How to Conduct an SEO Audit on Your Competitors: 5 Tips to Getting Ahead

Conducting an SEO audit on your competitors will give you a better picture of what you’re up against. By identifying the best SEO practices that they follow and what their failures are, you can mimic their success and avoid making the same mistakes.  

So, do you know which companies show up for your target keywords and how well they rank in the search engine results pages for those terms?

Do you know what keywords they use to reach out to their target customers? Are you aware of how they get their organic traffic?

In this article, we will share with you five simple tips for conducting an SEO audit in West Palm Beach.

Best SEO Auditing Tools

• HubSpot Website Grader
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console

• Bing Webmaster
• Google Trends
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• BuzzStream

• Moz Pro
• SpyFu

5 Tips to Auditing Your Competitors’ SEO and How They Get Organic Traffic

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step you need to take when doing a competitor analysis is to first define who your target audience is.  

Create buyer personas to help you understand who your best customers are, what pain points you need to address, and how they behave online.  

This will provide insights on how they will find you in the SERPs: what terms they use to look for the products or services you offer, what channels they search on, and how they go about the buyer’s journey.  

With this information, you’ll know what long-tail keywords to use at each stage of the buyer’s journey, what types of content to serve, and how to engage them and bring them closer to a point of purchase.  

Once your customer persona is ready, list all the keywords and topics your target audience uses when searching for your products or services online, and what relevant topics they'll likely be interested in.  

This will be the key to reaching your target audience and generating leads.  

2. Identify Your Competitors

You can't perform a competitive analysis if you don't know who you're up against. Define your key competitors and always be on the lookout for any emerging new ones.

So, how exactly can you determine who your key competitors are?

Search for the keyword phrases you want to rank for and see which companies rank on top of search results. Then do the following:

• Get more search traffic than your site.  
• Rank for multiple keywords.  

These businesses are not only competing for clicks in the search results but also for your customers and sales.  

Other ways to find competitors include:

• Use social media to search for competitors in your local area.
• Use Google Alerts to keep tabs on mentions of your keywords. It may help you discover other potential competitors you weren’t aware of.  
• Conduct search on other search engines like Bing to discover other competitors.  

• Use SEO tools like SEMrush or AHREFs to identify your top direct competitors.  

When identifying your competitors, rule out anyone who receives extremely high Search Traffic because it can be challenging to compete against industry giants.  

3. Analyze How Established Your Competitors Are

Now that you know who your competitors are, it’s time to analyze the competitive landscape.  

To do this, you’re going to need to look at some key stats and West Palm Beach SEO metrics, including:

• The Number of Referring Domains – A strong site gets a lot of quality referring domains.
• Domain Rating – This metric refers to a website’s backlink profile. The higher its score, the more solid their backlink profile is. It’s important to evaluate your competitor’s DR score compared to yours. For example, if your site is DR33 and a competitor is DR50, you’ve got to work on improving your domain rating.  
• Ahrefs Rank (AR) – AR determines the quality of your competitors’ backlink profiles. The higher a site’s ranking is, the more solid its backlink profile is.  
• Estimated Organic Search Traffic – The more traffic a site gets, the better it performs in the search results.  
• The Number of Keywords Rankings – The more keywords they rank, the better their performance on the search engine results pages.  

Always compare your competitors’ results to yours. The more gap there is between you and your competitors, the more catching up you need to do.  

However, these metrics don’t tell you everything you need to know about your competitor’s SEO in West Palm Beach. You also need to do the following:

• Determine your competitor's link-building efforts by checking the rate at which they’re gaining new linking sites.  
• Find “superfans” or those who link out to your competitor’s content regularly. It might be strategic to build a relationship with them.  
• Find your competitor’s broken pages and figure out what those pages used to be. Then, publish something similar but better and offer your working content to those who linked to that dead source.  

4. Figure Out What They’re Doing to Drive Organic Traffic

Take a look at your competitor’s best-performing pages and the keywords that are driving organic traffic to your competitor’s sight.  

You can do this by running an organic keywords report for each of your competitor's domains. Exclude any branded keywords and only choose those terms that are highly relevant to your brand or business.  

If you also prefer to find keywords that you stand a chance at ranking against, stay away from phrases that have a high keyword difficulty. Go for keywords with a low KD score instead.  

Aside from keywords, here are the other things you need to do to unearth how they’re getting traffic to their site:

Analyze Your Competitors’ Featured Snippets

Featured snippets show up for 19% of all search queries. 9% of all clicks also go to them.  

If your competitors show up a lot for featured snippets, there’s a huge chance that you can do the same. Plus, you don’t have to be in the no. 1 spot to get featured! 59.2% of featured snippets come from sites that are in the 2 to ranking positions.  

Discover Content Gaps

Look at your competitors’ content structure and determine keywords or topics they rank for and find any gaps you can fill with a much better piece of content.  

Focus on keywords or topics that have low to medium difficulty but high search volume opportunities. They’re the ones that are easy to rank for but are guaranteed to drive traffic to your site.  

Find Your Competitor’s Most Popular Content

Your competitors’ best-performing pages might be bringing in tons of traffic. Get some of that traffic by writing about the same overarching topics. You can use Ahrefs Site Explorer Top Pages report to help you identify these pages.  

Identify Your Competitor’s Most Linked Content

Identify the most-linked-to pieces of content that your competitors are creating so you can focus on creating the same pieces and covering the same topics to get more links for your site.  

In some cases, you can devise even better-performing strategies. For example, if your competitors’ text-heavy content gets linked to a lot, you can create an infographic to attract even more links.  

5. Find Out Your Competitor’s PPC Keywords

If your competitors are paying a lot of money for certain keywords, those keywords are likely generating significant revenue.

Use Ahrefs Site Explorer PPC keywords report to determine your competitors’ PPC keywords. Then, go through the data and find low-volume, high-converting keywords.

For example, a keyword like “make an e-commerce website” (80 searches/ month) will likely have a higher conversion rate compared to “free website maker” (1000 searches/ month).  

Aside from this, you also want to analyze their PPC ads. What best practices are they using for their copy to attract clicks? Optimize your meta titles and descriptions accordingly to attract clicks and generate more organic traffic!  

Take Your Business to The Next Level with West Palm Beach SEO!

Doing an SEO audit and competitive analysis is a must if you’re serious about ranking high in the search results and getting more business online.  

Now that you know what you’re up against, it’s time to develop an SEO strategy that will put your website ahead of the competition.  

Keep note of your strongest competitors’ best SEO practices and follow them to get the same number of backlinks and traffic to your site.

At Digital Resource, our SEO specialists in West Palm Beach will work with you to create a custom SEO plan that will make you rank high and help you achieve business goals. Contact us today to start getting more traffic and leads online!

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