Summary
I recommend using the SEO competitor research template to gather as much data as possible. This helps identify the gap between your website and top competitors.
Use tools like Semrush for a bulk analysis. Enter at least three competitors and your domain to compare organic traffic and backlink data.
Export the analysis results and enter data points like authority score, referring domains, and total backlinks into the template. This will give you a clear picture of needed improvements.
Use ChatGPT to categorize referring domains by authority buckets. This indicates the strength of back-links you need to match better-performing competitors.
To identify relevant keywords, use Semrush's keyword gap tool, comparing your domain with top competitors to find untapped keywords.
Crawling competitors' websites reveals valuable data on indexed pages, word counts, internal links, and pages with backlinks. These metrics indicate content depth and link building needs.
Evaluate competitors' branded keywords and audience size on social media, as this shows brand awareness and potential content gaps.
Check the presence of your competitors in search results on large language models. Use tools like Otterly to assess brand awareness.
On the page level, analyze competitors' content for rankability score, word count, basic on-page SEO practices, and content originality. This shows where to improve content relevance.
Perform a qualitative analysis of competitors' pages for copywriting, design, and user experience quality.
Determine internal linking strategy by measuring unique in-links to competitor pages.
Use an advanced content optimizer for in-depth relevance analysis of top competitor pages against yours.
Consider the quantity and quality of pages competitors have for key topics to gauge topic authority.
Focus on the domain authority and page-level backlink strength of competitors using tools like Semrush to find gaps to address.
Take action by optimizing existing content to close identified gaps and improve site performance.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing a structured approach to improve your small business's website performance. Here's how you can start:
SEO Competitor Research: Use the SEO competitor research template to gather data on your competitors. This helps identify SEO gaps. Use Semrush for bulk analysis to collect data like organic traffic and backlinks. Export this data and fill out the template.
Categorize Backlinks: Utilize ChatGPT to categorize referring domains by authority. This will help understand the backlink strength needed to compete.
Keyword Exploration: Use Semrush's keyword gap tool to find untapped keywords your competitors are ranking for but you are not. This will guide the creation of new content.
Website Crawling: Crawl competitor websites to analyze their pages for indexed content, word count, and internal linking. This shows content depth and linking needs.
Social Media and Brand Awareness: Evaluate your competitors' branded keywords and social media audience size. This will highlight brand awareness gaps.
Optimize Your Content: Focus on improving content relevance and on-page SEO. Use tools like originality.ai to ensure content quality aligns with top competitors.
Internal Linking Strategy: Evaluate the internal linking of competitors' top-ranking pages to enhance your own site's structure.
Take these steps to refine your website's performance and improve your competitive standing online. By focusing on low-cost and high-value items first, you can gradually enhance your digital presence without a huge investment.
Quotes by Author
"This is the last SEO competitor analysis video you'll ever need to watch"
"Our goal here is to gather as much data as humanly possible"
"This is a very powerful technique that can give you tons of intel about how to build an effective website"
"Even the smallest of things like word count"
"You now have all the data you need to take intelligent action against your competitors"
Full Transcript
This is the last SEO competitor analysis video you'll ever need to watch. So, start by scanning the QR code on screen to get the free SEO competitor research template I'll be using in this video. And let's begin with the broadlevel analysis. Here's how to do it. So, step number one, gather organic traffic and backlink data. So, here's the SEO competitor analysis template you're going to be using in this process. And our goal here is to gather as much data as humanly possible so we can see what the gap is between us and our top competitors. So let's get right into it. So step number one is we're actually going to go into Semrush. And inside of Semrush, I want you to go to the bulk analysis tool and you're going to enter uh at least three of your top competitors and then enter your domain in there as well. And then just click compare. So then once the analysis is complete, just go ahead and export the report and then go back to the sheet and I want you to enter the traffic data from Semrush. I want you to put the authority score, the referring domains, which might just be domains on the report and then also the total backlinks. So put all of that data into the appropriate row for each of your competitors and also your own domain. And we're going to start to build upon this process. So then once you put all the data in, I want you to go back to the bulk analysis here and click on domains on one of your competitors. So you can just open this up in a new tab. And then what you're going to do is you're going to export all of their referring domains. And this will make sense here in a second. So then just go into chat GBT and enter this simple prompt. And what this is going to do is I want you to upload the report you just downloaded and use this prompt. And then it's going to take all of those referring domains and their and their authority scores and it's going to put them into these buckets. And so this is what the outcome will look like. You'll see that chat GBT will put all the domains into the different authority buckets. And then just go back to the sheet and enter the appropriate amount of referring domains in each of these authority buckets. And the reason we want to do this is because it helps us see the strength of the back links that we have to get just to be able to narrow that gap. So in very high competition industries like we're looking at here, you see that there's a significant amount of links that the competitors have that are very high authority which means the link investment here is going to be significant compared to you know maybe a local industry where you don't see a lot of really high authority links like this. So this allows you to determine what your link building budget is going to be. So then the next step here is to go back to Samrush and go to the keyword gap tool. Enter your domain and then enter your top three competitors in here and then just click compare. So then what you want to do is scroll down and then click on untapped. So these are going to be the keywords that your competitors are ranking in the top 100 but you are not. So then I would just export that report and add it to the sheet. And now it's time for step number two. Crawl your competitor's website. All right. So now what you're going to do is you're actually going to crawl your competitor's websites. This is a very powerful technique that can give you tons of intel about how to build an effective website that's highly relevant cuz basically we're we're kind of building upon what our competitors have already done. So go ahead and just enter a competitor and then I want you to go to the API section and make sure you connect the HF's API and then I want you to go up here and I want you to go to configuration. We're we're going to go to crawl config and just to make this a more efficient crawl, we're going to get rid of all of this other stuff here. Okay, so just go ahead and check all of this off. You don't even have to have images. You can just get rid of those two. And we're going to check all of this off. And all I want to have is just kind of the the basics, okay? Because we're trying to do just a very quick crawl. So then that's enough to run the crawl and then just start it. And once the crawl is done, you're going to go to HTML. So when this on this internal tab, click HTML and then you're going to export the report, just the HTML. And then we're going to bring that over to the sheet. So you can see here I've got the full crawl in here. And you can see there's tabs down here where you can enter the crawl for at least three of your top competitors. Okay? And so there's a couple things you want to do. First, I would highly recommend freezing the top row. It just makes your life a lot easier. So go up here and then freeze what you know, one row. And then also make sure you just add a filter. Okay? So we're going to add a filter here. So then the next step that we're going to do is we're going to go and we're just going to look at indexable pages. Okay? So we're going to take non-indexable off and we're just going to look at indexable. So there are four data points we want to grab from these crawls for each of our competitors. Number one is we want to see how many indexed pages they have. So we're just going to highlight this row and if you go down here to the right hand side, bottom right hand corner, you'll see 719. Just do minus one because that will include the top row. So this will be 718 index pages. So then just go back and put that into the broad analysis tab. Then we're going to scroll over and we're going to look at word count. Okay? So go over to word count. We're going to do the same thing. just do this this word count analysis again and you'll see they've got about 1.4 million words on their index pages. Okay, so the reason we want to look at that isn't because word count is necessarily a ranking factor, but it's because it shows the the the the quantity of content that's on their site, which means if they've done a decent job, they've probably built some significant levels of topic authority. So this is a very important metric. Okay? And it's it is a gap that we're going to have to narrow. All right? And then we're going to go over here and we're going to look at unique inlinks. This is how many internal links they have. Once again, a very strong variable in performance. We want to also try to match that same level of coverage on our site. So you see they've got about 26,000 27,000 unique inlinks, internal links. Okay. And then finally, the last thing I want to look at is we're going to go over here, and this is the part where you got to kind of use a little bit of filtering. Go to HS referring domains exact. We're going to go actually here and we're going to go to greater than and we're going to do greater than zero. So we're only looking at pages that have at least one referring domain or one backlink. Okay? And so you can actually just do this over here to see the quantity. And once again, just do minus one. So 425 pages on their website that have existing backlinks. So now you can see I've input all of this data in here. So we've got the indexable pages. We've got the word count for all of our competitors. We've got the internal links for all of our competitors and we also have the pages with backlinks. Now, this one you might be wondering why does this matter? Well, because we want to see this ratio. So, you can see if the formula didn't work for you on the template, you can just see it's just a simple division. But the reason why this is important is because we want to see how many pages actually have existing backlinks because that's a really good signal of trust and authority. So you want this number to be as high as possible. And and so on some really good websites, you'll sometimes find that they might have like 90%. Meaning 90% of the pages on their website have backlinks. So if you think about if we're trying to send positive signals to Google, that's like the most powerful signal we can send is that hey, look at the majority of our pages on our website actually have votes. Okay? If we're if we're thinking about backlinks in terms of votes, this is what we're looking at. And so like this 23 here w is an alarming ratio, right? So you want to be at least 50% and above because that's going to show that you've got a significant amount of links going to internal pages, not just the homepage, right? So you want to have a really high ratio. So if it's if it's below 50, you want to at least get to 50, but ideally keep pushing it up further and further. And now moving on to step number three, investigate your competitor's brands. So next thing we're going to do is we're going to go and gather branded keyword volume. So what you can do is just go ahead and enter one of your top competitors. Let's use rankability in this case. And in the keyword overview in Semrush and we want to collect how much branded search volume they have. Now keep in mind you don't need to get every single keyword variant. Just get their main brand keyword. And that should be sufficient to give you kind of a rough guideline of how much brand awareness they have. Because once again all of these are gaps that you want to try to narrow or you want to try to set as your target. So, if there's a significant gap between you and the top competitors as far as branded search volume, that means they're probably doing more content marketing than you, maybe more advertising. So, you're also probably going to have to do that as well. The next thing you want to do is go and look at every single one of their social media profiles, at least their main ones. So, look at YouTube, X, LinkedIn, whatever other social media platform they're using. And I want you to get a cumulative audience size. Okay? So, how many subscribers, followers, etc. do they have as a whole? And once again, this is just a really good sign of trust because if you're building building awareness on these other platforms, that's likely going to drive branded searches. It's also likely going to help get these potential prospects and potential customers to know, like, and trust you. So, if your competitors are like killing it on YouTube or killing it somewhere else, you are probably going to lose because you need to also be there as well. So, go and gather all of this data. So then the next thing you want to do is go and gather how many reviews they have from third-party websites. So this is going to vary depending on the industry. So like if it's SAS, you want to go to Capterra or G2. If it's local, you're going to want to go to, you know, the Google business profile, which is really the most powerful place uh to to look at review quantity. And if you're on like e-commerce or educationbased businesses, you may want to look at Trustpilot. But basically just pick one and then gather how many reviews they have from that platform and then go ahead and put that into the sheet. And then the last kind of brand awareness thing that we want to gather is with the large language model. So this is a new thing that we're starting to really get into which is measuring our our brand awareness on chat GBT Google Gemini and Perplexity which I'm calling right now the big three. This could change tomorrow. Okay. So this is all moving so fast, but in general we can actually start to measure our awareness. And so you can see here you can use a tool like Otterly and I can see how many mentions of the brands are showing up for a specific keyword phrase. So in this case, this is going to be content optimization tools and you'll see you'll see all of the ones that are popping up. So I'm just going to go right back to the sheet and we're going to enter that data in there. So this is what it should look like once you've entered all the data in. We've got the branded searches. We've got the audience size. We've got the number of reviews. We've got the average score as well, which I do like to put in there. And then the brand mentions from large language models. So, we've got a very beautiful picture of the gaps that we have between the top competitors and our brand. And this is what you want. You want to be able to see this at a high level and say, "Okay, we've got a lot of work to do." Okay? Or, but in some cases, if you're already an established brand, maybe you don't have as much work to do. But when you're working with a new business that hasn't really done SEO in the past, you are up against some significant competition from competitors that have been doing this probably for a very long time. So these are real gaps and this is real raw numbers that you do have to narrow. Like even the smallest of things like word count, you can see like for rankability, we've very minimal content has been created on this site, right? And that's by design. But just in general, you can see like even the the next lowest competitor is, you know, 187,000 words. So that is a lot of content that needs to be produced just to narrow the content gap. Okay. Um, and we're not even talking about the quality of the content yet. We're just talking purely about the pure volume. And the same thing with links, the same thing with internal links. So you can start to see the reason why these brands are winning right now. Okay? you can see it because it's clear as day that just based on the numbers alone, there's no reason that we should be able to beat them, okay, right now. Okay, but this is the beauty of this is that all of these all of these metrics here like uh total indexable pages, words, internal links, uh back links are all the leading metrics that that come first before the lagging metrics. And so the lagging metrics of course are the branded searches, the uh brand mentions in large language models and of course the traffic, right? These are all the lagging metrics from all the work that's being done, right? Same with the audience size. Like the audience size just grows because content was created. Now you could go to another level and be like, "Okay, how many YouTube videos do they have? How often do they post on social?" like you could go to that level, but in general, like if you see they've got a big audience size, it's pretty clear that you need to be creating content probably on multiple platforms. So, now that you know what you're up against on the broad level, it's time to drill down to the page level. Here's how to do it. All right, so now you're going to go to the pages tab down here, and you're going to see all of these different templates. So, each of these is designed for one singular keyword. So you're just going to enter one very important commercialbased keyword here. And then we're going to go through this process. So the first step to measuring relevance is to go to rankability and go to the content optimizer. And you could do this in a batch or you could do it one at a time. So if you want to do it with just a single, you just go ahead and enter the keyword and click import URL content and then enter the URL in here. So you can see this is what I did with this one. But if you want to do multiple at the same time, just click the multiple tab. And then all you have to do is just put the keyword here and then enter the URL like this dot you know whatever the URL is and then slash keyword. So just make sure that the keyword here that you enter matches the URL and vice versa. So this would be you know keyword 2 and this would be you know slashkeyword 2. But make sure you have the full URL in there. Okay. And so this will run multiple optimizers at the same time and this is going to help us measure relevance. Okay. So then open the report and go to the competitors tab and you're going to go ahead and look and see what their overall rankability score is for a specific keyword like this. And so you'll go back into the template, go ahead and enter the rankability score for the top competitors for that keyword. So in this one, this, you know, SEO content optimization tool. We enter the rankability score and then enter your rankability score. If you're not showing up in the top 30, then you can enter the URL in here and then hit compare and it will show you what your current rankability score is specifically for that one keyword. Okay, so you're going to enter the rankability score and then go ahead and enter the word count as well right here. So once again, this just shows us a clear gap on the page level that you know, A, our page is not as relevant as the top competitors and b our page is not as thorough and likely as deep as the top competitors. So, we can already see that there's a gap just looking purely from quantitative analysis, not even looking at the quality of these pages. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to measure onpage SEO. So, like the very basics of onpage SEO. So, what you're doing here with rankability, this is what I would consider more advanced content optimization, but there is some kind of basic level onpage SEO that you do have to do. So, you go to the site, just download the detailed Chrome extension. Just click on this. And we want to see that the keyword is in all the core locations. So, we want it to be in the URL. Now, there's an exception to this rule if it's on the homepage because obviously you're not going to get that benefit. So, this once again shows the advantage of using an exact match domain. But in this case, this technically would not get the full score just because the core keyword is not in the URL. Uh, but we want to look in the URL, the title, the metad description, the H1 tag, the visible heading on the page as you can see here, and then the first sentence. Okay? So, if it hits all of those marks, you're going to go back to the template and you're going to mark it as a five. So, you'll see now we've got this column here for on page SEO. If it has every single part in it, then it's going to get a five. So, these are actually going to be fours cuz they don't have it in the URL and they don't have an exact match domain. So, Zapier though has everything perfect. They've got the keyword in the URL. They've got it in the title, the meta description, the H1, and the first sentence. So, that's five out of five on that front. So once again, a clear gap that we can go and narrow for our page. The next thing I recommend doing is running all of your competitors through originality.ai. And this isn't because AI content can't rank. It's more just to see if who you're up against, what they're currently using. So if all of your competitors are using human written content, more than likely you're going to have to use human written content. You're not going to be able to beat them in that regard. And if everyone else is using AI content, then of course you could use AI content as well because it's already a proven model. So what we're doing here is we're just trying to see what what that distribution is. And so in this case, I'll show you like the large majority of competitors are using human written content. So and we are funny enough this was measured as human written, but it is I would call it more of a hybrid. It was using some AI, but it's still coming back as human written. So, um, so the but the point is we want to we want to align with the competitors for whatever keyword we're going after. So now open up each of your competitors URLs that are currently ranking and I want you to do a qualitative analysis. So everything that we've done so far is very quant quantitative analysis based very data driven. But now I want you to actually just like look at the page and subjectively analyze it. And so for me, what I just a real quick analysis, what I'm looking at is like quality of copywriting, uh, design, user experience, and readability. Okay, so when I look at this site here, Clear Scope, they're doing a terrific job across all those fronts. They have very clean copywriting. They've got beautiful design. They've got great social proof. It's very clean and minimalistic, which is definitely my preference. And they've got, once again, just it's a really, really good page overall. So this would get a solid five out of five. you can quickly see that and you can see quality right away. Um, but if you're in doubt, then what you can do is you can actually just use chat GBT to do this for you. So, what I would do is I would just go ahead and do like this. Like I'm going to print it. And then I'm going to go here and I'm going to save it as a PDF. And we'll go ahead and do portrait like this. Let's try to get the best design. And you can see we can go ahead and just save this as a PDF. And then we can upload this to ChatGBT. And then we'll just use a very simple prompt like this. You can see this here, this very simple prompt. So, analyze this pages SEO content quality based on the questions below. Okay, so these are all questions that you can run through. And by the way, I pulled these directly from Google's quality raider guidelines. So, you could add a bunch of others in here as well uh to to ultimately see if if the page is compliant with what Google's algorithms are hoping to see. Now, does Google actually use all these? hard to say, but in general, these are just general good ideas to build a good page. So then just go back to the sheet and enter a quality score for all of the top competitors. Okay. So then go back to the screaming frog crawl and what we want to do is look at how many internal links the page that's ranking has. Okay, so for the homepage here for them, we're going to go over here and we're going to go to unique in links and we're going to see how many unique inlinks the homepage has and it's 326. Okay, this makes sense because usually the homepage is prioritized in the navigation. So, this is what you would expect, but you still want to go and enter that number into the sheet because it's going to tell us, okay, we know how many internal links we're likely going to need to probably perform well for this. All right, so now we're going to measure the overall topic authority around that one keyword. So, in this case, we're just going to look at Zapier and just use the site colon search and put the keyword pretty broadly. So, like in this case, the primary keyword is SEO content optimization tools, which is pretty long tail, but I've kind of condensed it down into the core topic because I want to see how many pages they have that are relevant to that core topic. Okay? And so, we can see they've talked about roughly in this, you know, in this category quite a bit. Okay? Quite a bit. So, basically what you want to do is just you want to get the raw number of pages that they've built around this topic. And then you're going to go back here and you're going to enter a score based on that. So a very simple criteria you can use is like if if they have one or less then they would get a score of one. Okay? And then you could go like for a score of two it would be two to five. Uh then you would do you know 6 to 10 for a three and then 11 to 20 for a four. And then for uh for a score of five they would need 21 additional assets that support that main keyword. So, they have 21 plus assets. Then they've built significant support around this core topic, and that's that's another gap that you're going to have to narrow. All right, so finally, the last thing to do here is go to Samrush's keyword overview. You can also find this data in your sheet more than likely, but we'll go ahead and scroll down into the core keyword. And there's two things we want to look at. Number one is we want to look at the overall domain strength of the competitors that we're up against. Okay, so we have Zapier, Surfer, and Clear Scope. So, we've got their domain authority score, which is the overall strength of their website. Okay. Then, we want to go over here to the URL and look at how many referring domains they have on their pages. Okay. Very, very important because these are the we need to probably narrow these gaps as well. So, let's go back to the sheet and once again just enter the referring domains that we'll need on the page level and then also the authority score. So, this is important because we're looking at two different things. looking at, okay, how many links do we need going to this specific page? And then also, how big is that authority gap on the site as a whole? And so, for example, you could narrow this referring domain gap on the page level, but if you haven't narrowed the overall strength of the site, you're probably not going to be able to beat them. You now have all the data you need to take intelligent action against your competitors. But the question is, what actions can you take that will have the biggest return with the least amount of effort? Well, one of my go-to techniques that has a 99% success rate is to upgrade and optimize existing SEO content. So, watch the next video to see my complete stepbystep SEO content creation process.
