Competitor SEO Analysis: Gaps, Keywords & Content Strategy

There are several ways digital businesses can identify their key competitors with the help of SE Ranking. Let's take a look at how this can be done using the Competitive Research and Keyword Research tools, SERP Competitors, and Visibility Rating. Firstly, let's dive into the Competitive Research tool. By entering a website or specific URL you wish to analyze and selecting the desired region, you get a bird's-eye view of the website's performance in both organic and paid search at the site level. As we aim to pinpoint the organic search competitors of the analyzed website, head straight to the Competitors tab under Organic Traffic Research. This section offers various charts including total traffic, keywords, traffic cost, and backlinks comparing the website in question against its leading competitors. The overlapping target keywords between two sites determine the depth of their rivalry. Scrolling down, we see a comprehensive list of websites competing for organic traffic with the analyzed site, revealing metrics such as Domain Trust score, the count of common, missing, and total keywords,

as well as data on traffic volume and cost. To dive deeper and get a direct side-by-side comparison of a website with its organic search rivals, go to the Competitor Comparison tab in the left menu. Here, you can also go over to the Paid tab to see the PPC adversaries of the analyzed website. Switching our focus to the Keyword Research tool, here the analysis revolves around the keyword you input. Enter your keyword, choose a relevant region, and discover which websites are competing for it in both organic and paid search. The SERP Overview section presents a roundup of the top-100 websites ranking organically for the analyzed keyword. Make use of the extensive data presented here on each website for a comprehensive understanding – from traffic metrics and keyword counts to Trust scores and backlink data. Dive into Ads History to identify the websites battling for keyword prominence through Google Ads, complete with site metrics and even the ad copy itself. Another essential tool, SERP Competitors, is your go-to solution for tracking keyword dynamics.

Want to see the trend of a specific keyword and spot top performers, be they long standing leaders or sudden risers? Once the project is set up and is ranking with a list of target keywords, access this tool for a deep-dive into SERP ranking trends for each keyword. Define your time period, pick a keyword, and analyze website position shifts over time. The Share of Voice metric also helps you spot digital rivals as it measures the visibility of your website in search compared to your competitors. It aggregates data on your website's organic and paid presence, showing the percentage of the total search market you control for specific keywords. By analyzing the Share of Voice, you can better understand your position in the competitive landscape and identify opportunities for improvement. Lastly, the Visibility Rating offers an insight similar to the Competitors tab under Organic Traffic Research, but with a distinct focus on your target keywords. Basically, it gives you a lens to which you can see how your website stacks up against its competitors in terms of search visibility based on specific target keywords.

This is a crucial metric that website owners and marketers use to determine how easily their target audience can find their website in search. The higher the search visibility of a website, the more likely it is to attract traffic and generate leads, which can result in higher conversions and revenue. By comparing your visibility rating to other websites, you can identify your key competitors. And while these are the main tools for identifying competitors, SE Ranking offers additional ways of doing this. For instance, the Content Editor, On-Page SEO Checker, and SERP Analyzer can also help you spot competitors, but this is a topic that deserves its own video. Once you've identified your competitors, be sure to go to My Competitors → Added Competitors, and add them to your project. That way, you'll see how each competitor is ranking for the same target keywords you target in your campaigns, and you'll be able to react quickly once their rankings change. And that's it! SE Ranking offers businesses multiple ways of identifying and keeping track of their top and direct competitors,

and we hope you'll use them to your advantage. To gain insights into competitor SEO strategies, explore the capabilities of SE Ranking's Competitive Research tool. Start by entering a website you'd like to analyze, select the preferred region for data analysis, and hit "Analyze". You will then see from which regions of the world the analyzed website gets most of its organic traffic along with such key metrics as: The Domain and Page Trust scores that provide insights into a site's authority and the strength of its backlink profile; The total volume of organic traffic, the number of keywords the domain ranks for, as well as the total cost of driving traffic; Then we have the same information, but with regard to paid ad campaigns; And to give you a better understanding of how the analyzed website builds up its search engine authority, we have the total number of referring domains and backlinks. This overview is particularly useful when quickly assessing a website for potential partnerships or evaluating a client's or a competitor's

performance. Further down, you can see the distribution of traffic by country. This gives you an idea of where the website is drawing its visitors from, whether organically or through paid traffic. Diving deeper, you'll come across charts displaying the website's key metrics over time. A consistent rise in traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks suggests a robust and successful SEO strategy. Watch out for sudden spikes, though, which may indicate potentially suspicious activities. Under the 'Organic Traffic Research' section, we have the 'Keywords' tab that provides a list of keywords the website ranks for among the top-100 organic search results, offering key insights about keyword positions, search volumes, SERP features, and more. Be sure to take advantage of the filtering options and presets here to focus on the keywords that matter most to you. Plus, you can select one or several keywords and add them to a project for tracking, keep track of keyword dynamics and the Keyword Manager, use the keywords to write a new piece of content, as well as check the local search volume of the selected keywords. In the 'Competitors' tab,

you can identify websites that rank for the same keywords as a site you're analyzing. Alternatively, you can discover which unique keywords are targeted by your competitors, but not by your website. Another important section of the tool, the 'Pages' tab, reveals which pages of the analyzed website get the largest share of organic traffic. Make sure to analyze them separately in detail to understand what exactly makes them work and use that data to enhance your own organic campaigns. You can actually dive into each page from here by hovering over a URL and clicking the Analyze URL via On-Page SEO Checker button. This will redirect you to the tool that will fully audit any web page. Under the Subdomains tab, you can learn more about the analyze domain subdomains, including their individual traffic shares, volume, and cost, as well as the total number of keywords targeted by each subdomain. The 'Ranking Changes' tab reveals how the website's ranking positions have evolved over the past month. Be sure to keep an eye out for fluctuations relating to your most profitable target keywords. Under Traffic distribution by country, you can see a map of how much traffic the analyzed site gets

from different countries across the globe. You're also welcome to compare up to five countries or regions to see how they stack up against each other with regard to traffic distribution, organic traffic, organic keywords, and organic traffic cost. Finally, let's turn our attention to 'Paid Traffic Research', which is especially useful for scrutinizing competitor websites or potential clients. Here, you can view ad ranking positions, find out where on the SERP the ad is located, and what the ad count is. The Ads History tab spills all the details on which ads are running for which keywords, when these ads were rolled out to the public, and the best part is that you can see what exact copy was used in the ads by going to the 'Ads Copies' tab. You could even take this research to the next level and compare up to three websites side-by-side under the 'Competitive comparison' tab. This information can help you expand your list of target keywords to drive more organic and paid traffic. And that is how you can analyze competitors and their SEO strategies using SE Ranking's

Competitive Research tool. If you have any questions, reach out to us or visit our knowledge base. Thank you for choosing SE Ranking, and happy SEOing.