Take advantage of free SEO competitor analysis tools. Here are three ways to find your competitor’s strategies.
- Test their site
- Discover their keywords
- Follow the backlinks
1. Test Your Competitor’s Site
First, see how your competitor shows up in search. You could type in their URL, but you’d be missing an opportunity to analyze their search results. Open an incognito window in your favorite browser. With an incognito window, you’ll see results that aren’t tailored to you. That means the results will be closer to what a potential customer would see. Now search for your product or service.
How does your competitor look in your incognito search? They could have an information box for their company, a leader, or a product. They might show up in shopping results. Or image results. Or local results.
Search for the competitor’s name. Select the “news” tab to see press releases they’ve posted, or local events they’ve sponsored. These can provide valuable backlinks to their website.
Next, put their URL into PageSpeed Insights. You’ll get scores for the Site’s Speed, Best Practices, Accessibility, and SEO. If you are new to this tool, the Semrush blog has a good overview.
And then, look into your competition’s metadata. Website metadata describes the content of a web page to search engines. It isn’t visible to a website visitor. If you haven’t already, set up a free subscription to MOZ tools. Now add their extension to Chrome. Log into MOZ, and then enable the plugin. Next, navigate to the competition’s pages and look at the plugin’s evaluation. You’ll see the page’s authority rating, the domain’s authority rating, and the domain’s spam score. Click on the magnifying glass/web page icon to get more details about the on-page elements.
2. Discover Their Keywords
In SEO Competitor Analysis, one of MOZ’s free tools, select Keyword Gap. Enter your site’s URL and up to 3 competitors. You’ll see their top-ranking keywords and best-performing content.
3. Explore Their Backlinks
The free version of MOZ will show you the major websites that link to your competitor. Visit those links. Maybe this is a paid listing with a link, or maybe there are guest posts in an industry blog.
The Next Step
Repeat this investigation on your site and compare. Ask yourself questions like these—
Does their website have a better SEO Score in PageSpeed Insights? Look at the detailed description in their report and yours. You’ll find things on your site to improve.
Does their site use keywords that are different from yours? Use Google Trends Explore to compare which keywords are more popular.
Do they have more backlinks? Can you also get a paid listing from the same site? Would they like a blog post from you?
Information + Imagination = A Better Website
If you’d like to go deeper into competitor website analysis contact me, I can help.