Complete Guide for SEO Competitors Research

What does competitor analysis in terms of SEO?

For those just about to start work on their website, project, or client project, such an analysis will help determine the possible obstacles faced when entering a specific niche, the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, and what kind of content they have. As a result, it will be clear how difficult it is to break into the leaders of the chosen niche, or it is better to give up some ideas altogether.

Such a competent approach is not just a long shot, but a set of content solutions, common themes, and everything else that can be implemented on your website based on what is already working effectively for your competitors.

The process includes the collection of semantics, that is, individual keywords for which the content will be optimized. In addition, link building ideas are collected by looking at competitor profiles and determining where you can get links for your sites.

Benefits of competitor analysis that you can gain:

• keywords and content ideas;
• ideas where to get new links;
• how you can deal with competition and become top in a long-distance run;
• detailed analysis of direct competitors.

What you can learn about a competitor’s site:

• if competitors use SEO, what is their strategy and how it works;
• traffic amount (very approximate using third-party resources);
• best content type and quality pages covered topics, keywords;
• sources of links;
• site structure + internal linking scheme.

How to find competitors for your project?

The most obvious way may look like this: go to Google, enter keywords, and get to know your competitors, but as it turns out, this is not the best way. Instead, you can use such tools:

1. Ahrefs Competing Domains
2. Google with Ahrefs Toolbar or Keywords Explorer enabled
3. Traffic share by domains in Keywords Explorer

Let’s define the roadmap for each tool.

Ahrefs Competing Domains

Since there is an amount of SEO-based competitor analysis guides written by marketers and SEO experts, they all use as an example SEO sites and related vocabulary.

In our article, we decided to use the site of a crypto exchange, for which we will single out the competitive ones using the above tools.

The first thing we should do is enter the site into Ahrefs Competing domains. This reveals to us the sites that overlap with the top 10 keywords from the perspective of maximum overlap percentage. And right away we see several dozen competitor domains that can be investigated further. This is the first place to find competitors.

Google with Ahrefs Toolbar or Keywords Explorer

The next place to find competitors is Keywords Explorer, where you should also type in keywords and look at the results. You can select a country on which the result with metrics will immediately be issued.

In some cases, it would be better to use Google Ahrefs Toolbar enabled. These queries are less expensive, and there will appear a table with combined metrics for the domain and page under each search result. But the most useful thing is that this issue can be exported and in one table you will get a matrix for numerous competitors.

Traffic share by domains in Keywords Explorer

Another method is to use Share traffic from Keyword Explorer.

This tool allows you to analyze a large number of requests at one time. When you are about to enter a niche, then you already have a number of keywords that can be used. You should collect them in a table and immediately enter them into Keyword Explorer and analyze them.

Step-by-step Competitor Websites Analysis

What competitors to check first?

In the competitor websites list pay attention to relatively new websites with good results.

When we observe such a picture, it is very interesting to find out how such results have been achieved.

Does domain age matter for search ranking?

Practice shows that older domains are ranked higher in search engines. As a rule, over the years of their existence, such resources accumulate a lot of information that is indexed by search engines.

Therefore, if competitors with older domains work in the thematic niche, and you have a fledgling resource, then you will have to make up for this by increasing the download speed, content variety, link promotion, etc.

However, just because a domain was registered many years ago doesn’t make it strong:

• All this time, the website might not be indexed, not receive links, traffic and not exist at all.
• The site could change its owner, SEO team, budget, and so on.
• The graph of the growth of the link profile and traffic is much more indicative.

Step 1. General Ahrefs website overview

Step 2. Organic search tab

One of the most illustrative reports in terms of how serious they are about SEO is the tool shown below.

Step 3. Organic positions in Ahrefs – Organic search tab

It shows the number of keywords depending on the positions. We can see that most of the keywords are at the top. This is a good indicator.

You can see the number of pages by the result in Google, although this is not always accurate information. But just to look at and evaluate a competitor is enough.

Be sure to go to the site itself and check out their design (logo, fonts and color schemes, photos, cover text, widgets, etc.).

Step 4. Content and organic traffic analysis. Top pages report

Let us start with the Top pages report. This tool shows us the pages, top keywords, and the number of keywords that bring us the most traffic. You can add branded keywords directly to your filter so they don’t get in your way.

The top pages report is a filter for categories that can be used for Intent analysis. For example to check the most traffic pages from corporate blogs.

What to look at:

• number of keywords, not just traffic (to assess the overall potential of the topic);
• the number of backlinks (relative to traffic).

As a result, we receive ideas for content with good overall traffic potential (not just good single keyword frequency) that don’t need a lot of backlinks.

You can find additional keywords besides the ones that bring lots of traffic.

Step 5. Keywords count as an indicator of overall traffic potential

Step 6. Check websites

Look at the competitors’ pages and study their successful guides, UI and UX, design, and customer flow. Perhaps you can do something better for your site.

Step 7. Check the competitors’ Featured Snippets

Hint! Use these reports for different purposes:

• Top pages report for analysis at the site/domain level;
• Organic keywords report for the page or category analysis;
• Top Subfolders/Subdomain for structure/section analysis.

The missing semantics

Step 8. Content Gap

You can look at organic keywords to see how they intersect several sites at once. You add your site to the filter so that it does not rank, and start to analyze the sites of competitors. We receive keywords for which three or two of your competitors rank. You’d better use a keyword filter right here.

Step 9. Content Gap Report at the pages or categories level

You can analyze not only websites but even categories and individual pages. To do this, there are a number of separate tools that suggest which keywords are used frequently. You can take your article on this topic and add 3-5-10 articles about your competitors to this report to analyze them. There will be keywords in the search results that can be added to your page since these keywords are already bringing traffic to your competitors.

Backlinks sources in business niche

Step 10. Niche link sources

Similar to the Content Gap Report, you can add 10 websites of your competitors to this report and find sites that link to several competitors at once. You can often find categories here where you can be added absolutely free.

When we turn to an individual analysis of backlinks, the first thing we pay attention to is the graphs of the Referring Domains growth, but this indicates more the amount of effort expended than the result.

Don’t start with Backlinks or Referring Domains, but rather go to the Best by Links report.

Step 11. Best by Links are the pages with the highest number of referring domains.

Although these pages may not always be high-traffic.

You can also look at the report called Best by Links’ Growth, where you will find the pages with the best link growth. This is either fresh content or pages that people have been referring to recently.

Advice:

• Use Backlinks report at the page level
• At the site or domain level: use reports Best by links, Best by links’ growth, Referring Domains

Technical analysis of competitor’s website

What should you check?

• Page load time
• How mobile-friendly the website is
• Simple on-page SEO mistakes

First of all, any page of the site needs to be viewed by the load time, as this is one of the ranking factors for Google now.
Using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, you can see how friendly the page is to mobile devices. This is necessary since a large percentage of traffic comes from mobile devices. You can add a competitor’s site to Ahrefs Site Audit to see if there are simple SEO mistakes.

So that the work done is not wasted, at the last stage, it is necessary to bring together all the data. That is why you need to enter the results in a special table (enter the site and its main metrics). The last stage will be to analyze the data obtained and draw conclusions about your place among the rest of your industry.

This type of SEO research allows you to discover all the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, compare them with your own strategy, and understand what you are doing wrong and how to fix it.

In fact, such a strategy is a specific guide to action that will help you find the answer to the question: what to do to get ahead of the competition?

Ahrefs released several updates to their tools several months ago, some of which are freely available and incredibly useful. In this article, you will not only learn about them but also how to apply them in practice.

Updated Organic keywords

What distinguishes it from the old tool version is historical data by months with past dates. You can observe the changes since the beginning of this year: keywords that are bringing in more traffic and changes in rankings.

Next, you can see what keywords the site was ranked for in the past. For example, this is a crypto news website, and if you look back, at the beginning of 2019 it was a news site that was ranked for completely different keywords.

And there is a keyword filter. It identifies new and lost keywords, as well as keywords that have improved or declined in rankings.
For example, using the “new” filter, you can see only new keywords for which the site has begun to rank in the last three months.

Then there is a one-way feature that was not originally planned by the developers, but eventually, it was announced to become a separate button. This button provides the ability to find keyword cannibalization for the site.

Cannibalization is when several pages of a site rank at the top for the same keyword. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad, depending on the specific case. If such pages distract attention from the ones you need, then you can rewrite them. But there are cases in which it plays into your hands.

For example, one such case is illustrated in the picture.

And right in the Organic keywords report there is a SERPs history. For any keyword, you can use this drop-down date picker to get an idea of what search results looked like in the past, see which sites were before, and where your site was in comparison to others. It is something like a time machine for a search result.

In addition, there is an abundance of filters that can be used immediately in Ahrefs. For example, here are five filters that you can see in the picture. And there is a cool list of ideas for creating awesome content and getting traffic.

Updated Top Pages 2.0 are the best organic website traffic pages

This report shows the best website pages for organic traffic.

Analyzing competitors, observing significant and important changes on their sites is good for promoting and working on your website. Therefore, it is important to watch its traffic history together with the history of new pages.

Next, similar to organic keywords, we can now compare the current period with a year, month, or several months ago and see how the traffic on the page has changed since that time.

For example, by choosing a range to compare with the beginning of the year and sorting the “Change” column in descending order, we get a list of pages that have started to bring the most traffic to the site since the beginning of the year. For the sites we work with, we can sort in reverse order the pages that worsened their traffic the most.

In the upper right corner, there is a switch that toggles the change column between percentage view, absolute value, and a graph that will show the traffic-to-traffic ratio in bars.

In addition, a filter by page status has been added. Page status is either a new page that Ahrefs has started to see in SERPs that it hadn’t seen before, or a lost page that has disappeared from SERPs, or one that hasn’t changed.

The coolest application is to monitor competitors and see what new articles they have published, new pages that start to grow, rank and appear in search results for keywords. For example, let’s compare January of this year, set the status “New” and see for the Lifehacker website pages that were published only in this half of the year and which have already started to increase traffic.

Link opportunities – Potential internal links

Internal links:
1. Ensure the user movement on your site.
2. Pass the PageRank to the pages.
3. Search engines use anchor texts and text next to them in algorithms “to understand the content on the page”.

The most obvious way to add internal links to a site, taking into account the keyword, is the command site: next comes the site name and the keyword.

This is a manual process, where you can enter only one keyword and you do not know if there is a link to the page you would like to pump up. Therefore, there is the Link opportunities tool.

What Link opportunities do:
Collects 10 best (by traffic) keywords for the pages of your site.
2. Looks for mentions of these keywords on other pages of the site.
3. Shows the possibilities for placing internal links (only if the link is no longer there).

This is what this report looks like.

The same functionality is available for free in Ahrefs and is called Webmaster Tools.

Average Frequency vs Monthly Keywords Frequency

One of the latest updates in Ahrefs is Average Frequency or Monthly Frequency for keywords.

Where does the traffic come from?
It is calculated quite simply – knowing the frequency of the keyword, the frequency of the number of clicks on the search results, then the number of clicks is distributed between the search results from the first to the nth position by the percentage of clicks.
The curve is not constant, and there is a curve for each keyword. The data depends on the data that was collected from different services. Summarizing this data of all keywords, the traffic that the site receives is calculated. All tools calculate the traffic that sites have received to date based on the average frequency, average search demand over 12 months, and subtract the estimated traffic that the site receives.
A lot of keywords are influenced by seasonality, trends, peaks and valleys. Therefore, the Ahrefs team added a value not only for the average frequency but also for the monthly frequency. There is a toggle that allows you to calculate the historical traffic of the site according to the trend graph of that keyword.

This is the picture of studying traffic while considering a trend. There is a special tab that allows you to do this, which is very important and useful for certain sites.

The same toggle is in the Top pages, where the shape of the graph changes completely.

Updated Referring Domains Report

The new report combines three old reports. In the picture you can see the status of links from this domain, it is either live, or a lost link, or it is lost during this period of time.

There have been added many filters for user convenience.

Here is an example of using these filters:

• Only Do-follow backlinks
• DR more than 40
• Traffic of the donor-website bigger than 100
• Links to the target website less than 3
• Only new ones
• For last 6 months
• Only from content

Update of the Backlinks Report

First of all, Ahrefs team updated the speed of report appearance. For example, instead of 6 seconds, blog loads in 2 seconds. For larger sites, this is even more of a difference. The loading of reports has been accelerated by 3-5 times.

There is no longer any division into indices: “Live”, “Recent”, “Historical”. Now the indexes are merged, you can see the indexes of all reports. Instead, the links have a state that can be:
Newly published. This is when a new page was found with a link to a site that analyzes the page.
New. This is when a link was added to an existing page.
New restored. This means that at some point in time the link disappeared for some reason, and then reappeared on the page.

There is also a filter by link type.

Filter by the type of the acceptor content is a very useful thing. There are two options: linking to the html page or to other files and resources. Most of them will be links to an image. If you want to look at links to files and resources that have a different format, then in two clicks you’ve got a Backlist report.

The whole set of filters is also present for the backlinks report. The metric to pay attention to is the number of links to other sites from the page. The following formula applies here: the more pages a page links to, the more PageRank is scattered and the less PageRank goes to each page from which the page links. It means that it is better to get links from pages that link to a small number of other sites, then your site will have more weight and bonus. This filter can be applied directly to the report.

Traffic Data from Google Search Console

In order for you to receive data, you need to confirm ownership of the site through the Google Search Console. Ahrefs will keep this data for longer than 16 months. On one page you can see all traffic graphs for all sites, projects that you run. More updates are planned related to backlinks and traffic.

Ahrefs Toolbar

This extension is not entirely new, just redesigned. There is a list of question that Toolbar can help to find the answer to.

For ex. the results in the USA are ranked from the German blog. Ahrefs Toolbar now has such a function as a search simulator from other countries. It will not replace searching from another country, but it will become a fairly accurate and useful simulation. The issue depends not only on the country, but also on the language of your system. And here is an example of a search simulation for Backlinks for the US but in German on the standard domain Google.com. You can find that the articles of the German blog are ranked in the top.

We described main changes added to Ahrefs tools and reports in several last months. Hope it help you to skyrocket your organic traffic and define SEO possibilities clearly in 2022.

By Natural Links