Search Engine Optimization (SEO) all around the world serves the purpose of explaining to the potential customer the balance between search volumes, domain authority, budget, and brand awareness.
Thus, we have created a blog to let you understand the importance of competitive research in formulating a clear, realistic, and clear strategy for your business.
So, without further ado, let’s move further with the blog.
Steps For Conducting SEO Competitive Research
Step 1: Keyword Research
Your Seo content requires appropriate keyword research. It makes it the first and the most significant step in SEO competitive research. When you have a brand name and a domain authority for a bigger brand, the possibility of ranking in that particular keyword of your niche is reasonably none.
Thus, your priority should be finding a viable and achievable niche in your competitive industry. You can even use tools like mind-mapping to organize appropriate keywords.
Moreover, you can also grow your keyword lists in a variety of ways, like:
- Determining your competition and writing them down in keyword research tool so as to gain the list of keywords they are ranking in.
- Getting a list of possible primary keywords from the keyword planner.
- Identifying the list of keywords your competitors are bidding for.
Step 2: Determining The Competitors
After acquiring all the relevant keywords concerning your niche, you need to search every keyword in Google and write down the names of the top 10 websites you are getting from that list. You will see some of the sites appearing in the search results again you need to figure out those sites and jot them down on your competitor’s list.
You can also search for them in different competitive research tools and can figure out their organic traffic and the number of organic keywords ranking in Google. Brands with more keywords ranking in the search engines are the highly authoritative brand that should be considered in the competitive research.
Therefore, this process is all about identifying the site that is competitive with yours. Look for sites with appropriate brands and relevant keywords. Do not go for the one with a much higher domain name as they can be the reason for the break-in of your metrics.
Step 3: Determining The Competitors (In Detail)
This step will entirely focus on the details of every competitor you have listed in our previous step. Here, you have to acquire general metrics for them. General metrics include the information about the Link Velocity, Domain Authority, Social Share, Inbound Links, Domain Age, and so on. Then, you have to attain a detailed overview of their backlink profile.
For this, look at the following steps given below:
- Using a tool, sort the domain rank from most to least authoritative website for acquiring the Backlink profile. It will provide you an idea about the high-quality backlinks you have to target.
- Next, analyze their tropical authority to understand their acceptable link profiles.
- The last step involves establishing the industry averages that will provide you the guidelines you need to follow while starting a campaign.
Step 4: Understanding Social Media And Content Strategy Of The Competitors
After acquiring the information about the competitors and their backlink profile, it’s time to search for their social media and content marketing strategy. You need to look for the frequency of sharing posts on social media platforms, their engagement ratio, and the number of active followers.
By evaluating their blogs and social media accounts, you get an idea about your frequency of being active in social media and sharing your creativity and knowledge with your audience. Moreover, it helps you to determine your targets related to follower acquisition and engagement ratio.
Step 5: Identifying Your Barrier To Entry And Strategy
After acquiring thorough knowledge about your competitors and the data, it’s time to build the strategy of your business.
First, you will need to look at the links you have acquired and produce a quality link to show up in the search results. Then, you need to determine the links required for the process based on the tropical categories. Lastly, determine how many articles you will need to post every week.
The data you acquired from your SEO competitive research serves as a backbone of your business strategy and built a structure of your campaign. It is significant to arm the data you have acquired so as not to waste it and fail in gaining the ROI.