The Definitive Guide: SEO Competitor Analysis

Like any other marketing work, competitor analysis is most effectively done by adhering to a tried and true procedure. While you shouldn’t have to start from scratch to learn about the competition and gain an edge, doing your homework is essential.

In this article, we outline a five-step procedure for thoroughly assessing the competition. Both keyword and backlink analysis, two of the most critical aspects of SEO, can be broken down into the same five processes.

Analyzing Competitors’ Backlinks: A Step-by-Step Guide

Checking through the links that your rivals have built can provide you inspiration for your own strategy. Examine the profiles of your rivals and compile a list of the domains where they have established high-quality backlinks.

Locate Your Rivals’ Backlinks

In the same way that you would compile a list of keywords, you would also compile a list of your rivals before diving into an analysis of each. All of your opponent domains and their relative level of Competition are displayed in the Semrush Backlink Competitors report.

Your level of competition will increase in proportion to the number of shared hyperlinks between you and their site. When two websites share backlinks, it signifies that there is at least one referring domain that links to both of them.

The total number of backlinks and referring websites for each of your competitors is also included in this analysis.

The greater the competition level of an opponent, the more important they are to study.

However, don’t restrict your analysis to just this figure. The number of inbound links, relative to the number of domains, is also significant. If your competition places a premium on creating high-quality organic links, or if they resort to gray hat techniques, this can tell you.

Look for What They Do Well

Enter your rival’s domain into the Backlink Analytics tool to see their best links and most-linked-to content.

This software provides several reports that explore their backlinks in detail. Selecting the Backlinks option displays all of their backlinks, the Referring Domains option categorizes them by domain, and the Indexed sites option displays their most popular sites in terms of generating links from other domains.

You can identify which links are doing the most good for your competitor’s SEO and authority by categorizing their referring sites by Authority Score.

Examine competing backlink profiles

Our Backlink Analytics tool’s Backlink Gap and Overview reports are the simplest ways to compare and contrast different link profiles. Each service provides a side-by-side comparison of up to five different markets.

By entering competitors in the top input fields of the Backlink Analytics Overview, you can easily view metrics such as the total number of backlinks, referring domains, IP addresses, and Authority Score for each of your rivals.

Please be aware that the fields will provide alternatives that are competitors of your site based on backlinks.
If you want to know how far behind your competition you are in terms of backlinks, or how close you are to catching up, this analysis will tell you.

When you select “view all domains” at the bottom of this report, you’ll be sent to a full table of referring domains from the Backlink Gap.

When you use Backlink Gap, you’ll see exactly which backlink chances you’ve been losing out on.

Identify Potential Linking Sites

The greatest, Unique, and Weak reports are the greatest filters to utilize in Backlink Gap to locate your own opportunities.

Beginning with the Best filter is a good idea because these are the websites that are already linking to your competitors, and there is a good probability that you may get a link from them as well.

To assist you gauge how beneficial each referring domain may be to your SEO efforts, we’ll sort them according to their Authority Score (AS). The higher the score, the more likely it is that the link will be beneficial.

It’s possible that the potential websites should be your next link-building objectives.

Investigate their backlink profile for missing or outdated links.

Finding your competitors’ fresh and recently lost links is another easy technique to seek for quick backlink chances.

You can see what has changed in their backlink profiles recently by reviewing the Backlinks report again. If the number of “New” items suddenly increases, investigate more. Your opponent may have recently formed a new alliance, uploaded material that quickly went viral, or purchased a large number of inbound links, all of which could account for the increase.

Update Me, And Do What You Say You’re Going To Do

Here’s what you can do now that you have a list of potential link-building partners and a rough sense of how many backlinks others in your niche typically have.

Backlink Analytics widgets, along with your own photographs and screenshots from My Reports, can be exported as a PDF and shared with others.

The Backlink Gap tool allows you to export a list of potential link-building targets.

Get your Semrush Project off the ground with a Link Building Tool campaign.

The Link Building Tool will benefit greatly from having the Backlink Gap prospect list uploaded into it.

Create email pitches in Semrush and reply to webmasters directly from the tool by using the integrated inbox.

In order to monitor the general health of your backlink profile and any potentially harmful backlinks, you should do a Backlink Audit regularly.

Concluding Remarks

Since you now have access to so many resources, there is no reason to delay in beginning an investigation of the competition. You’ll need patience, the kind of thoughtful assistance we’re pleased to offer, and, above all, a strong will to reach your destination.