SEO Competitor Backlinks and Keywords Analysis to uplift your SEO rankings.
Backlinks – the process of other websites linking back to your content – are the lifeblood of your website. Backlinks mean user traffic, which means more users becoming familiar with your outlet or business, which means more chance of selling your goods and services.
To be truly successful in the online space, you not only need to be creating content that’s worth backlinking to, but also making sure that it’s being backlinked by reputable websites with heavy traffic of their own.
I’ll show you how to become aware of your immediate competitors that are out-performing you with their backlink performance, and help you understand how to redress the balance and start beating them in traffic and search engine rankings.
Soon, you’ll be well on your way to becoming an expert in SEO Competitor Analysis and the online tools offered by SEMrush to find the backlinks relied on by your competitors so you can start working on acquiring them to promote your content.
What is SEO Competitor Analysis in digital marketing?
For any business to get ahead, you have to consider the strategy of your competitors and react accordingly.
SEO Competitor Analysis is just that, but in the digital marketing space. You condense the strategy of your competitors down to several key areas – such as the content that they’re producing, the keywords it caters for, and who backlinks the content – to inform your own strategy going forward.
Online businesses like yours perform SEO Competitor Analysis using highly recommended web tools like SEMrush’s to get clean and clear data that informs their strategies.
How to do SEO competitor analysis
Identify your competitors and their strengths
Your closest competitors are ones that you should monitor for general backlink traffic and a breakdown of their referral domains.
They’ll perform well for keywords similar to the ones that you’re targeting within your niche, and they’ll be commonly backlinked by industry leaders plus other high-performing competitors of yours.
If you can secure backlinks on these sites, you stand to gain a lot of traffic going forward.
In addition, you’ll rank better in both search engines and SEMrush’s own Authority Score, which collates Page, Domain and Trust Scores to indicate the volume of traffic your site can expect.
The Organic Research Competitors report is a great way to get started identifying the domains that you’re directly competing with, while the Position Changes report finds competitors that have recently started performing better or worse across the keywords for your niche.
Some intuition here will be useful – has a competitor recently changed their niche to something that more users are searching for with keywords? It’s possible. You want to identify why positive traffic changes have happened and see if you can’t adapt to try and move in the same direction.
Identify your weaknesses
If you’re struggling with backlink performance, it more often than not means that popular backlinking sites cannot find you.
Use SEMrush’s Keyword Gap tool to compare your site’s keyword reach to others. Consider the keywords that you share, but also the ones that all of your competitors are tapping into that you aren’t. Don’t just look at the variety of keywords, but their performance too.
There may be a high-performing keyword that only one of your competitors has tapped into, that you should consider retooling your content around.
Think: what backlinked content are your competitors making that you aren’t? What are you both making but they do better? How can you improve your content to be better than theirs?
Check your competitor’s website traffic
Use SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool to compare the backlink profiles of five domains simultaneously. The tool makes it easy to discover which high-performing backlinking domains your competitors are using that you aren’t, and the specific pieces of content that are being backlinked.
Use the ‘best’ filter to find high-traffic websites backlinking your competitors, and consider opening a dialogue with them to try and secure backlinks of your content on their site. You can’t create content in a vacuum and expect to receive high user traffic.
Use the ‘unique’ filter to find domains that only link to one competitor. If you can beat that competitor on the quality of your content, you might be able to take that backlinking opportunity from them.
Sort referring domains in this view by Authority Score to find the highest performing sites that could eventually backlink you. Remember that not all backlinks are created equal.
SEMrush’s Backlink Competitors report breaks down all the sites that are backlinking your competitors. It can tell you which sites are open to backlinking you, as well as highlight your closest competitors for website traffic.
Analyse your competitor’s backlinks
SEMrush’s Indexed Pages report can tell you the specific competing content that’s getting backlinked. Engage with the content and consider not just why it gets backlinked, but why it’s being chosen over your content for that backlink.
Find weak spots in their content so that you can improve yours to secure backlinks. In short, practice the Skyscraper technique.
Acknowledging where your content falls short can be difficult, but it is the only way to beat out higher-performing competitors.
Once you’ve adjusted your content in a pointed effort to be better than your competitors, focus on courting the sites that are backlinking to that competing content, that you’ve found with Backlink Gap.
To then get ahead of your competitors in user traffic, court the backlinks that your competitors want to build with Keyword Gap.
Putting your SEO Competitor Analysis to good use
All of SEMrush’s tools can export gathered data into clean reports and spreadsheets to be referred to later.
Now that you’ve collected your leads for new backlinking opportunities, you can open a dialogue with your best ones, sorting by Authority Score and working your way down.
Outreach has never been easier, thanks to SEMrush’s connected inbox keeping all of your lead correspondence in one place.
SEO Competitor Analysis is the best way to secure new backlinking leads that can help you get ahead of your immediate competitors, and comprises a vast number of techniques.
The process can be daunting to those new to SEO and competitor website analysis, but SEMrush is on hand to make it as easy as possible to follow and let you get on with the most important think in online marketing – making amazing content.
