This post was published on the Screaming Frog blog on 3rd October 2019.
Unless you’re lucky enough to operate in a monopoly, competition will be an everyday part of your business. Online is no different. Knowing who you’re fighting for visibility in SERPs is the first step to building a watertight SEO strategy.
This post will explore how to find your competitors and analyse their backlink profiles. If all goes to plan, you’ll find weaknesses you can exploit and strengths you can use to inspire future campaigns.
To illustrate the process, we’ll be using an imaginary chemistry facts website as our ‘new’ site in need of a strategy. This site wants to rank for keywords including [chemistry facts], [chemistry revision] and [learn chemistry].
Finding the Competition
The first step in any competitor analysis is finding competitors to analyse. To do this the easiest way is to run a Google Search for your target keywords.
From these searches, we can identify our main SEO rivals. While these competitors may not necessarily offer the exact same things as our site, they all compete for the same key search phrases.
This is an important point: SEO competitors may not overlap with direct business competitors. Being aware of this will save you a lot of headaches further down the line.