How to Conduct Competitor Analysis and What Approaches To Use At Each Step

The major advantage of Serpstat as an SEO platform is its ability to use both approaches to competitive analysis, which is why we will use it for our demonstration.

Another big advantage is Serpstat offers not only Google databases but also Bing. Bing includes its main demographic market – the US. This database allows you to check keywords' search volume, ads, SERP features, and positions. So, within one tool, you can use both approaches and both search engines for competitive analysis.

Also, additional use cases will help us go deeper and further than even the majority of digital marketing agencies, and SEO & marketing in-house teams go.

So let’s start with the basics and go through the typical steps of a proper Competitive Analysis:

Here we should focus on 3 main criteria:

So let's discuss how Serpstat tools can help you go through each of the listed criteria:

First, enter your domain in the search bar on the homepage → select database → click "Search." The service will display a summary report for your domain. To find out who your real search competitors are and get the list of competitors in a single click, go to the "Competitors" report.

I’d like to highlight a few things that would make it easier for you to choose the right competitors from the list.

The other two significant metrics in this report are All keywords and Visibility.

All keywords represent the keywords the website ranks for in the TOP-100 Google search results.
Every single keyword from the TOP-100 being listed here gives us an understanding of how big the keyword list of our competitor’s website is compared to others.

Visibility indicates the general success of the website in Google's TOP-20 search results, which makes it a substantial measurement for comparison.
However, we should keep in mind that not all keywords the website ranks for are actually targeted keywords.

That's why this particular approach isn’t the best in terms of specific data that could help us determine what exactly we're missing.
Although in most cases, this should really help with the identification of your general competitors on the market.

But what if our website isn’t really focused on one topic, niche, or product?

In this case, instead of Domain analysis, it would make more sense to use the URL analysis since it can help you find specific URLs or categories on the competitor’s website for collecting the desired data.

To get this data, enter the URL of the page starting with the https:// (or http) into the search bar and select the type of search "Exact URL" or "URL Prefix."

And what if my website is new or in development, so there are no keywords it ranks for yet?

In this case, I would recommend you to use the combination of the methods listed above to collect the data about your competitors. As we can’t do the analysis based on the data about our own website we can simply focus on a certain targeted keyword, and determine the main player on the market for it.

Keyword research tool will help you get it done:

Just in one click, I was able to get a list of TOP content pages for the keyword of interest, here's exactly what I did: went to the "Keyword research" report → chose the "SEO research" tab → clicked on the "TOP pages" report.

Now, it's really easy to make the right conclusion about the topic coverage and success of the page based on 3 metrics:

“Organic keywords” will show you the number of variations of the targeted keyword the page ranks for, which is a direct measure of topic coverage;
“Facebook shares” and “Estimated traffic” will help to check competitors traffic.

Within Keyword Research module, Top by keyword report will also be useful as it shows you the SERP for an analyzed keyword. This will help you to identify competitors and also optimize your website – for this, analyze competitors: gather and expand set of keywords for both SEO and PPC, and analyze backlinks and ads.

Go to “Keyword research” report again → choose the “SEO research” tab → click on the “Top by keyword” report.

Once the report is generated, you get a list of top-100 domains/URLs in search by this keyword and the following information.

For the keyword:

• a number of variations of the searched keyword based on results;
• search volume;
• CPC (cost per click, $);
• keyword difficulty (KD);
• PPC competition, %;
• SERP features.

For URLs in SERP:

• SDR;
• organic keywords for the URL;
• domain;
• domain visibility;
• domain's organic keywords;
• domain's PPC keywords;
• domain's top-10 keywords;
• domain's backlinks;
• referring domains;
• external links;
• external domains.

The only problem we face here is that the tool allows us to only analyze one keyword at a time which limits the area of its appliance, as in most cases we have a list of targeted keywords.

That's where the Rank Tracker comes in handy!

But how do you come up with a list of targeted keywords? Let me show you one easy way of doing that:

Go to the "Domain Analysis" section → and select the "SEO Research / Domain vs. Domain" tab. Enter the addresses of competitors' sites in the corresponding fields, then click Compare.

So instead of analyzing 700 000 keywords, we can just focus on the intersection, which is the targeted area in 90% of cases, at least in the early stages of the website development.

However, at this point, we can see a high number of low-volume keywords in the list. It would be a good idea to remove keywords with a very low search volume so that we could solely focus on keywords that could actually bring traffic to the website.

To do so just export all the intersected keywords and filter them in Excel or Google Sheets in a way that meets your needs.

A great thing about the Domain vs. Domain tool is that its features are available even for comparing certain URLs of your competitors.

Go to the "URL Analysis" section → and select the "SEO Research / Compare URL" tab.

Now we are getting to step number two!

My recommendation is usually to go straight to the Rank Tracker as it gives you the best up-to-date results with a lot of data that you can use to establish your strategy.

Although, there's also one section in Domain Analysis that I often use to quickly find successful pages of my competitors for the keywords I need, and that is "Tree view".

As you can check the distribution of keywords among the website pages, Tree View is often used for exporting the whole keyword list and website structure of your competitor(s). It could potentially save you a lot of time when developing the structure of your website.

But for now, we're just going to need it to identify successful cases.

Go to the "Domain Analysis" section → and select the "SEO Research / Tree view" tab.

Now, how is seeing the whole website structure going to help me build my promotion strategy?

First, I'm going to use multilayer filtration to find the following:

• competitor's pages on leading positions (1-10 or the first page of SERP);
• pages that rank for keywords that could bring traffic. In our case, that is the monthly volume of 1000 but this number could be much lower for some niche products;
• Pages with the topic of interest (in our case it's “SEO”).

The result contains the most successful pages of my competitor on the targeted topic:

So all we need to do is to perform a thorough analysis of these pages. I usually go directly to each page and check it with our Serpstat Plugin.

Let's go through areas of my interest one by one. First, it's metatags and general structure of the content.

In one click I can check the whole H1-H6 hierarchy:

The next think I'd like to check is speed and optimization:

Such structured data allows me to detect if the competitor uses any tricks to
achieve better rankings in Google SERPs via Google Featured Snippets.

In this case, it is only an Open Graph but generally, I can see anything highlighted with a help schema markup.

If you're interested in learning how to get featured I highly recommend reading the following article, as it is going to show you the whole world of Featured Snippets, which is a free and effective way to make your website more visible for the targeted keywords:

At this point, we have managed to get quite impressive results out of all the tools we’ve used but we can dive even deeper with the Rank Tracker. This tool allows you to thoroughly focus on a specific niche and market.

Let's go step-by-step through all the settings in Serpstat Rank Tracker that we need to launch our project and get the necessary results:

Here you can get very specific and even go up to the level of a zip code.
In most cases, it's enough to just select the search engine, SERP type, device, and country.

If your keyword list is ready you can simply upload it here via “import file” or simply add drag them to the empty area.

But there's always one alternative convenient option everyone keeps forgetting about.

Reports containing keywords allow you to send any chosen keyword(s) directly to your project, including Rank Tracker.

You can select any keywords you need at any point, even while analyzing your competitors, and have them sent to the Rank Tracker directly, which can save you a lot of time.

Keep an eye on your competitors and see which keywords they are ranking for. Once the project is set up and launched, the system collects the data for it: about your own website, as well as your competitors'.

As you can see there is one project, but we can switch between 3 (or more) different websites, where the first one is ours, and the others belong to our competitors.

To sum it all up, the Serpstat Rank Tracker tool allows you to not only analyze the performance of your website but also simultaneously track your competitors' websites in the same way as your own.

Just having this comparator highlighted will allow you to check the reports for the same list of keywords for different competitors. You can even submit a dozen of the websites and we’ll track them all without any extra charges.

Whenever you want to see the progress of your website over a certain period of time, all you need to do is select the time frame you're interested in, and you will get a dedicated report where you can check the dynamics of your positions:

I'd also like to point your attention to the tagging option.

You can tag the keywords during the stage of importing your keyword list file.
In this case, you need to make sure that the tag for each keyword is listed in the third column:

Also, you can do the tagging afterward as this option is still available in the project overview via the “Operations” button.

Within the Rank Tracker, there's also a separate tool, specifically created for the identification of competitors that are ranking for the same targeted keywords in a certain market.

So how do you use the competitor tracking?

Go to the "Rank Tracker" section → select the "Competitors" tab.

With the “Competitors” report we are able to check what's going on in terms of the general competition in the targeted market.

On the following screenshot, you will see that the system shows me the list of competitors that are working with the same keywords, as well as their traffic share, and the dynamics of their performance over a period of time.

With tagging feature, you can rearrange the list just based on the keywords that are grouped by a certain tag.

It could be very helpful at least in 2 cases:

• You added some new keywords to the project that represent a new niche for you, and would like to know who your competitors are in this niche;

• Certain products are not a part of your current product line and you expect to have a very different competitor list for them.

And all of the above can be applied not only to your SEO activities but also to your paid campaigns. That way we’ll learn who is active in paid search for the list of the targeted keywords:

All the websites that we find interesting to track closely we should definitely add to our list of competitors in the project settings, as it would allow us to check the effectiveness of their promotion alongside our website and see the results side-by-side.

There are two more features of Serpstat Rank Tracker that can give you really good advice about the possible ways of page optimization: the SERP itself and SERP features.

There's no denying that it's essential to use every single opportunity to get into the Featured Snippets.

In the SERP features column, you can clearly see where your website is being active (highlighted in blue), as well as the area you're missing out on, the grey one. The latter is pretty much your pathway to further website optimization.

What about the SERP itself?

Let’s imagine that all your promotional activities for some keywords didn’t yield any positive results, and despite all your efforts, your positions are still dropping. Here is an example:

In this case, we can go to the SERP column as over here we have access to the whole list of top-100 search results for a particular keyword.

It will allow us to see what websites are evolving on the market with particular keywords, while our positions are dropping or aren't as high as we would like.

Once I discovered a successful case, I would like to go further with my analysis.

It's safe to assume that they must be doing something right to their page if its position in search results for the analyzed keyword went up.

In order to find this page switch over from the domain view to the URL view, and once you do that the system is going to show you the targeted URL.

My next step is usually to do a very thorough check of this URL using the Serpstat plugin to determine the reason why its rankings improved.

But frankly speaking, in some cases, you will not be able to discover any particular reason why the URL's positions for a keyword improved, most likely it's due to the backlinks.

Luckily Serpstat also has its Backlinks Analysis tool, so if you go even further, it will not be a mystery.

With this step, I’d also advise you to perform the SWOT analysis and based on its results probably use a few more of the Serpstat tools. But that would be a different article :)

Analyzing competitors is a critical aspect of marketing and any SEO research. Without an analysis of competitors, a business may not understand which channels to target and what strategy could help generate conversions.

I tried to show tips and tricks to discover, track, and understand your competitors so that you can navigate the market with ease.

If after reading this article you feel like the Serpstat Rank Tracker is the right tool for your tasks, take a look at our detailed guide.