Competitors Websites

How to analyze the competitors’ website structure?

The logical and user-friendly structure of the website and the implementation of a comprehensive list of pages with the correct internal linking is half the success of the website!

Compare competitors’ sites from the top search results with yours to understand how to optimize the website correctly, increase its usability, and generally make it competitive.

For example, you are an online store owner trying to measure the text size to add to the product cards. The analysis of pages of successful competitors will help in this case. Have a look at top competitive texts and detect what can attract users on these pages:

• check what was implemented to make the website more user-friendly;
• what filters are used, its structure;
• what anchors are on the product listing pages;
• what descriptions are there on the pages;
• is there a blog, and how is it designed;
• is the website loading speed high enough;
• which pages have become top-ranked and by what queries.

Such analysis will help you understand which direction to move. But it’s essential to do everything wisely to not turn your website into an unsuccessful copy of a competitor’s website.

How to check the website loading speed?

You can use the PageSpeed Insights service to check the website loading speed. Enter the page address in the search bar of the service and click “Analyze.” PageSpeed Insights will show you also troubleshooting tips.

You can also use Sitespeed.me:

How to find top competitor’s sites and compare the content?

Serpstat will also show you the most traffic-generating pages of competitors. Enter the competitor’s address in the search bar of the service and click “Search” → go to the section “Domain analysis” → click on the tab “SEO Research” → open the “Top Pages” report.

Content intelligence is one of the most effective techniques in content marketing. But, first, it’s essential to understand the competitors’ content strategy and their tricks to attract an audience. 

An analysis of their top posts and comparing the content of competitors’ websites with your own will help here.

To make a qualitative comparison, you need to understand which scheme to work with.

We divide the website into page types:

• home page;
• website categories;
• product pages;
• a blog;
• other sample pages that can be found using Serpstat (see the previous paragraph).

Then we gradually analyze the content.

1. Check the home page and pages of categories:

• number of characters;
• meta tags title and description;
• the contents of the H1, H2, H3 headers;
• number of images, size, its Alt, and Title attributes;
• usage of lists;
• readability of the content and its usefulness;
• keywords and its occurrence;
• spamming techniques and stuffing used in the text.

By the way, these characteristics can be checked using the Serpstat plugin for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

2. For product pages, you should check the following:

• availability of the product description and its information content;
• number of words and characters;
• usage of spamming methods;
• availability of the list with characteristics of the products;
• accessibility of video reviews;
• the handiness of comments, ratings, and other valuable data.

3. For blog check the following:

• meta tags title and description;
• frequency of publications;
• what is the total amount of materials at the moment;
• what is the average size of articles;
• the contents of the H1, H2, H3 headers;
• number of images, its size, Alt and Title attributes;
• usage of lists;
• what topics and themes are the most popular;
• what is the general essence of the content: news, user-friendly and informative content, etc.

Such a detailed analysis will help draw up your content strategy, eliminating the drawbacks and mistakes made by competitors and possessing their advantages.

https://youtu.be/eH2-DOZSgXk

Semrush Tool

Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Semrush tools and reports are able to help marketers that work in the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management.

How to Use Semrush to Supercharge Your SEO

1. Identify Your Competitors

To identify your organic competitors, just enter your domain in the Semrush search box and navigate to the “Main Organic Competitors” column in the overview report.

You’ll find your top 5 organic competitors here. These are the domains you’re competing against in Google for the same keywords. The more keywords you share with your competitor, the higher the competition level will be.

For example, a quick search on “hootsuite.com” showed these top 5 organic competitors:

You’ll also see columns for competition level, common keywords, and the total number keywords the competing site is ranking for in Google’s top 100 search results.

To view more competitors, hit the “View details” button below the column. You’ll see a complete list of organic competitors. Click on any of these competitor domains to unravel key data from each site and level up your SEO strategy.

2. Identify Your Competition’s Top Content

Semrush also allows you to analyze your competition’s top-ranking content.

Enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar and then navigate to:

Competitive Research > Organic Research

Open up the Pages tab to view your competitor’s top-performing content.

This report shows all the pages your competitor has ranking in the top 100 Google search results. Semrush will provide further estimation of the total organic traffic, traffic percentage, the total number of keywords that piece of content is ranking for, and additional data on backlinks and paid keywords.

You can export the list of keywords onto a spreadsheet for manual review and sorting. These are all the keyword variations you should use while creating your own content. 

3. Identify Your Top Ranking Keywords

Organic traffic is going to be one of the major drivers of traffic to your website. This feature allows you to review the top-ranking organic keywords for your site and helps you determine whether or not your SEO strategy is working.

You can also view your competitors’ top-performing keywords and discover potential content ideas and topics for your site.

To view your top ranking keywords, enter your domain in the Semrush search bar and navigate to:

Competitive Research > Organic Research

Open up the Positions tab and examine the results here.

Don’t just focus on the list of keywords. Pay special attention to the following five columns on the right to determine how each keyword is performing in SERPs:

• Search intent
• Position
• Volume
• Keyword difficulty (KD) score
• Traffic percentage

This will show you how your site is performing on Google and whether or not you need to tweak your organic SEO strategy to focus on a different set of keywords.

4. Find News Ways to Monetize Your Website

If you’re a blogger driving decent traffic to your site for certain topics, you’re probably always on a lookout for new ways to monetize your website. There are several sites out there that are willing to pay for the traffic you are driving through organic results.

Here’s how to use Semrush to find new ways to monetize your site:

1. Enter your domain in the search bar to generate a domain overview report. I’ll be taking the popular social media marketing blog, Social Media Examiner (socialmediaexaminer.com), as an example.

2. Scroll down to the Main Organic Competitors section and hit “View all” to see the full list of organic competitors.

3. Check out the Paid Keywords column. For this example, let’s pick Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) since it has 584 paid keywords.

4. Next, click through the number in the Common Keywords column next to Hootsuite.

5. This will open up the Keyword Gap tool. In the drop-down menu below each domain, make sure you pick “Organic Keywords” for your domain and “Paid Keywords” for your competitor’s domain.

In the resulting report, scroll down to see the complete list of shared keywords.

As you can see, I have highlighted two specific set of keyword phrases — “automate instagram posts” and “social media marketing podcast”.

In both these cases, while Social Media Examiner is currently ranked at #1 organically in organic search results, Hootsuite is bidding for the same keywords on Google Ads to rank at #1 in paid search results.

So in order to make full use of this feature, reach out to some of the websites which are bidding on terms you’re ranking for and see if they are interested in placing ads on your site. Negotiate an ad fee and start monetizing the organic traffic on your site.

5. See the Breakdown of Your Competitors

When you do competitor research on Semrush, it produces a report which has hundreds, even thousands of organic competitors. The amount of data at your disposal can be overwhelming.

As a result, it’s important to first consider your top 5 or 10 competitors and review their strategies individually.

The report on organic competitors can be filtered by:

• Competition Level
• Common Keywords
• SE Keywords
• Traffic
• Costs (USD)
• Paid Keywords

With a detailed report from Semrush, you’ll get a deeper understanding of what your competitors are doing, how you’re stacking up against them, and what you can do to improve your ranking in SERPs.

6. Find High-Quality Link Building Opportunities

To perform competitor backlink analysis on Semrush, enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar and then navigate to:

Link Building > Backlink Analytics

In the Backlinks Overview report, pay special attention to Referring Domains and Backlinks.

The overview report will also contain useful graphs and widgets on changes in the referring domains and backlinks, new and lost backlinks, categories of referring domains, referring domains by authority score, link attributes (follow, nofollow, etc.), backlink types, and more.

When you click through the Referring Domains number, you’ll get a deeper understanding of your competitor’s link profile. You can then use advanced filtering and sorting options to identify potential link building opportunities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA6Ll4FkFZk