Analyzing competitors is always useful, but most often comparative analysis I see a basic report on the age of the site, its TCI, the number of pages in the index, etc. There is little such information.

To optimize the pages of your site, it is not enough to simply write meta tags and headings; you need to analyze the TOPs. An analysis of competitors will tell you how you can improve your website and make it clear what your competitors have that keeps their websites in the TOP.
To conduct competitor analysis, you need to find them. How to do this, Evgeny Aralov wrote in his previous article: “”. Therefore, we will not repeat ourselves and will immediately move on to how to analyze competitors’ websites and why it is needed.

Basic competitor analysis

Typically this type of analysis includes:

• Checking the site registration date.
• Thematic Citation Index, also known as TCI.
• Number of pages in the index.

Basic analysis is convenient when you have little time to evaluate a site and need to quickly figure out which sites are currently in the TOP.

Based on the registration date, we find out the age of the sites in the TOP. If we have a young site, and in the TOP there are only “old people”, we will understand that the age of the site is not on our side. In such a situation, you need to carefully analyze your competitors in order to understand how to make your website better.

Based on the TCI, you can roughly determine the link profile of sites from the TOP: the higher the TCI, the better the link profile. However, now this figure is very approximate.

The number of pages will indicate the size of the site - in some topics, preference is given to large information resources.

Basic site analysis is ineffective, since the information obtained is very vague and approximate. It is only suitable for a quick inspection of competitors, but nothing more.

How to Conduct Basic Competitor Analysis

For basic analysis, you can use the free service CY-PR.com.

If there are many competing sites, you can use .

This service is convenient when you need to analyze a large number of sites. It is paid, the cost of checking is 0.025 rubles per site. As a result of the check, we get the following report:

Analysis of behavioral indicators

Most often, this type of analysis is needed when doubts arise about the behavioral indicators of your site.

It includes the following indicators:

• Total traffic for the month.
• Traffic per day.
• Time on site.
• Bounce rate.
• View depth.

By comparing the time on the site, we will see where visitors spend more time. If competitors have a higher rate, by analyzing their landing pages, we can understand how they retain users.

A large number of refusals may indicate that a person does not find the necessary information and leaves. By analyzing competitors with low bounce rates, you can figure out how to improve your rate. It should be taken into account that the bounce rate is a very vague parameter and needs to be analyzed carefully. The best way to look at the long click rate is visitors who spent more than a minute on the site. Typically, there should be at least 10% of such visitors on the site. The site itself is also important, for example, a one-page site on Google will have a bounce rate of 100%. Therefore, if you see a high bounce rate on your website, do not panic, but start analyzing your competitors.

Browsing depth will show the number of pages that the user opened when visiting the site. If competitors have a higher indicator, perhaps they have better interlinking or blocks with links look more attractive, motivating the user to click on them.

Time spent on a site, bounce rate, and browsing depth are closely related to each other, and improving one metric can lead to improving the other.

Case Study

At the beginning of last year, one information portal had a bounce rate of about 70%. After conducting a similar analysis, it was discovered that many competitors with a low bounce rate in their articles used “infinite scrolling” - when you scroll further after reading an article, the next article is loaded. By introducing such functionality on our website, we have significantly reduced the bounce rate, and also increased the time on the site and the depth of browsing.

When analyzing the above-mentioned indicators from competitors, it is convenient to immediately look at their traffic - this is checked with one tool.

By comparing competitors' traffic, we will understand who has more of it. In cases where your traffic is lower than that of your competitors, you need to analyze where they get it from - from what requests. We'll look at how to do this below.

You can read about how to work with behavioral factors in our articles:

How to check the behavioral indicators of competitors

For this I use the SimilarWeb service.

It shows the number of visits per month (Total Visits), time on the site (Avg. Visit Duration), viewing depth (Page per Visit) and bounce rate (Bounce Rate). In addition to these indicators, you can use it to learn about a lot of others, for example, look at your competitors’ traffic sources. Overall this is a good and free service.

To view daily traffic, I use the RDS API application.

Analysis of competitors' key phrases

This type of analysis includes finding competitors' queries for which they receive traffic. Knowing what queries your competitors are promoting for, you can expand your semantics. Also, the semantics of competitors can suggest new directions for promotion, for which new pages can be created.

I recommend reading about how to further expand the semantic core in our article “”.

How to check promoted queries from competitors

Of the purely free services, there is, mentioned in the basic analysis of competitors, CY-PR.com. He shows search phrases, by which the site is visible, but there are few of them.

Link analysis of competitors

Basic link analysis usually includes:

• Number of referring domains.
• Total number of links.
• Link anchors.

If you need to study competitors in detail, I recommend reading the instructions “”.

First of all, link analysis of competitors is needed when promoting a website under Google. In Yandex, the effect of links is not so noticeable.

By comparing the link profile of your site with your competitors, you will roughly understand how many links you need to increase. By analyzing the links and their anchors in more detail, you will find out which links your competitors are taking and will be able to draw up a rough plan for building up your link mass.

By downloading competitors' links, you can find sites for placing links to your site. To do this, you need to find domains that host several competitors. Most likely, you will also be able to link to your site on these domains.

How to conduct basic link analysis

The most popular service for this is Ahrefs.

This service allows you to analyze the link mass of a site in detail.

You can also see link anchors there:

Using the service, you can study in detail the link profile of competitors, link growth, etc. The main disadvantage is its price. The basic plan costs $82 per month.

If you need a basic competitor link analysis, you can use free analogue MegaIndex.

It will show basic information about the number of links, their growth and anchors.

In addition, it allows you to see what kind of links they are and their anchors. There is a possibility of export.

Tracking competitors' positions

You need to track your competitors' positions in order to understand what is happening in the search results.

Sometimes there are situations when a site suddenly loses positions. In a panic, we may start making unnecessary edits to pages, which will only make things worse. In such situations, it is best to monitor the positions of competitors. It may well be that their sites are also down, which means this is shaking the entire search results. If the drawdown affected only your site and several competitors, analyze which pages sank for them and for you. Try to find something in common. This will help you quickly understand what’s wrong with the site and return it to the TOP.

How to track competitors' positions

Everything is simple here: many people use services to track the positions of their website, and you can also track your competitors there. In my work I use SEOlib. It has a separate tab for competitor sites in the project:

This is convenient because I don’t need to create separate projects for competitors and I always have the opportunity to compare sites’ positions.

Site loading speed analysis

Website loading speed is one of the indicators by which a search engine will evaluate it. Loading speed also affects the behavioral indicators of the site. In cases where you are sure that your site is better than competitors, but it is not in the TOP, you should pay attention to the loading speed. Perhaps competitors' sites are better technically optimized and their pages load faster. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site loads at least no longer than your competitors, and better yet, faster.

How to check

The first service we need is WebPagetest.

In it you can see in detail how the site loads. This will help when finding errors.

It shows basic information about the site's loading speed.

You can also find options to improve loading speed here:

Website structure analysis

This analysis is needed to understand how to optimize a website, how to make it competitive, and what competitors have that you don’t.

For example, we have an online store and we don’t know whether to add text to product listing pages. In this case, you need to check the pages of competitors from the TOP. We checked, they don’t have the text. The question arises: how then to optimize the page to give it more relevance? Again, look at the pages from the TOP.

You need to compare absolutely everything that arouses interest on competitors’ pages: how their filter is structured, what anchors are used for product cards on listing pages, whether there are short descriptions; if this is an article - how it is formatted, etc. Then perhaps you will find a way to improve your site.

Example from practice. This is what part of the table looks like, according to which I compare the promoted site with competitors:

In the “Amount” field, I see how many competitors’ sites use the functionality I’m interested in; the last column is my site. This is only part of the table. Based on the results of this check, decisions were made to optimize pages, which bore fruit.

Therefore, try to compare everything as meticulously as possible.

How to check

You need to understand that all this is purely individual for each project. I check everything manually by making a table like this:

In the first column, I indicate the availability of the functionality I’m interested in, then I check whether competitors have it and see how it’s implemented in mine. The functionality of interest is selected individually for each site.

Results

Analysis of competitors' websites is useful, thanks to it we can always find out how else we can improve our website and prepare a plan for its optimization.

To conduct basic competitor analysis, use CY-PR.com, and SEOlib is more convenient for working with lists. To analyze the behavioral indicators of competitors, the similarweb.com service is suitable. If you need to understand why competitors more traffic, analyze their keywords through spywords.ru, Serpstat or at least free CY-PR.com.

To evaluate the link profile of competitors, I recommend using ahrefs.com, and for basic link analysis, the free megaindex.ru is suitable. To better understand what's happening in the search results, track your competitors' positions. For this I use SEOlib, you can use any position reading service that is convenient for you.

Check the loading speed of your site and your competitors' sites using webpagetest.org and PageSpeed ​​Insights. Remember, the faster your site loads, the better.

When you need to make a decision on optimizing website pages, their design, and improving the website as a whole, do not be lazy to do a structured analysis of competitors in as much detail as possible.

If you are confused and don’t know how to develop your website, contact us. We will audit your website, compare it with competitors and prepare recommendations for its improvement.

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It is currently one of the most popular methods of brand promotion. And in order to achieve 100% success in this matter, experts use SEO competitor analysis both at the start and already in the process of promoting the resource.

What is SEO analysis of competitors' websites?

You are already asking yourself: why do you need competitor analysis and how can you use it? In response to this, we can say that this process is one of the most important stages in promotion. A thorough analysis of competitors' websites allows you to understand exactly how and for what queries they promote their resources. Based on the data obtained, it is much easier to prepare a semantic core, develop your own effective promotion strategy and make the project competitive in the market and on the Internet.

How to spend SEO analysis of competitors?

Based on your field of activity, tasks and popularity of business topics, analyzing competitors' websites can be quite difficult. Indeed, to carry it out, it is important to take into account many factors at the same time. The following algorithm of actions will help to simplify the process at the stage of preparing the semantic core.

Stage 1. Identifying Potential SEO Competitors

This stage can be called preliminary, but it is no less useful and important, because when building cooperation with a completely new, little-known client in a new industry, a team of specialists, as a rule, knows nothing about it. A lack of information can lead to errors when compiling a semantic core for a website and may not take into account the specifics of your business. Therefore, you should carefully consider this task and, if necessary, provide a list of your business competitors to the SEO company.

It is necessary to understand that potential competitors for an SEO company are not only individuals and companies that offer similar products and services. This is also any other site that simply competes with the promoted object in search engine results for identical key queries. It is the entire range of competitors that will be considered by specialists.

Stage 2. Confirming the correct choice of SEO competitors

After carefully studying possible competitors, it is time to make sure that you have made the right choice. What needs to be done for this? View the list and highlight those companies and sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you have selected. Note what positions they are in now.

In addition, you can also expand the semantic core by analyzing key queries using various services. Add to the list keywords that you became aware of after studying competitors’ sites, as well as similar phrases for which you are not promoting, but can get your share of traffic to the site. Here you should not forget about the relevance of the request to your site (i.e. if you do not sell parquet board, then you don’t need such a keyword, despite the fact that your competitor is promoting on it).

SEO analysis of competitors during promotion

Experts use both competitors’ sites. It is worth noting that great importance here they have:

• current position of the site in ranking;
• volume of search traffic;
• keyword relevance;
• indexed pages;
• quality of incoming links to the domain;

When promoting high-frequency and competitive queries, you cannot ignore competitors’ sites; here, not only the text and occurrences of keywords on the page are evaluated, but also the format of the information presented, as well as the structure of the sites. Most likely, you will need to develop and improve your website according to the current top (if necessary, add “features” that your competitors have, such as “service calculator”, “online consultant”, etc.).

It is quite difficult to fully understand all stages of SEO analysis of competitors, and therefore we suggest you turn to real professionals - the promotion specialists of Artox Media Digital Group. The information received at the start will serve as a starting point for further promotion of your brand, products and services on the market, and conducting an SEO competitor analysis at a later stage will allow you to achieve the desired top. Thanks to the competence of our team, high professionalism and rich experience in solving similar problems, you can be confident in the result.

With help online services you can immediately remove a set of ratings of all competitors’ sites and compare them with yours

To do this, you need to add your website to the list of competitors, upload the list to the Checktrust service, create new project, set the parameters that need to be removed (you can remove all available ones), wait for the analysis to complete, download the received data in Excel format.

What parameters will we get:

• Age
• Spam level
• Number of pages in index
• Number of links
• Trust is a complex parameter of trust on the part of search engines
• Page loading time - which is very important
• Even attendance data is possible

*It is important to understand the specifics of programmatically collected data! The data may not be accurate; you should not rely on it blindly, especially when it comes to competitors’ attendance - this can only be taken into account as Additional information. Data from different analyzers may differ from each other.

But in any case, an approximate picture of how much your site is losing to competitors in terms of age, number of pages, quality and links will already be available to you.

Analysis of competitors' queries (keywords)

How to find out what queries your competitors are promoting for?

We look at what keywords their pages are optimized for.

We parse pages, for example, with the SeoFrog program. We get data on the title and description meta tags and look at what key phrases are in them.

We look at the headings H1-H6 on the website pages.

Install the SEO META in 1 CLICK extension in your browser. While on the landing page, activate the plugin and get data on the phrases that are used in the headings on the page.

To collect all the keywords for which the site is ranked in the Yandex and Google search engines, of course, you will have to use paid tools such as Semrush, SerpStat. But you can immediately obtain a large array of data for comparative semantic analytics. These services have it all detailed instructions to download the required parameters.

The main tasks of this stage of analysis:

1. Find out the keywords you should use to promote your website
2. Find keywords for which there are no sections or pages on your site to promote
3. Optimize the structure of your website sections for new key queries and directions
4. Evaluate the quality of your meta tags compared to competitors
5. Compare the depth of development of the semantic core of your site and competitors.

Analysis of competitors' texts

As part of the article, we can recommend the CheckTrust service, which will help you select the purest white donors.

Visual inspection and analysis of competitors' marketing

No services can replace a careful inspection and study of sites with your own eyes!

We research competitors, look for their successful solutions for:

• Navigations (menus, widgets, navigation tips, linking)
• Design of end-to-end blocks (header, footer)
• Design of standard pages (home page, catalog section, product or service card, shopping cart, order form, contact page, about us, price list, etc.)
• Content (images, texts, documents, videos, graphics, etc.)
• Marketing (USP, promotions, conditions, special offers, etc.)
• Design and decoration.

And of course we compare it with our website. If competitors have excellent, well-polished websites in terms of usability, content, internal optimization, navigation, etc., etc., and everything is dull and sad for you, then the chances drop significantly.

It is also worth paying more attention to the commercial factors of Yandex. One of the most important factors is assortment! If you have much fewer goods and services than the top leaders, this will play a negative role when trying to promote.

How to use the data obtained to promote your website

So, you have carried out a selection and analysis of competitors on the Internet. What to do with this information?

Semantics and content

• Make a plan for redesigning the structure of the website sections - which ones need to be added, maybe something can be eliminated
• Set priorities for creating new pages and preparing information to fill them
• Make a plan to develop semantics - which new clusters need to be studied more deeply

Internal optimization

• Think about the existing pages on the site, what can be changed in their optimization (rewrite texts, add new words, change markup and code)
• Think about how to deal with common factors: design, functionality, commercial factors. It is impossible to promote a site that is far behind the top ones in terms of its technical equipment and design.

External optimization

• Build a link building strategy using quality donors who link to top competitors.

Good luck with your promotion!

SEO analysis of competitors may be needed in two cases. First: you are planning to create a website and immediately think about optimizing it. That is, you are thinking about how to make sure that the resource gets to the TOP for the necessary queries and is there next to or (more preferably) above competitors. Second: you ordered a website (and at the same time promotion) from a neighbor (brother, godfather, matchmaker), who made it cheaper than professional web studios, but made it so that your company can only be found on the Internet with the help of the winner of the show “Battle psychics."

Either way, you're in trouble now. There is a website, but there are no clients from the Internet. And if there is, it is only thanks to expensive contextual advertising. The competitors are doing well. The site feeds them. The situation needs to be corrected urgently!

First you need to identify your competitors

Sometimes they are known. You may have seen their advertisements/heard about them from clients/secretly use their services yourself.

Sometimes you need to do a little research work. A very simple job.

Enter in the search several queries for which you are promoting (plan to promote) the site.

For example, if you sell windows, write in the search “buy windows” or “order windows”, or “window installation”, or “window price”. All sites on the first page of search results are your competitors.

Those sites next to which the inscription “Advertising” appears (which launched contextual advertising), are also competitors. They also need to be studied. But this article will focus specifically on those companies with whom you compete in organic search results. For now, ignore sites marked “Advertising” and focus on those that did not pay search engines to get to the TOP.

Important nuance! Don't forget about regional listings. Search engines know where you are and show you companies that are located in your city.

If you live in Chernigov, and your services (products) are intended, for example, for Kyiv, adjust your output. When entering the desired query into the search, add the name of the required city to it. That is, look not just for “windows price”, but for “windows price Kyiv”.

Yandex also allows you to specify your location. The required button is located at the very bottom of the search results page.

Click on the target icon and enter the city for which your product is designed.

What parameters of competitors' websites need to be taken into account?

How more features You will copy and improve the sites that are in the TOP for your queries (simply copying is not an option), the greater your chances of getting to the first page of search results and getting customers from search.

These are the parameters I pay attention to when I conduct an analysis of my clients’ competitors:

1. Attendance.
2. Number of pages in the index.
3. For what queries in the TOP.
4. Number and quality of links.
5. Traffic sources.
6. Domain Authority and Spam Score.
7. Micro markup.
8. Download speed.
9. Meta tags.
10. HTML page structure.
11. Design and usability.
12. Content chips.
13. Texts (where would we be without them).

Free tools for SEO competitor analysis

Let me clarify right away: I’m not trying to talk about all the free services that can be used for SEO audit of websites. Here is only what I use myself Lately. Before preparing this post, I specifically did not look at articles on the topic of SEO tools. I don’t like theory (and it’s stolen from other people’s sites). This is just practice. Only what I figured out myself and what really helps.

Checking Attendance

SimilarWeb

The service allows you not only to view traffic over the last 6 months (Total Visits), but also provides information about the average viewing depth (Pages per Visit), bounce rate (Bounce Rate) and time on the site (Avg. Visit Duration). In addition, SimilarWeb has many other useful free features, which will be discussed below.

A little useful tip! It is important that the tool provides information about traffic for six months. You can study the data of several major competitors and predict the approximate traffic of your resource. If the amount of traffic for all competitors decreases in December, then most likely it will decrease for you too. There is no need to panic and punish the SEO specialist. We need to think about how to attract customers from additional sources in December.

Pr-cy.ru

Like SimilarWeb, this service also has a large number of options.

By the way! The fact that almost everyone knows about pr-cy.ru does not mean that it should not be used. I saw how quite large (and therefore expensive) SEO studios added data from this free, simple and well-known service to their report.

Checking the number of pages in the index

To check how many pages of your competitor’s website have been indexed by Yandex, use the operator url:. This operator must be added before the resource name. An asterisk (*) should be used after the name. Look at the screenshot:

You can find out the number of pages indexed by Google using the operator site:. It also needs to be added before the resource name:

Not always a lot of pages = a lot of traffic. It's all the same important parameter, which cannot be ignored. And if your 10-page site is visited by 100 people a day, and your competitor’s 100-page site is visited by 1000 people a day, it is quite possible that you need to work on increasing the number of useful pages.

How to find out what queries your competitor is in the TOP for?

There are two approaches to solving this problem. First: enter the website into the service.

The already mentioned SimilarWeb will do:

On the right are the keys from organic search results, on the left from contextual advertising.

Another option is the Ukrainian SerpStat, which is disguised as a cool multilingual foreign service:

As you can see, SerpStat provides more data: you can see positions, frequency of each phrase and other information.

I note that both services make it possible to view keys in the TOP even without registration. Of course, they don’t show all the keys for free, but often free data is enough.

The second approach: check each competitor for the keys you are interested in.

This can be done, for example, using seolib.ru:

Conveniently, this tool allows you to select a region and three search engines at once: Yandex, Google and Mail.ru. You can check 25 queries per day for free.

Number and quality of links

Linkpad

Advantages of the service:

1. You can see almost all of your competitor's incoming links.
2. You can find out your competitor's anchors.
3. You can see the percentage of non-anchor links and links with the nofollow attribute.

A few years ago, data from LinkPad (or a similar service) was enough to make serious progress. You get to know donors, negotiate with their owners to place links to your resource, and watch your positions grow. Now such tactics can also be beneficial, but links alone are clearly not enough to significantly increase positions and traffic.

SerpStat

It provides quite a lot of information: the number of referring domains, the quality of links (Serpstat Page Rank and Serpstat Trust Rank), anchors. detailed information available free of charge for up to 20 donors only.

Determining traffic sources

I think that everything is clear in the screenshot, except for the Display column. These are ad clicks.

For free and in a couple of seconds, SimilarWeb will show whether your competitors are investing in promotion on social networks and email marketing, and whether it is worth thinking about working with these traffic channels.

Definition of Domain Authority and Spam Score

Micro markup

You can check what micro-markup has been added to the website of a company that competes with you for customers using Structured Data Validation Tool from Google.

Each type of micro markup will be shown as a separate block. The same tool will show what code is used to implement this or that type of markup. Micro markup is understood and taken into account when ranking by both Google and Yandex.

Measuring site loading speed

It not only tells you the download speed on mobile and desktop, but also gives recommendations on how to improve the speed.

We must strive to ensure that the download speed is 100 or at least 85, regardless of the competitor’s performance. But if the budget is limited, and you see that other companies in the TOP are also not doing well with this characteristic, direct the money in a different direction for now.

Meta tag analysis

You can index the entire site and immediately see all the meta tags of the resource that competes with you in the search results. This is possible, for example, using a tool from MegaIndex:

You can view each page separately. The Firebug browser extension will help:

HTML page structure

Firebug is also great for this purpose. You can also use standard browser capabilities. In Google Chrome, just right-click and select “View code” or “View page code”:

Why study the HTML structure of your competitors’ online platforms?

At a minimum, to learn how it uses h2 and h3 headings on optimized pages. At most, to copy his chips. Maybe he uses some new tags like details or picture. Maybe he designs the order buttons somehow thoughtfully. Like this:

Here the main key is inscribed in the button and looks appropriate and unobtrusive.

Design and usability

Pay attention to what you like and what you don't like. Do you think it’s convenient to read and leave reviews on a competitor’s website? Great! Send the link to your layout designer and assign the task.

Are you frustrated by a form with 10 required fields? Make sure this doesn't happen to you. Make half of the fields optional and let the manager clarify the missing data after receiving the application. Or break up filling out the form into several steps. First there are three fields and a “Next” button so you can click on it and fill out a few more fields.

Content chips

Every little thing can raise the page several positions. Perhaps your competitor was once in 12th place in Yandex search results. Then he added a video to the page, and rose to 11th place (even if the video is not unique, it works). Then pictures appeared on the page high resolution with correctly written attributes - that’s already the TOP 10.

Tables and animation can also affect a site's ranking. Remember everything that you don’t have and that is interesting to users.

Analysis of competitors' texts

As you understand, I can write a whole article about this. And not even one.

In short, I advise you to look at how the headings and subheadings are composed, the use of keys (especially important is how they are written at the beginning of the text), and the volume.

Personally, I almost never use text checking services and prefer to do everything manually. If I recommend any free tool, it would probably be text.ru:

You can see which words appear most often on the analyzed page and try to use them yourself. I don’t recommend paying attention to the percentage of “water”, “spam” and other similar indicators.

There is no point in checking the uniqueness of texts. No matter what others have, you still need unique content. If someone is in the TOP with a post whose uniqueness is 93% according to Advego, this does not mean that exactly the same uniqueness will in any way help you get traffic from search.

Important! Be sure to check what sections are on competitors' websites. I'm talking about sections such as “Why us?”, “Reviews”, “Cases”, “Contacts”, etc. It may seem that they are not tailored to the keys and do not affect optimization. In fact, they are important. Both for search engines and for your potential clients.

A couple more thoughts on SEO competitor analysis

Today, there are hundreds of ways to check the SEO parameters of websites. I tried more than half of them. Still, I settled on the ones I mentioned above. They really help, they are free and simple. I hope at least some of them are useful to you.

Why do competitor analysis at all?

Understand how things are in the niche, dive deeper into the topic of the client’s business, find non-obvious points that are important specifically for this topic. Analysis is important for making strategic decisions on the project and understanding the project’s place in the niche.

I want to immediately warn you about the risks. We will learn to read a competitor's strategy, but we will never have accurate data about whether it works - we can only guess and test.

I will focus on the analysis of online stores, since everything there is more or less easy to compare.

1. Setting goals

Every analysis should begin with setting goals. It is important not just to write down the indicators, but to understand what they tell:

• in which areas you need to catch up with your competitors. SEO is still an integrated approach, the result depends on many factors;
• what successful points of competitors’ strategy can be adopted;
• what strategies competitors are not using. This question is especially relevant if the site being analyzed is a leader in its field.

For example, the following elements of the strategy can be called clearly successful:

• creating additional types of pages, creating additional linking;
• creating additional benefits for the user: installment plans, credit, discount systems, free delivery;
• carrying out work to increase reviews using email newsletters after purchase.

By successful, I mean strategies that allow the project to grow and do not contradict the requirements of search engines. For example, spam and highlight strategy keywords in texts may give growth at first, but it contradicts the requirements of search engines and does not work in the long term.

2. Identifying competitor sites

The second important step is to identify your direct competitors.

2.1. Analyze search results for key queries

Explore search results for different groups of queries (high-frequency and mid-frequency) and select resources that are relevant to you and have a similar structure.

Enter the site name and view the competitor report. Pay attention to the “Common Keyphrases” and “Visibility” column. The more common keyword phrases, the more likely it is that the site is your direct competitor, and the greater the visibility, the more likely it is that the competitor is using a smart strategy.

Among the selected sites, check the region and see that the structure is similar. Avoid aggregators or sites with broad topics.

If the site is young, the “Competitors” section of Serpstat cannot be used - there will be almost no statistics or only weak competitor sites will be shown, which make no sense to focus on.

2.3. Take information from the client

The client knows his competitors well, so you can ask him for a list of their websites. However, it is worth remembering that this list is not final and the client can compete with these companies online, but not offline.

3. What to analyze and how to draw conclusions?

3.1. Domain age determination

You should compare the age of the analyzed domains - use Whois for this. If your project is young, you need to compensate by working harder on other ranking factors. Therefore, this needs to be taken into account in the strategy.

3.2. Attendance comparison

Traffic information can be taken from SimilarWeb. It allows you to see the total traffic to the site (data is approximate), the percentage of traffic from search, email, paid traffic and other channels.

What conclusions can be drawn after comparison:

• understand whether there is room for improvement in the topic area;
• which competitor has the most traffic and from which channel;
• in the future, try to understand why the competitor has so much traffic and connect new channels.

The number of pages in the index can be checked using the "site:" operator.

If the difference between the number of pages in Yandex and Google is too large, then the site contains junk pages or other problems due to which the site is poorly ranked by the search engine.

3.4. Research of the semantic core

First of all, it is worth looking at the semantics of the site being analyzed. This can be done using Serpstat:

Pay special attention to those competitors who have the most words in their semantic core. Next, try to understand why they have so many keywords.

Then you should download competitors’ semantics, which are used to rank competitors’ sites, but not your site.

• which competitor has the most keywords;
• is there room for improvement in the topic;
• what pages can be added or optimized;
• what new page types can be added;
• in which product groups competitors are outperforming the project in terms of product range.

3.5. Structure analysis

Pay attention to the quality of the structure. Does a competitor bother to create pages? for low-frequency requests? Is the structure organized logically?

Does your competitor have any standard pages that you don’t have? What queries are covered by these pages?

How the structure is expanded: with tags, landing pages or filters?

After the analysis, you can understand the level of optimization of the site structure, the potential for expanding the structure and the direction in which it can be developed.

3.6. Content Comparison

It's important to understand what your competitors are doing in their content strategy.

To do this, we divide the site into types of pages that are useful for promotion:

• home page;
• categories/subcategories;
• product cards;
• blog pages;
• other typical pages, depending on the niche.

3.6.1. Content analysis of the main, categories/subcategories includes the following points:

• how many characters are in the text;
• Is text markup used - headings H1, H2, H3;
• whether images are used;
• whether bulleted and numbered lists are used;
• Is the content generally readable?
• whether spamming methods and keyword inclusion are used.

3.6.2. Content analysis of product cards may include the following items:

• are there any informative product descriptions;
• how many characters are in the description;
• whether the content on product cards is spam;
• are all the characteristics given, are there video reviews, reviews and other content useful to the user.

3.6.3. Blog page content research:

• how often the content is published;
• how many articles are there already;
• how many characters does one article contain?
• a blog is written based on requests, useful content is simply posted, or company news is just published.

After the analysis, you can draw conclusions about what texts to order by volume and what good tactics on filling out the product card can be adopted. Should you start a blog and how often should you publish content?

3.7. Meta information analysis

Analysis of Title, Description, Keywords, H1 headings is performed by dividing the site into the same types of pages as when analyzing content strategy:

• home page analysis;
• analysis of categories/subcategories;
• analysis of product cards;
• blog page analysis;
• analysis of other typical pages.

The following should be taken into account:

• is there any keyword spam?
• are synonyms used?
• Only generation templates or manual meta tags are used;
• is there a certain structure for constructing meta-information, what is it like;
• is information about the unique selling proposition used in meta tags, is a call to action used in the USP; Is the USP clear?

As a result, it is possible to draw conclusions about whether competitors use spam methods and take them into strategy. good practices building meta-information, understanding the level of optimization of meta-information among competitors.

3.8. Comparison of link strategies

To obtain the necessary data, we use Ahrefs or Serpstat.

What can be compared:

• number of referring pages;
• number of referring domains;

• anchor list (what it looks like: natural/unnatural);

After analyzing the results, you can understand whether the sites are promoting organically, using a mixed approach, or using spammy link building methods.

If, after analysis, it is clear that the competitor is using a smart link building strategy (the link profile is varied, mentions of the site on third-party resources look natural and are included in the topic, the resources are thematic), you can upload domains that link to the competitor’s site. It is also important to look at which regional domains are worth building links from, based on the experience of competitors. Then check the link quality indicators, filter out and get a list of domains for link building. It is important to avoid the temptation to mindlessly post where your competitors are posting, and avoid repeating spammy link strategies.

3.9. Linking analysis

The main types of pages are analyzed. It is necessary to determine whether manual linking is used in texts on category pages, linking from card pages to filter pages, additional linking blocks for cross-sales: “they buy with this product” or “cheaper in a set.” Other types of linking can also be used, which potentially increase the weight of the promoted pages.

3.10. Availability of https

The presence of an https version of the site gives, albeit a small, plus to ranking in search engines. After analyzing your competitors, you will be able to understand whether you need to move your site to https. If you are still on http, then why not move to https and get an additional advantage in ranking?

3.11. Presence of a mobile version of the site

Availability mobile version has long become not a feature, but a necessity - in order to reach an additional audience of mobile users. As a result, you can better understand which competitors are reaching the mobile audience and which are missing out on this opportunity.

3.12. Multiregional and multilingual

You should see if competitors have other language or regional versions of the site, as well as separate pages for regional queries.

Regional versions of a website or page for geo-queries may result in greater coverage of key queries.

3.13. Download speed

Analyzed for typical pages, for example:

• home page;
• categories/subcategories;
• product cards;
• blog pages;
• other standard pages.

The check is performed for both the mobile and desktop versions. You can use Google Page Speed ​​Insights or analogues (for example, GTMetrix, WebPageTest).

The main readings are recorded:

• mobile version optimization percentage (N/100);
• percentage of desktop version optimization (N/100);
• mobile version server response time;
• server response time of the desktop version.

If your site's loading speed is very slow compared to your competitors, increasing it should be a priority.

3.14. Social activity analysis

You should record the activity indicators of your subscribers on social networks. The most indicative is the number of likes/shares/comments/reposts of blog articles. On YouTube you can see the total number of views on a channel.

Based on the activities of subscribers and their involvement, you can see what social network should be included in the strategy if it is not already included. Especially if this channel is active among competitors.

3.15. Business Features Research

The question to ask is why? potential client goes to a competitor? Analyze possible options.

Most popular versions:

• a competitor has a lower price;
• the competitor has a larger assortment;
• the competitor has more goodies: bonuses, cumulative discounts, promotions, free delivery, favorable credit and installment terms, pickup points;
• the competitor has more reviews (on the website, in Google My Business) and they are fresh;
• a competitor has an online consultant who is constantly in touch.

As a result, ideas for developing the project’s marketing strategy may appear. For example, organizing promotions and other activities to engage users, participating in events as a partner to promote the brand.

At this stage, you will understand what products you should think about expanding. For example, if a client has a narrow niche, the entire range of this niche should be present. Otherwise, it will be more profitable for the consumer to order everything on the competitor’s website (if all the items are already there), rather than looking for them in different stores.

You can also collect ideas to increase loyalty: for example, if competitors have information about the project team, mission and values, a creative “About Us” page, information about the company’s participation in exhibitions, conferences, and so on.

4. How to structure the results of competitor analysis

But it’s inconvenient to look at the table every time, so I recommend writing down conclusions based on the results of the analysis of each direction in a simple Google Docs in the format:

• [a few words about the situation now];
• [what you need to do to get ahead of your competitors].

It is worth noting those points where your project is the leader - you need to know your strengths.

conclusions

When performing a general analysis of sites, you should pay attention to both General characteristics, and on specific areas that are important for promotion. Depending on the type of business, indicators can be removed or added.

Here are the basic ones:

• domain age;
• attendance;
• number of pages in the index;
• semantic core;
• Site structure;
• content;
• meta information;
• link strategy;
• linking;
• availability of https;
• availability of a mobile version;
• multiregional and multilingual;
• download speed;
• social activity;
• business features.

At the start of work, such a superficial analysis is a must have for a specialist. It shows well the features of the topic and allows you to understand the current situation.

I would be glad to receive additions from you - what else can be analyzed and what will it give?