Marketers considering an SEO initiative face an almost endless list of on-site and off-site optimization tactics and tasks to complete based on an overwhelming amount of data. With limited resources, it’s critical to concentrate your efforts on the items that will provide the greatest return on your time and money.
Researching competitors to drive your SEO strategy is perhaps the most important weapon of any SEO. Acknowledging one’s weaknesses and potential opportunities in the seo competition and focusing on them might save a lot of time in your SEO growth.
To establish such a focus, conduct a SWOT analysis of your web presence to identify areas of priority in terms of keyword, content, technical, linking, and competitive positioning.
A thorough SWOT analysis for SEO provides a road map against which tasks can be tackled methodically. While keyword research should never be neglected, we could devote an entire SWOT analysis to keywords alone. We’ll assume the analysis here is based on a well-defined set of target keywords established for a specific point in time for the sake of a broader SEO perspective.
So How to Do a Proper SWOT Analysis
For this example, we have taken our website thatware.co and two other competitor websites namely:
npdigital.com/
In this SEO Comparison, we are going to use Ahref as our main SEO Tool. However, we will also be using other web apps as well which will be relieved.
Some Common SEO Stats
Competitor 1: NPDigital.com
Competitor 2: InfiDigit.com
Your Website: ThatWare.co
Observation: One of the competitors NPDigital are investing in paid advertisement which may be a potential threat as they might be stealing potential clients by bidding on some competitive keywords.
Top Performing Keywords:
Competitor 1: NPDigital.com
From an initial analysis of the top-performing keywords, it is evident that NPDigital is mostly
ranking on Branded terms which are earning them the largest chunk of their traffic. This indicates brand awareness is their main traffic acquisition strategy.
Competitor 2: InfiDigit.com
From an initial analysis of their top performing keywords, it is evident that most of their traffic comes from informational and seo based queries. This suggests that educational content marketing is their main traffic acquisition strategy.
Your Website: ThatWare.co
An initial analysis of the top performing keywords indicates a mix of both informational and transactional keywords ranking in the top 10 and driving the most traffic.
Observation: Although we rank for a significant number of keywords, our rankings are outmatched by INfDigit.com. Also, NPDigital has the significant number of traffic from direct searches which could be highly valuable in terms of intent.
Based on this, a mix of aggressive content marketing and brand awareness activities may be pursued to gain more organic rankings and direct traffic.
Traffic Demographics
Competitor 1: NPDigital | Competitor 2: InfDigit.com | Your Website: ThatWare.co |
From the above comparison, it is clear that both NPDigital and INFDigit drive a significant amount of traffic from Tier 1 countries. We should focus on targeted backlink acquisition from Tier 1 countries to close this gap.
Competitor Gap Keywords
In this we use a Gap analysis tool of any keyword research tool to find out keyword opportunities that are competitors are ranking for but we don’t.
Using the content gap tool we have 851 keyword opportunities in the USA alone with good volume and moderate keyword difficulty. These are potential content marketing opportunities that can be explored.
Traffic Value Analysis
Competitor 1: NPDigital.com
Competitor 2: InfiDigit.com
Your Website: ThatWare.co
A low traffic value indicates a lower quality of traffic. Both our competitors have a higher strength of traffic quality. This can be attributed to the fact that they are drawing most of their traffic from Tier 1 countries.
Website Quality Analysis using website.grader.com
Competitor 1: NPDigital.com
Test Results: https://website.grader.com/tests/npdigital.com
Competitor 2: InfiDigit.com
Test Results: https://website.grader.com/tests/www.infidigit.com
Your Website: ThatWare.co
Test Result: https://website.grader.com/tests/thatware.co
Potential Opportunities:
SEO Stats using WebsiteSEOChecker
- Thatware has high spam Score.
- The Percentage of Quality Backlinks is moderate however still less than NPDigital.com
- TF/CF Ratio is not ideal. Need to improve it to achieve near the Golden Ratio.
Inference
- From analyzing competitor keywords, we have uncovered multiple gap keyword opportunities with relatively low keyword difficulty and decent search volume.
- Those can be leveraged in our content marketing to gain more stable organic traffic.
- The majority of our traffic is from India which is not our ideal customer base. We can create alternate versions of the website using hreflang tags and get more backlinks from tier 1 countries. This will also improve the traffic value.
- The number of page requests is high. The more HTTP requests your website makes, the slower it becomes. Try reducing the number of files your site loads.
- ThatWare has high spam Score. Need to reduce it.
- The Percentage of Quality Backlinks is moderate however still less than NPDigital.com
- TF/CF Ratio is not ideal. We need to improve it to achieve near the Golden Ratio.
Final Thoughts
Doing such a SWOT uncovers many SEO opportunities to boost your SEO Growth.
