Competitor research and analysis may seem like the same, but it is not. It is about knowing what your competitors are doing. It is about probing their keyword and linking plans while realizing their current strengths and weaknesses. The bottom line is that you are trying to understand what is making your competitors rank. When understanding your competition, it is better to examine their past and present activities, along with implementing ways to track their future activities. Even though there are lots of tools available, this guide emphasizes the easy tips you can use in your work.

Before we get into the topic, let’s check a few tools for better SEO competitive research:

#1 Alexa–It allows the tracking of global web traffic of your and your competitor’s websites. Alexa is a must-have tool to transform data into competitive values. If you already have the Moz toolbar, you can peep into any website’s ranking. It helps you to keep track of your competitor’s backlinks, traffic, keywords, etc.

#2 InfiniGraph – It tracks trends in social media circles. InfiniGraph combines user targeting to find the brands and consumer-to-brand interactions in real-time.

#3 SpyFu–This is a powerful tool. It lets you analyze data of your competitor’s keywords in organic search and AdWords. Just add the competitors’ keywords and get an overall view of their strategy.

Other tools include Monitor backlinks, Open Site Explorer, Moat, iSpionage, Followerwonk, Simply Measured, Complete PRO, and more.

Let’s explore how you can make use of all the data you’ve collected:

Find your competition

You need to know who your competitors are before you can analyze your competitors. But how? When starting your competitor research, you will want to share it with your local competition. Visit the local online business directories in your niche to find potential competition. If you have global competition, see whether you can learn anything from their online presence.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the most important element for SEO success. Use keyword research tools and check which keywords are supposed to do well for their site. While doing this, find the keywords that you’ve skipped and start optimizing your site for them. Also, don’t forget to check the location of the keywords.

Backlinks

For Good SEO rankings, backlinks are other backbones. This is the reason, why you need to examine the backlinks of the competition. Check their numbers, origin, anchor text, etc… and you will get a clue on how your competitors are ranking. You may also get some backlink ideas i.e. you’ll find your competitor is getting good backlinks from popular sites that you didn’t even know.

Social Media

Social media is one of the powerful platforms to get more traffic. This is why you can’t skip this step of checking your competitor’s profiles. Though this step is harder to perform, you can start your research from social bookmarking sites. Take a quick glance at some of the popular social bookmarking sites to see if your competitors have posted anything there and how popular the posts are.

To analyze your competitors more clearly, seek the help of Digital Evolutions. They are the most reputable web development companies in Dubai that help you reach the right destination.