Analysis Of Competitors' Websites: An Extensive Guide


But how can you achieve this goal? You must pay close attention to how competitors do it and exceed them. In this article, I will give some advice to analyze competitors' websites effectively, from A to Z.
2. How To Identify Direct Competitors
3. How To Collect General Information On Competitors' Websites
- How To Identify Business Features
- How To Check The Age Of A Website And Domain?
- How To Check A Website's Indexing?
- How To Analyze The Traffic Source?
- How To Compare Website Visibility Metrics
- How To Find Missing Keywords?
- How To Explore The Keyword Lists Of Competitors?
- How To Analyze The Competitors' Website Structure?
- How To Find Top Competitors' Sites And Compare The Content?
- How To Analyze Metadata?
- How To Conduct PPC Analysis By Domain Or Keyword?
- How To Research Keywords For A PPC Campaign?
- How To Check Landing Pages?
Wrapping Up
Why Do You Need To Analyze Competitors?
Let's say your competitor is a small online store that drives more traffic than you. After detailed analysis, you conclude that they attract customers through social media and advertising. However, the website usability is quite low, so customers don't come back.
Another situation: your competitor gets a lot of traffic, and their website is user-friendly, but they don't rank high in search results due to low-quality SEO optimization.
After the analysis, you can assess all the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, compare them with your strategy, understand what you are doing wrong, and how to achieve better results.
How To Identify Direct Competitors?
For instance, a huge multi-store establishment is not a direct competitor to a small online store.
How To Find Competitors Manually?
Then, you can type each query in a search engine and discover the competitors that use the same keywords for promoting their websites in organic search. Note that search engines often personalize the results based on your past queries. Therefore, you should always use the "Incognito" mode: the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + N for Google Chrome or Opera and Ctrl + Shift + P for Mozilla.

However, a manual search for competitors has several disadvantages:
How To Identify Competitors Using Serpstat?
Also, there's even better news:

For a complete list of relevant competitors, go to the "Competitors" report:


How To Collect General Information On Competitors' Websites?
How To Identify Business Features
- the range of products/services offered by a competitor;
- prices for these products/services;
- interaction with the audience: promotions, discounts, bonuses, promotional codes, payment, and delivery conditions;
- reviews that users leave;
- customer support: an online consultant or chatbot that helps users make choices or place an order;
- participation in events aimed at increasing brand cognition, etc.
As a result, you will identify which business aspects of your competitor are better from the client's point of view and introduce new ideas into the organization of your own business.
How To Check The Age Of A Website And Domain?
You can check the trust level with Serpstat. First, enter a domain in the search bar on the main page and click "Search." Then, go to the "Backlink analysis" section and check the "Backlink overview."



How To Check A Website's Indexing?
Why do you need to check website indexing?
The vast majority of users get to your website through search engines. If the website pages are not indexed, the user will not find them. The more pages are included in the search engine index, the higher its potential traffic. That is why checking website indexation is essential when analyzing competitors' websites.
How to check website indexing?
The number of indexed pages can be checked using the "site:" search command in Google. Type the operator and domain address in the search bar, and press "Search" to start analyzing.

How To Analyze The Traffic Sources?
- To assess your traffic potential;
- To determine whether to buy a particular domain;
- To select websites for guest posting;
- To find out the conversion of competing sites;
- To find their strengths and weaknesses;
- To choose an example to strive in content and usability.
You can use Serpstat for it. To do this, enter the competitor's website in the search bar and click "Search."

More detailed information about traffic on the website can be obtained via SimilarWeb. Enter the website address in the search bar on the main page and press Enter.

Below, you can see the countries analyzed website receives traffic from.

Next, find out the main channels of competitor traffic to understand where visitors come from. Finally, if your strategy doesn't include any profitable traffic sources, go for it!

Here you will find the top 5 keywords for which a competitor ranks in the organic search and uses in advertising campaigns.
Next, you will see how much traffic is driven to the website from social media and the percentage of visits to a particular website.


How To Compare Website Visibility Metrics
In simple terms, visibility is how well the website is "visible" in the search. The higher this indicator, the more visited the website will be.
Why Do You Need To Analyze The Visibility Of Competitors' Websites?
How to determine website visibility?
Check the visibility of your website and competitors using Serpstat. To do this, enter the domain name in the search bar of the service and click "Search." Serpstat will redirect you to the Summary Report.


How To Analyze Competitors' Keywords
How To Find Missing Keywords?
All sites are promoted with a specific list of keywords that reflect their subject. According to them, search engines rank the website, and potential customers can find a website in search results. Therefore, searching for missing keywords will help you enrich the website's pages with relevant, high-performing keywords.
Both of these can be done with Serpstat in just minutes. First, enter the domain address in the search bar, select a database, and go to Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Domain vs. Domain. Then, enter competitors' websites in the corresponding fields, or select them from the list offered by Serpstat. Click Compare.
By analyzing the keyword lists of competitors, you can find additional ways to drive traffic to your site. For instance, you may find missing keywords useful for your project or gather ideas for your content plan.

How To Explore The Keyword Lists Of Competitors?
If a competitor ranks higher in search results than your website, you may have incorrectly assigned keywords to the site pages.
You can check the distribution of keywords among the website pages using the unique "Tree view" Serpstat report.
Enter the website address in the search bar, and go to Domain analysis → SEO Research → Tree view.

How To Analyze The Competitors' Website Structure?
Compare competitors' websites from the top of search results with yours to understand how to optimize the website correctly and increase its usability.
Let's say you're an online store owner trying to decide on the text size for product cards. Analyzing the pages of successful competitors could be really helpful. Take a look at top competitors' 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 are the descriptions;
- is there a blog, and how is it designed;
- is the website loading speed high enough;
- which pages have high rankings and for which keywords.
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 PageSpeed Insights to check the website's load speed. Enter the page address in the search bar and click "Analyze." PageSpeed Insights will also suggest troubleshooting tips.
There's also Sitespeed.me:


How To Find Top Competitors' Websites And Compare The Content?

But first, it's essential to understand the competitors' content strategy and their tricks to attract the audience.
- homepage;
- website categories;
- product pages;
- a blog;
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, Alt, and Title attributes;
- usage of lists;
- readability of the content and its usefulness;
- keywords and their occurrence;
- spamming and keyword stuffing used in the text.
By the way, these characteristics can be checked using the Serpstat plugin for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.

- 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 the blog:
- 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, their size, Alt and Title attributes;
- usage of lists;
- what topics and themes are the most popular;
- the general essence of the content: news, user-friendly and informative content, etc.
Such a detailed analysis will help devise your content strategy, eliminating the drawbacks and mistakes made by competitors and possessing their advantages.
How To Analyze Metadata?



How To Conduct PPC Analysis By Domain Or Keyword?
You can't carry out an accurate analysis of competitors in contextual advertising without using special tools. So we are going to show a few steps using Serpstat.
Serpstat analyzes a domain's ad campaign keywords and shows relevant competitors. Enter the domain address in the search bar and select the search system, and go to Domain analysis → PPC Research → Competitors.

It will be helpful if contextual advertising is not yet configured. The report will show the closest competitors for each keyword.
Enter a keyword in the search bar and select a database(region). Serpstat will redirect you to the Keyword Research tool. Then, go to PPC Research → Competitors.

How To Research Keywords For A PPC Campaign?

- What kind of ads do competitors make?
- What is their unique selling offer (USP)?
- What about their pricing strategy?
- How often do they hold promotions and bonuses?
To see competitors' ads in Serpstat, go to the PPC Research → Ads examples report and analyze the appearance of advertisements by keyword.

In the Domain Analysis tool, go to PPC Research → Domain vs. Domain. Using this tool, you can make a parallel comparison of two or three domains.
Some competitors are offered by the platform, or you can manually enter them in the corresponding fields and click "Apply."

The number of unique and common domain keywords is displayed on the right of the chart. All numbers are clickable: Serpstat will redirect you to the corresponding report after clicking.
How To Check Landing Pages?
However, this method has disadvantages: it's time-consuming, and the information you get might be incomplete and inaccurate.
Therefore, it is most effective to conduct analysis using SEO automation services. For instance, with Serpstat, you can check landing pages and ads by domain and keyword.
What should you pay attention to when analyzing landing pages:
- Design;
- Product (service) presented;
- Communication with the customer.
To check landing pages by domain, go to Domain analysis → PPC research → Ads landing pages.

Research On Competitors' Backlink Strategies
However, "more" is not always "better." Search engines recognize irrelevant links if a website uses black-hat SEO methods like buying/selling/exchanging links. As a result, a website will get an algorithmic penalty and seriously lose its position. Therefore, it is essential to observe the quality of backlinks and control links' appearance on your website and among competitors.
Within competitive backlinks research, we have to:
- analyze backlinks and anchors of top competitors;
- evaluate effective link-building strategies;
- check the quality of backlinks;
- control the growth of the backlink profile.
Analyzing competitors is an excellent way to obtain data to build your backlink profile. The leading indicators that you need to pay attention to are:
How To Determine The Quality Of A Backlink Profile?


How To Check A Competitor's Anchor List?
Why do you need to analyze the anchor list of competitors?
An anchor list must be true-to-life for effective promotion. Incorrect anchor and non-anchor links and keyword stuffing in your list can get you a search engine penalty, which will cause your website to lose traffic, so it must be avoided at all costs.
Anchor analysis can be done using the Serpstat Backlink analysis tool. For example, click on the "Anchors" tab and get the following report:

Backlink analysis includes checking the quality of linking donors, anchor list, backlink growth dynamics, etc. Regularly check backlinks to keep your website adjusted to search engine updates.
Wrapping Up
Most SEO professionals select dozens of keywords by which they are eager to get to the top, and then monitor the site's position in the search engines for these queries. However, this approach is not entirely trustworthy. When using this method, specific keywords will be missed, and you will not track the objective dynamics of growth and growth.
Automate the tracking positions, making it faster and more effective using the Serpstat tool — Rank tracker. You can add keywords to your project if you want to group them using tags and track positions of both your website and competitors.
Speed up your search marketing growth with Serpstat!
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