backlink profiles of our competitors.
The only problem with Ahrefs is that it will cost you an arm and a leg. It may be a tool you would want to invest in down the road.
Majestic
Possibility for a free account or paid subscription. Majestic is a great tool for analyzing backlinks and other website stats. It uses it's own algorithm, which shows a sophisticated Trust Flow and Citation Flow graph.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner should be one of your SEO key research tools for competitor analysis. It’s an awesome tool for keyword data and creating an ad campaign. Plus it’s FREE!
SimilarWeb
A smart tool to check your competitor’s engagement metrics and organic traffic. In addition, SimilarWeb has a very helpful metric, showing you websites and blogs that are related to you or your competition. Use that data in Ahrefs and check their backlink profiles, great for your new outreach!
PageSpeed
As the name says, Google’s tool to check your own or your competitor’s page speed. Is your page super slow? Change your hosting plan, or have a chat with a web-developer to reduce code.
Mobile-Friendly
Traffic from mobile devices is increasing every day. Google even introduced a ranking factor that will drop your page’s ranking in case your website isn’t mobile friendly.
Bloomberry
BuzzSumo created this tool but for now, it’s still in beta. However, it’s an amazing tool that subtracts data from websites and forums to find questions people ask about your website’s topic or industry.
It’s pure gold if you want to be in a featured snippet in Google Search. And the best thing is: you don’t even have to be ranked 1st or 2nd to be mentioned in featured snippets.
Now You're Ready to Rock n’ Roll!
Are you ready to beat your competitors?
A good competitor analysis in your niche or industry is very important. Analyze what is working for them and implement the results of your analysis. Research what content is driving the most traffic and start creating your own, but better!
As mentioned before, it takes time and you need to take action!
However, the tools listed above will help you in the process to make it easier and faster.
If they can do it, you can!
What's Next?
Are there any competitor analysis tools you have used that we didn't mention? or maybe you just want to leave us a comment. Let us know what you think below!
If you are starting a blog and want more information check out our comprehensive guide on the “7 Things to Consider Before Starting a Blog”.
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