Intro to SEO Competitive Analysis 101

A good, solid competitive analysis can provide you with priceless insights into what's working for other folks in your industry, but it's not always easy to do right. In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus walks you through how to perform a full competitive analysis, including:

• How to identify your true competitors
• Keyword gap analysis
• Link gap analysis
• Top content analysis

Plus, don't miss the handy tips on which tools can help with this process and our brand-new guide (with free template) on SEO competitive analysis. Give it a watch and let us know your own favorite tips for performing a competitive analysis in the comments!

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today we're talking about a really cool topic — competitive analysis. This is an introduction to competitive analysis.

What is competitive analysis for SEO?

It's basically stealing your competitors' traffic. If you're new to SEO or you've been around awhile, this is a very valuable tactic to earn more traffic and rankings for your site.

Instead of researching blindly what to go after, competitive analysis can tell you certain things with a high degree of accuracy that you won't find other ways, such as:

• what keywords to target, 
• what content to create, 
• how to optimize that content, and 
• where to get links.

How to do an SEO competitive analysis

How does it do this?

Well, instead of researching just in a keyword tool or a link tool, with competitive analysis you look at what's actually working for your competitors and use those tactics for yourself.

This often works so much better than the old-style ways of research, because you can actually improve upon what other people are actually doing and make those tactics work for you.

1. Identify your top competitors

So to get started with competitive analysis, the first challenge is to actually identify your top competitors.

This sounds easy. You probably think you know who your competitors are because you type a keyword into Google and you see who's ranking for your desired keyword. This does work, to a certain degree.

Another way to do it is to look at the keywords you rank for, because the challenge is you probably rank for far more keywords than you believe you do.

Moz, for instance, ranks for hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of keywords, and we want to know at scale who are all the competitors ranking for all those different queries. This is very hard to do manually.

Fortunately, there are a lot of SEO tools out there — Ahrefs, SEMrush — many tools that can tell you look at all the keywords that you rank for across thousands of SERPs and then calculate, using advanced metrics, exactly who your true competitors are.

I'm happy to announce that Moz just released a tool that does exactly this. We're going to link to it in the transcript below.

It's called Domain SEO Analysis. It's a free tool. Anybody can use it.

You simply type in your domain, and we look through all the keywords that your site ranks for in our database, we look at all the competitors, and we use some advanced heuristics and we match those up and we tell you who your true competitors are. Once you know your true competitors, you can continue with the rest of the analysis.

2. Perform a keyword gap analysis

The first step that most people take in doing an SEO competitive analysis is identifying the keyword gap. Now for a long time, when I was new to SEO, I heard this term "keyword gap" and I didn't really know what it meant. But it's actually really simple.

It's simply what keywords do my competitors rank for that I don't rank for, and that's the gap. The idea is that we want to close that gap if the keyword is valuable or high volume. The trick is you can do this on your own manually. You can see all the keywords you rank for using an advanced keyword tool and then list all the keywords your competitors rank for and then combine those lists in Excel. It's a long, tedious process.

Fortunately, again, major SEO tools, such as Moz, can do this at scale for you within seconds. If you go to Moz Keyword Explorer, you simply enter your domain, enter your top competitor's domain that we found in this first step, and it will list all the keywords that your competitors rank for that you don't rank for. 

You can then pull this into a spreadsheet and find keywords with high volume or keywords that are valuable and relevant to your business.

This is an important point. You don't just want to go willy-nilly after any keyword your competitor ranks for. You want to actually find the keywords that are relevant to your business.

3. Perform a link gap analysis

So after you do that, we also have the cousin of a keyword gap analysis — link gap analysis.

This is a very similar concept, because you need links to rank. But where do you find the links? So you want to ask, "Who links to my competitors but does not link to me?"

The theory here is that if someone is linking to your competitor on a similar topic, they are more likely to link to you because they are in that business of linking out to that type of content.

An advanced tip is you often want to look at two or more competitors. The idea is that if someone is linking to multiple sources but not to you, it's more likely they'll link to you if you have superior content.

Again, SEO tools can provide something like this. You can list all the backlinks to yourself or your competitors and combine them in a spreadsheet. But the tools make it much easier.

In Moz's Link Explorer, you simply enter your competitor, you enter another competitor and yours, and you can find all the people who are linking to those competitors but not to you.

An advanced tip that I like to use is do it at the page level. Don't look for domains that are linking to your competitors. Look for specific pages and you can do this in Link Explorer. We're going to show you in a little more detail in a guide I'm going to link to at the bottom of this post.

4. Perform a top content analysis

So we understand links, we understand the keywords. But what content do we want to create?

Top content analysis, this is very easy to do these days. You're basically looking for content that earns your competitors a lot of traffic or a lot of links.

The idea is if other people are linking to these things, then it's highly probable that you can earn links with similar but better content. So the idea is you go to a tool like Link Explorer. You can sort by top pages, and you pick out the content that has the most links for your competitor. Then don't just re-create the content, but make it better. This is called the skyscraper technique, the idea of finding content that does really well and then making it better.

Then once you have this, you go back to your link gap analysis and you reach out to those people who are linking to that content and you ask them for links, showing them the better content.

So that's it in a nutshell. When we put it all together, we have a very valuable process. We can go back to our individual pages, look at those pages that are ranking for our competitors. When you're all done, you can actually take your page, plug it into your keyword gap, and see all the keywords the page is ranking for.

Our original keyword gap analysis looked at the domain, but now we just want to know what the page is ranking for. We can add that into our own page and make the page even better. We can again reach out to the same people who are linking to this page, show them our better content, and that is the process.

New Guide & Free Template

Whew, I'm exhausted. This is a huge process. I went over it really quickly. Fortunately, if it went by a little fast for you, we just released a guide, "An Introduction to SEO Competitive Analysis." We're going to link to it.

Get the Guide + Free Template



It explains all these processes in much more detail. It's free to use. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey, I really enjoyed making this video. If you found value in it, give it a thumbs up. Please share on social media and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com