When working on website promotion, one of the most effective strategies is: “Do it like the TOP.” Competitors have already done their best, spent dozens of hours thinking, wrote tons of content, built a high-quality link profile, and are now reaping the fruits of their work. There is no need to be stubborn, we just take it and do what the industry leaders have achieved, and only then look for new features.
You can gain useful knowledge from competitive analysis not only in terms of SEO optimization. In fact, there are a lot of growth points that can work in certain areas, but in others be useless. By paying attention to what a particular tool brings to industry leaders, you can protect yourself from unnecessary expenses and focus on what’s important.
What you should pay attention to when analyzing:
- format and intensity of promotion of competitors on social networks;
- semantic cores of sites in the TOP 10;
- parameters of the resources under consideration;
- purchase of advertising;
- building a content strategy;
- assortment and prices;
- presence on third-party sites.
SEO analysis of competitors' websites
One of the most desirable types of traffic for website owners is search traffic. It is shareware and, with good work on the resource, can bring a lot of targeted visitors. But before you count on a piece of the pie, you should understand who you will have to compete with on the first page of search results in Yandex and Google.
- To begin, create a pool of the most obvious and interesting keywords for you.
- Next, we go to search engines and go through the selected keywords, adding sites in the TOP 10 to the table.
- We check competitors' social networks.
- We pay attention to the types of content that search leaders use.
- We estimate the amount of traffic for TOP sites.
- Next you need to go through the service pages.
When conducting the initial analysis, try to notice all the interesting points. New techniques and tricks appear frequently and you won’t find a recent enough manual that will cover absolutely everything.
We return to the previously generated table and begin to analyze the domain indicators.
In separate columns opposite each site we write:
- age
- number of pages in Google/Yandex search
- incoming domain links
- attendance per month
- Availability of search engine filters/sanctions
Free domain analysis tools:
- RDS-bar - plugin for Mozilla Firefox (age, TIC, indexing)
- whois-service.ru (age)
- SimilarWeb - plugin for Mozilla Firefox (traffic)
- xtool.ru, feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/ (filters, sanctions)
What will it give
- understanding what to strive for
- assessing your site's ability to rank in the TOP
- promotion deadlines
- Is it worth entering the niche at all?
Unfortunately, there is no formula by which you can accurately calculate the time it takes for your site’s pages to reach the TOP. However, collecting the described metrics will give an approximate understanding of affairs in the niche and a real look at things.
Competitor keyword analysis
In order to find out the semantic core of a competitor, you can go in three ways: turn to online services for help, use parsers, or resort to manual analysis.
For a superficial understanding of what search queries competitors’ websites are promoted for, visiting the main pages may be enough. Browsing the menu, catalog sections, and service pages already provides valuable information. Many people settle on completely copying the site structure from the TOP 10 and it works. But don’t do it thoughtlessly, if you don’t sell collars for kittens, then don’t create such a page just because your competitors did it.
In order not to miss a single page on a competitor’s website, you can resort to analyzing the sitemap file, which is usually located at konkurent-site.ru/sitemap.xml. If such a file is missing (although this is strange for a leader), we turn to parsers.
Programs for analyzing competitors' websites:
- SiteAnalyzer by Majento (free)
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free, but with limitations). On the Free Version, the parser will crawl only 500 pages of the analyzed site
- Netpeak Spider(paid, there is a 2-week trial period)
- Windows - yes
- Mac OS - yes
- Linux - no
Online services for searching competitor keywords:
- Serpstat— you can see what phrases the domain is promoted for, as well as its individual pages. (paid, free option is very limited, coupons can often be found)
- Spywords is paid, but definitely worth the money. Ultimately, you will receive a huge table (uploaded from the service), where you can see all the keys by which the competitor is promoting.
What you should pay attention to when analyzing the link profile of competitors’ sites:
- dynamics of link mass growth;
- date of indexing of links;
- number of domains linking to a competitor;
- which sites link (their quality);
- types of links (dofollow/nofollow);
- which anchors predominate (image / anchor / brand / direct link);
- which pages receive more weight;
- donor topics.
What to do with this information
- Write down all relevant sites that link to your competitors. You will buy links from them in the future. Make sure that this list does not include sites with low domain characteristics. Pay attention to whether the sites are under search engine filters and whether they are suitable for your topic.
- Based on your analysis, determine which pages you should promote first.
- Calculate in percentage terms how many links you need and what they should be. Example: 70% branded, 20% anchor, 5% direct link, 5% image.
- Ultimately, you will gain an understanding of how much money and time it will take to reach the level of your competitors.
Services for analyzing the link profile of competitors:
- megaindex (paid)
- linkpad(free, paid plans available)
- ahrefs (paid only)
- serpstat (paid)
- majestic (paid)
Working with a link profile is perhaps one of the most labor-intensive areas. Before you start work, decide for yourself whether you have enough material and labor resources to pump up your site with links. If your budget is limited, opt for free services, this will be enough to get an approximate picture.
Analysis of competitors' website traffic
It's always interesting to know how much traffic your competitors get. Here you can quietly envy and find out what prospects there are in your niche. Going deeper, traffic analysis can show which channels are giving your competitors the most visitors. This could be e-mail or social networks, search or direct calls, and more. If sites in the TOP actively work with social networks and devote a minimum of attention to search engines, this definitely means something.
Where to start? We answer:
- We are looking for statistics counters on a competitor’s website. Many resource owners open analytics (Yandex Metrica and Liveinternet) for public access. Widgets are most often located in the footer, and Liveinternet statistics can also be found on the site itself.
- We go to the TOP social networks and see what’s going on there.
- Please note whether there are subscription forms (e-mail, push notifications, social network widgets).
- Manually, through serpstat or spywords, we check whether advertising is used.
- Register with Similarweb (free options are limited) or install the extension of the same name in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Here you can see the number of visits, as well as competitors’ traffic sources.
Analysis of competitors' advertising in Yandex Direct and Google Adwords
Please note:
- how many ads are present on the page for the desired key query (bottom, top);
- prices for products and promotions of competitors;
- estimate the budget and the level of rates through the “Budget Forecast” tool from Yandex Direct;
- Pay attention to the quality of your competitors' landing pages.
Most often, the most expensive advertisements for keys contain the words “buy”, “price”, “with delivery”. You need to pay attention to them and put them in your promotion plan. Optimize your pages for these keywords today and you will have a better chance of getting traffic from them in the future.
Looking to the future, it is worth saying that many are coming to the conclusion that context is necessary. Advertising is often even targeted to keywords associated with a brand or company name. Especially if you are a leader in the market, competitors will not miss the chance to appear higher for your brand queries. Even if you are in first place in organics, you are still 4th or 5th, at the top are paid ads.
What tools to use to analyze competitors' advertising:
- Spywords - expensive, rich. If you have broad semantics and large budgets, this is the place for you;
- Serpstat- clear and convenient;
- Advse
Analyze:
- keys
- headers
- ad texts
- quick links
- what extensions are still used (addresses, prices)
Buy access to the service, conduct a thorough analysis, use this information to compose your ads and select keys. Everything will pay off in the end. Advertising done in haste is more likely to fail.
Competitor Analysis Tools
1. RDS-bar - plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Opera
The extension allows you to view many website parameters directly in your browser. To fully work with the plugin, registration is required on the official website of the service developer - recipient.
Service capabilities:
- Shows the TIC of the site
- Number of pages in Google and Yandex
- Site age
- Number of incoming and outgoing links
- Approximate attendance
- And much more
It is worth noting that some functions of the service are paid. The plugin can also be integrated with various services, which increases its capabilities by providing even more site parameters for tracking.
2. SimilarWeb - plugin for Mozilla Firefox.
You can view the following site parameters directly in your browser:
- Number of transitions per month
- Traffic sources and their percentage of the total number of transitions
- Geography of visits
- Audience Interests
- Other
Some functions are limited, others are paid, but for a superficial analysis of the site the free tools are quite enough.
The online service similarweb.com is an expensive but very powerful tool. Expands the functionality of the plugin.
3. SiteAnalyzer from Majento - free site analysis tool
- scans pages, photos, documents
- defines page response codes (200, 301, 302, 404, etc.)
- shows meta tags and headings: Title, Description, H1-H2
- indicates the page nesting level
- other possibilities
Also, all received data can be exported in CVS and Excel format.
A powerful tool from an English developer. The free functionality includes:
- search for broken links, redirects, errors
- meta tag analysis
- audit of language attributes (hreflang)
- search for duplicates
- xml file generation
- limit 500 url.
The service is perfect for analyzing small sites.
5. Netpeak Spider
comprehensive SEO audit. Paid tool, there is a 14-day trial period.
Possibilities
- checks more than 50 SEO parameters
- shows internal optimization errors
- analysis of incoming and outgoing links
- search for broken links
- shows duplicate titles and meta tags
- calculation of internal PageRank
- ability to export a report
SEO analysis of competitors may be needed in two cases. First: you are planning to create a website and immediately think about optimizing it. That is, you are thinking about how to make sure that the resource gets to the TOP for the necessary queries and is there next to or (more preferably) above competitors. Second: you ordered a website (and at the same time promotion) from a neighbor (brother, godfather, matchmaker), who made it cheaper than professional web studios, but made it so that your company can only be found on the Internet with the help of the winner of the show “Battle psychics."
Either way, you're in trouble now. There is a website, but there are no clients from the Internet. And if there is, it is only thanks to expensive contextual advertising. The competitors are doing well. The site feeds them. The situation needs to be corrected urgently!
First you need to identify your competitors
Sometimes they are known. You may have seen their advertisements/heard about them from clients/secretly use their services yourself.
Sometimes you need to do a little research. A very simple job.
Enter in the search several queries for which you are promoting (plan to promote) the site.
For example, if you sell windows, write in the search “buy windows” or “order windows”, or “window installation”, or “window price”. All sites on the first page of search results are your competitors.
Those sites next to which the inscription “Advertising” appears (which launched contextual advertising) are also competitors. They also need to be studied. But this article will focus specifically on those companies with whom you compete in organic search results. For now, ignore sites marked “Advertising” and focus on those that did not pay search engines to get to the TOP.
Important nuance! Don't forget about regional listings. Search engines know where you are and show you companies that are located in your city.
If you live in Chernigov, and your services (products) are intended, for example, for Kyiv, adjust your output. When entering the desired query into the search, add the name of the required city to it. That is, look not just for “windows price”, but for “windows price Kyiv”.
Yandex also allows you to specify your location. The required button is located at the very bottom of the search results page.
Click on the target icon and enter the city for which your product is designed.
What parameters of competitors' websites need to be taken into account?
The more characteristics of sites that are in the TOP for your queries, you copy and improve (simply copying is not an option), the greater the chances of getting to the first page of search results and getting customers from search.
These are the parameters I pay attention to when I conduct an analysis of my clients’ competitors:
- Attendance.
- Number of pages in the index.
- For what queries in the TOP.
- Number and quality of links.
- Traffic sources.
- Domain Authority and Spam Score.
- Micro markup.
- Download speed.
- Meta tags.
- HTML page structure.
- Design and usability.
- Content chips.
- Texts (where would we be without them).
Free tools for SEO competitor analysis
Let me clarify right away: I’m not trying to talk about all the free services that can be used for SEO audit of websites. Here's just what I've been using lately. Before preparing this post, I specifically did not look at articles on the topic of SEO tools. I don’t like theory (and it’s stolen from other people’s sites). This is just practice. Only what I figured out myself and what really helps.
Checking Attendance
SimilarWeb
The service allows you not only to view traffic over the last 6 months (Total Visits), but also provides information about the average viewing depth (Pages per Visit), bounce rate (Bounce Rate) and time on the site (Avg. Visit Duration). In addition, SimilarWeb has many other useful free features, which will be discussed below.
A little useful tip! It is important that the tool provides information about traffic for six months. You can study the data of several major competitors and predict the approximate traffic of your resource. If the amount of traffic for all competitors decreases in December, then most likely it will decrease for you too. There is no need to panic and punish the SEO specialist. We need to think about how to attract customers from additional sources in December.
Pr-cy.ru
Like SimilarWeb, this service also has a large number of options.
By the way! The fact that almost everyone knows about pr-cy.ru does not mean that it should not be used. I saw how quite large (and therefore expensive) SEO studios added data from this free, simple and well-known service to their report.
Checking the number of pages in the index
To check how many pages of your competitor’s website have been indexed by Yandex, use the operator url:. This operator must be added before the resource name. An asterisk (*) should be used after the name. Look at the screenshot:
You can find out the number of pages indexed by Google using the operator site:. It also needs to be added before the resource name:
Not always a lot of pages = a lot of traffic. Still, this is an important parameter that cannot be ignored. And if your 10-page site is visited by 100 people a day, and your competitor’s 100-page site is visited by 1000 people a day, it is quite possible that you need to work on increasing the number of useful pages.
How to find out what queries your competitor is in the TOP for?
There are two approaches to solving this problem. First: enter the website into the service.
The already mentioned SimilarWeb will do:
On the right are the keys from organic search results, on the left from contextual advertising.
Another option is the Ukrainian SerpStat, which is disguised as a cool multilingual foreign service:
As you can see, SerpStat provides more data: you can see positions, frequency of each phrase and other information.
I note that both services make it possible to view keys in the TOP even without registration. Of course, they don’t show all the keys for free, but often free data is enough.
The second approach: check each competitor for the keys you are interested in.
This can be done, for example, using seolib.ru:
Conveniently, this tool allows you to select a region and three search engines at once: Yandex, Google and Mail.ru. You can check 25 queries per day for free.
Number and quality of links
Linkpad
Advantages of the service:
- You can see almost all of your competitor's incoming links.
- You can find out your competitor's anchors.
- You can see the percentage of non-anchor links and links with the nofollow attribute.
A few years ago, data from LinkPad (or a similar service) was enough to make serious progress. You get to know donors, negotiate with their owners to place links to your resource, and watch your positions grow. Now such tactics can also be beneficial, but links alone are clearly not enough to significantly increase positions and traffic.
SerpStat
It gives quite a lot of information: the number of referring domains, the quality of links (Serpstat Page Rank and Serpstat Trust Rank), anchors. Detailed information is available free of charge for up to 20 donors only.
Determining traffic sources
I think that everything is clear in the screenshot, except for the Display column. These are ad clicks.
For free and in a couple of seconds, SimilarWeb will show whether your competitors are investing in promotion on social networks and email marketing, and whether it’s worth thinking about working with these traffic channels.
Definition of Domain Authority and Spam Score
Micro markup
You can check what micro-markup has been added to the website of a company that competes with you for customers using Structured Data Validation Tool from Google.
Each type of micro markup will be shown as a separate block. The same tool will show what code is used to implement this or that type of markup. Micro markup is understood and taken into account when ranking by both Google and Yandex.
Measuring site loading speed
It not only tells you the download speed on mobile and desktop, but also gives recommendations on how to improve the speed.
We must strive to ensure that the loading speed is 100 or at least 85, regardless of the competitor’s performance. But if the budget is limited, and you see that other companies in the TOP are also not doing well with this characteristic, direct the money in a different direction for now.
Meta tag analysis
You can index the entire site and immediately see all the meta tags of the resource that competes with you in the search results. This is possible, for example, using a tool from MegaIndex:
You can view each page separately. The Firebug browser extension will help:
HTML page structure
Firebug is also great for this purpose. You can also use standard browser capabilities. In Google Chrome, just right-click and select “View code” or “View page code”:
Why study the HTML structure of your competitors’ online platforms?
At a minimum, to learn how it uses h2 and h3 headings on optimized pages. At most, to copy his chips. Maybe he uses some new tags like details or picture. Maybe he designs the order buttons somehow thoughtfully. Like this:
Here the main key is inscribed in the button and looks appropriate and unobtrusive.
Design and usability
Pay attention to what you like and what you don't like. Do you think it’s convenient to read and leave reviews on a competitor’s website? Great! Send the link to your layout designer and assign the task.
Are you frustrated by a form with 10 required fields? Make sure this doesn't happen to you. Make half of the fields optional and let the manager clarify the missing data after receiving the application. Or break up filling out the form into several steps. First there are three fields and a “Next” button so you can click on it and fill out a few more fields.
Content chips
Every little thing can raise the page several positions. Perhaps your competitor was once in 12th place in Yandex search results. Then he added a video to the page, and rose to 11th place (even if the video is not unique, it works). Then high-resolution pictures with correctly written attributes appeared on the page - now the TOP 10.
Tables and animation can also affect a site's ranking. Remember everything that you don’t have and that is interesting to users.
Analysis of competitors' texts
As you understand, I could write a whole article about this. And not even one.
In short, I advise you to look at how the headings and subheadings are composed, the use of keys (especially important is how they are written at the beginning of the text), and the volume.
Personally, I almost never use text checking services and prefer to do everything manually. If I recommend any free tool, it would probably be text.ru:
You can see which words appear most often on the analyzed page and try to use them yourself. I don’t recommend paying attention to the percentage of “water”, “spam” and other similar indicators.
There is no point in checking the uniqueness of texts. No matter what others have, you still need unique content. If someone is in the TOP with a post whose uniqueness is 93% according to Advego, this does not mean that exactly the same uniqueness will in any way help you get traffic from search.
Important! Be sure to check what sections are on your competitors' websites. I'm talking about sections such as “Why us?”, “Reviews”, “Cases”, “Contacts”, etc. It may seem that they are not tailored to the keys and do not affect optimization. In fact, they are important. Both for search engines and for your potential clients.
A couple more thoughts on SEO competitor analysis
Today, there are hundreds of ways to check the SEO parameters of websites. I tried more than half of them. Still, I settled on the ones I mentioned above. They really help, they are free and simple. I hope at least some of them are useful to you.
It is currently one of the most popular methods of brand promotion. And in order to achieve 100% success in this matter, experts use SEO competitor analysis both at the start and already in the process of promoting the resource.
What is SEO analysis of competitors' websites?
You are already asking yourself: why do you need competitor analysis and how can you use it? In response to this, we can say that this process is one of the most important stages in promotion. A thorough analysis of competitors' websites allows you to understand exactly how and for what queries they promote their resources. Based on the data obtained, it is much easier to prepare a semantic core, develop your own effective promotion strategy and make the project competitive in the market and on the Internet.
How to spend SEO analysis of competitors?
Based on your field of activity, tasks and popularity of business topics, analyzing competitors' websites can be quite difficult. Indeed, to carry it out, it is important to take into account many factors at the same time. The following algorithm of actions will help to simplify the process at the stage of preparing the semantic core.
Stage 1. Identifying Potential SEO Competitors
This stage can be called preliminary, but it is no less useful and important, because when building cooperation with a completely new, little-known client in a new industry, a team of specialists, as a rule, knows nothing about it. A lack of information can lead to errors when compiling a semantic core for a website and may not take into account the specifics of your business. Therefore, you should carefully consider this task and, if necessary, provide a list of your business competitors to the SEO company.
It is necessary to understand that potential competitors for an SEO company are not only individuals and companies that offer similar products and services. This is also any other site that simply competes with the promoted object in search engine results for identical key queries. It is the entire range of competitors that will be considered by specialists.
Stage 2. Confirming the correct choice of SEO competitors
After carefully studying possible competitors, it is time to make sure that you have made the right choice. What needs to be done for this? View the list and highlight those companies and sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you have selected. Note what positions they are in now.
In addition, you can also expand the semantic core by analyzing key queries using various services. Add to the list keywords that you became aware of after studying competitors’ sites, as well as similar phrases for which you are not promoting, but can get your share of traffic to the site. Here you should not forget about the relevance of the request to your site (i.e. if you do not sell parquet boards, then you do not need such a keyword, despite the fact that your competitor is promoting on it).
SEO analysis of competitors during promotion
Experts use both competitors’ sites. It is worth noting that the following are of great importance:
- current position of the site in ranking;
- volume of search traffic;
- keyword relevance;
- indexed pages;
- quality of incoming links to the domain;
When promoting high-frequency and competitive queries, you cannot ignore competitors’ sites; here, not only the text and occurrences of keywords on the page are evaluated, but also the format of the information presented, as well as the structure of the sites. Most likely, you will need to develop and improve your website according to the current top (if necessary, add “tricks” that your competitors have, such as “service calculator”, “online consultant”, etc.).
It is quite difficult to fully understand all stages of SEO analysis of competitors, and therefore we suggest you turn to real professionals - the promotion specialists of Artox Media Digital Group. The information received at the start will serve as a starting point for further promotion of your brand, products and services on the market, and conducting an SEO competitor analysis at a later stage will allow you to achieve the desired top. Thanks to the competence of our team, high professionalism and rich experience in solving similar problems, you can be confident in the result.
Analyzing competitors is always useful, but most often in a comparative analysis I see a basic report on the age of the site, its TCI, the number of pages in the index, etc. There is little such information.
To optimize the pages of your site, it is not enough to simply write meta tags and headings; you need to analyze the TOPs. An analysis of competitors will tell you how you can improve your website and make it clear what your competitors have that keeps their websites in the TOP.
To conduct competitor analysis, you need to find them. How to do this, Evgeny Aralov wrote in his previous article: “”. Therefore, we will not repeat ourselves and will immediately move on to how to analyze competitors’ websites and why it is needed.
Basic competitor analysis
Typically this type of analysis includes:
- Checking the site registration date.
- Thematic Citation Index, also known as TCI.
- Number of pages in the index.
Basic analysis is convenient when you have little time to evaluate a site and need to quickly figure out which sites are currently in the TOP.
Based on the registration date, we find out the age of the sites in the TOP. If we have a young site, and in the TOP there are only “old people”, we will understand that the age of the site is not on our side. In such a situation, you need to carefully analyze your competitors in order to understand how to make your website better.
Based on the TCI, you can roughly determine the link profile of sites from the TOP: the higher the TCI, the better the link profile. However, now this figure is very approximate.
The number of pages will indicate the size of the site - in some topics, preference is given to large information resources.
Basic site analysis is ineffective, since the information obtained is very vague and approximate. It is only suitable for a quick inspection of competitors, but nothing more.
How to Conduct Basic Competitor Analysis
For basic analysis, you can use the free service CY-PR.com.
If there are many competing sites, you can use .
This service is convenient when you need to analyze a large number of sites. It is paid, the cost of checking is 0.025 rubles per site. As a result of the check, we get the following report:
Analysis of behavioral indicators
Most often, this type of analysis is needed when doubts arise about the behavioral indicators of your site.
It includes the following indicators:
- Total traffic for the month.
- Traffic per day.
- Time on site.
- Bounce rate.
- View depth.
By comparing the time on the site, we will see where visitors spend more time. If competitors have a higher rate, by analyzing their landing pages, we can understand how they retain users.
A large number of refusals may indicate that a person does not find the necessary information and leaves. By analyzing competitors with low bounce rates, you can figure out how to improve yours. It should be taken into account that the bounce rate is a very vague parameter and needs to be analyzed carefully. The best way to look at the long click rate is visitors who spent more than a minute on the site. Typically, there should be at least 10% of such visitors on the site. The site itself is also important, for example, a one-page site on Google will have a bounce rate of 100%. Therefore, if you see a high bounce rate on your website, do not panic, but start analyzing your competitors.
Browsing depth will show the number of pages that the user opened when visiting the site. If competitors have a higher indicator, perhaps they have better interlinking or blocks with links look more attractive, motivating the user to click on them.
Time spent on a site, bounce rate, and browsing depth are closely related to each other, and improving one metric can lead to improving the other.
Case Study
At the beginning of last year, one information portal had a bounce rate of about 70%. After conducting a similar analysis, it was discovered that many competitors with a low bounce rate in their articles used “infinite scrolling” - when you scroll further after reading an article, the next article is loaded. By introducing such functionality on our website, we have significantly reduced the bounce rate, and also increased the time on the site and the viewing depth.
When analyzing the above-mentioned indicators from competitors, it is convenient to immediately look at their traffic - this is checked with one tool.
By comparing competitors' traffic, we will understand who has more of it. In cases where your traffic is lower than that of your competitors, you need to analyze where they get it from - from what requests. We'll look at how to do this below.
You can read about how to work with behavioral factors in our articles:
How to check the behavioral indicators of competitors
For this I use the SimilarWeb service.
It shows the number of visits per month (Total Visits), time on the site (Avg. Visit Duration), viewing depth (Page per Visit) and bounce rate (Bounce Rate). In addition to these indicators, you can use it to learn about a lot of others, for example, look at your competitors’ traffic sources. Overall this is a good and free service.
To view daily traffic, I use the RDS API application.
Analysis of competitors' key phrases
This type of analysis includes finding competitors' queries for which they receive traffic. Knowing what queries your competitors are promoting for, you can expand your semantics. Also, the semantics of competitors can suggest new directions for promotion, for which it will be possible to create new pages.
I recommend reading about how to further expand the semantic core in our article “”.
How to check promoted queries from competitors
Of the purely free services, there is, mentioned in the basic analysis of competitors, CY-PR.com. It shows search phrases for which the site is visible, but there are few of them.
Link analysis of competitors
Basic link analysis usually includes:
- Number of referring domains.
- Total number of links.
- Link anchors.
If you need to study competitors in detail, I recommend reading the instructions “”.
First of all, link analysis of competitors is needed when promoting a website under Google. In Yandex, the effect of links is not so noticeable.
By comparing the link profile of your site with your competitors, you will roughly understand how many links you need to increase. By analyzing the links and their anchors in more detail, you will find out which links your competitors are taking, and you will be able to draw up a rough plan for building up your link mass.
By downloading competitors' links, you can find sites for placing links to your site. To do this, you need to find domains that host several competitors. Most likely, you will also be able to link to your site on these domains.
How to conduct basic link analysis
The most popular service for this is Ahrefs.
This service allows you to analyze the link mass of a site in detail.
You can also see link anchors there:
Using the service, you can study in detail the link profile of competitors, link growth, etc. The main disadvantage is its price. The basic plan costs $82 per month.
If you need a basic analysis of the link mass of competitors, you can use the free analog MegaIndex.
It will show basic information about the number of links, their growth and anchors.
In addition, it allows you to see what kind of links they are and their anchors. There is a possibility of export.
Tracking competitors' positions
You need to track your competitors' positions in order to understand what is happening in the search results.
Sometimes there are situations when a site suddenly loses positions. In a panic, we may start making unnecessary edits to pages, which will only make things worse. In such situations, it is best to monitor the positions of competitors. It may well be that their sites are also down, which means this is shaking the entire search results. If the drawdown affected only your site and several competitors, analyze which pages sank for them and for you. Try to find something in common. This will help you quickly understand what’s wrong with the site and return it to the TOP.
How to track competitors' positions
Everything is simple here: many people use services to track the positions of their website, and you can also track your competitors there. In my work I use SEOlib. It has a separate tab for competitor sites in the project:
This is convenient because I don’t need to create separate projects for competitors and I always have the opportunity to compare sites’ positions.
Site loading speed analysis
Website loading speed is one of the indicators by which a search engine will evaluate it. Loading speed also affects the behavioral indicators of the site. In cases where you are sure that your site is better than competitors, but it is not in the TOP, you should pay attention to the loading speed. Perhaps competitors' sites are better technically optimized and their pages load faster. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site loads at least no longer than your competitors, and better yet, faster.
How to check
The first service we need is WebPagetest.
In it you can see in detail how the site loads. This will help when finding errors.
It shows basic information about the site's loading speed.
You can also find options to improve loading speed here:
Website structure analysis
This analysis is needed to understand how to optimize a website, how to make it competitive, and what competitors have that you don’t.
For example, we have an online store and we don’t know whether to add text to product listing pages. In this case, you need to check the pages of competitors from the TOP. We checked, they don’t have the text. The question arises: how then to optimize the page to give it more relevance? Again, look at the pages from the TOP.
You need to compare absolutely everything that arouses interest on competitors’ pages: how their filter is structured, what anchors are used for product cards on listing pages, whether there are short descriptions; if this is an article - how it is formatted, etc. Then perhaps you will find a way to improve your site.
Example from practice. This is what part of the table looks like, according to which I compare the promoted site with competitors:
In the “Amount” field, I see how many competitors’ sites use the functionality I’m interested in; the last column is my site. This is only part of the table. Based on the results of this check, decisions were made to optimize pages, which bore fruit.
Therefore, try to compare everything as meticulously as possible.
How to check
You need to understand that all this is purely individual for each project. I check everything manually by making a table like this:
In the first column, I indicate the availability of the functionality I’m interested in, then I check whether competitors have it and see how it’s implemented in mine. The functionality of interest is selected individually for each site.
Results
Analysis of competitors' websites is useful, thanks to it we can always find out how else we can improve our website and prepare a plan for its optimization.
To conduct basic competitor analysis, use CY-PR.com, and SEOlib is more convenient for working with lists. To analyze the behavioral indicators of competitors, the similarweb.com service is suitable. If you need to understand why your competitors have more traffic, analyze their keywords through spywords.ru, Serpstat, or at least the free CY-PR.com.
To evaluate the link profile of competitors, I recommend using ahrefs.com, and for basic link analysis, the free megaindex.ru is suitable. To better understand what's happening in the search results, track your competitors' positions. For this I use SEOlib, you can use any position reading service that is convenient for you.
Check the loading speed of your site and your competitors' sites using webpagetest.org and PageSpeed Insights. Remember, the faster your site loads, the better.
When you need to make a decision on optimizing website pages, their design, and improving the website as a whole, do not be lazy to do a structured analysis of competitors in as much detail as possible.
If you are confused and don’t know how to develop your website, contact us. We will audit your website, compare it with competitors and prepare recommendations for its improvement.
Subscribe to our newsletterIn website promotion, as in business, appetite comes from eating the competition.
Good afternoon, readers of my blog. Today we will talk to you about analyzing the websites of your competitors. In his article “Website Promotion – Where to Start?” I noted that analysis is one of the very first stages of promoting your site.
Many young SEOs neglect this stage; they believe that they first need to understand their website, and only then analyze their competitors. This is a big mistake, a very big one. If a competing site is in the TOP3 results, then the optimizers did something, and did it correctly. The purpose of your analysis is to find out how the site was developed, how it was optimized, what external promotion factors were used and how effective it was. To be honest, you can learn about the site practically, and this will allow you to get a complete picture of what is happening.
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Competitor website analysis: internal optimization
We will start our simple analysis with internal optimization. Enter the query you need into the search engine and open the first 10 sites.
1. Meta tags. This is the first thing worth analyzing. Here we focus on the inclusion of keywords in title and description. It should be similar for you. Ideally, description should contain one direct occurrence and one word form.
2. Content. Next, we look at the presence of text on the page. The main thing here is to decide on the volume of text, the density of keywords, and the inclusion of the key in the headings h1-h6. Pay attention to text structures, markup, and the use of various tables and pictures. If you don’t have all this, then you have a chance to beat your competitors with better optimized text.
3. Linking. When analyzing linking, you need to understand how many pages of the site link to the one that is in the TOP, what weight it has.
4. Evaluate the usability of sites. What modules they use, perhaps they use various features (pop-up menu, tooltips, etc.) that allow the user to quickly find the information they need. Recently, search engines have begun to take this factor into account, so do not hesitate to borrow interesting ideas from your competitors.
If the first point can be checked manually, then there will be a problem with the subsequent ones. To do this, you need to use special software and various analyzer sites. I wrote in more detail about the software and all kinds of programs in the article “Programs for site audit and analysis.”
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Competitor website analysis: external website optimization
External optimization includes the quantity and quality of backlinks that lead to a given site, or more precisely to a page in the search results. What you should pay attention to:
1. On what resources and how were the links placed? If these are trusted, fat resources, with articles written for the site being analyzed, then we can conclude that competitors approached the selection of donors responsibly and purchased high-quality backing. It becomes clear that your backing must be of no less quality.
3. You also need to analyze anchors and the number of non-anchor links.
In order to see all the competitor’s backs, I use several sites. Firstly, this is solomono.ru The site is good, but it has a number of shortcomings, the main one of which is the speed of updating the backs. Doesn't always provide up-to-date information, but you'll get the general picture.
Secondly, I always use ru.ahrefs.com. Its disadvantage is that the free version is limited. For a full analysis you will need to purchase a subscription. But the service is really great. With its help, you can see all the backings, which pages they are from, where they lead, with what anchor, and how much weight they convey. In general, all the necessary information in a few seconds. This service will also show the dynamics of back growth, linking sites by domain zone and a lot of other interesting information.
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And in the end, I would like to add that you should not put off a detailed analysis of competitors until later, because if everything is done correctly, you will be able to build the right development strategy and achieve TOP positions for your key queries much faster.
Outbound links – good or bad?
