How to Conduct a Competitive SEO Audit

Improving the SEO of your website is essential for ranking highly on the search engine lists. However, to stay at the top of your market as a business, it is not enough to only work on improving your website. You also must keep track of what your competitors do. That’s the only way to stay ahead of them and avoid having unpleasant surprises. With that in mind, let’s see how to conduct a competitive SEO audit and learn more about strategies your competition uses.

Know who the key competitors are

Before you can conduct a competitive SEO audit, you first must identify who your main competitors are.

First, thoroughly research other companies in your industry. You should do this on a local as well as on a global level, especially if you do the majority of your business online.

Second, once you know who your competitors are, you need to form a team that will closely monitor all of their activities. That includes not only checking out their websites but also their activities on social media.

A person taking another person’s chess piece in a chess match
To outsmart the competition, you should discover their best moves

Finally, you need to familiarize yourself with your competitors’ offers. If they are doing something differently from your company, it is crucial to figure out why.

With the combined information from the research, you can provide essential data to your SEO team and help them find a way to beat the competition.

Get to know your clients

Analyzing competitive SEO is not enough if you don’t know your clients’ habits. When a person decides to look something up on the internet, they search for different keywords and phrases. You have to determine what kind of words will you use to help your clients find you. They might use industry jargon, a specific keyword tied to your company’s name, or maybe a phrase that can be associated with your products or services.

By knowing this information, a competitive SEO audit will have more meaning. For example, if the analysis shows that your competitors use more industry jargon keywords than you, that’s fine as long as your clients do not use that same type of keyword to find you.

If the competition is using the same type of keywords as you, that’s when you need to step up the game and figure out how to beat them. For that reason, understanding SEO from start to finish is a must.

Use all browser engines to get more precise data

Even though Google Chrome is the most used browser of all, you need to widen your research. Other search engines also play an important role, so don’t dismiss them.

People have different preferences; someone uses Chrome, someone else uses Firefox, there are people who use Bing or Edge, and so on. All of these browsers function similarly but show different results. That is because they use diverse variables to give search results.

Conduct a competitive SEO audit on different devices

Just how different browsers return different results, that’s what happens with different devices as well. Search engine optimization is done differently for a mobile device from, let’s say, a desktop.

A man looking at chart analysis on a printed report.
By gathering data from different devices and browsers, you will better understand how a competitor’s SEO strategy functions.

With that in mind, a competitive SEO audit must be done on all devices. It would help if you even prioritized mobile devices because they are more used than PCs.

Do not lose your identity

If you discover that your competitors are doing a better job than you, you might start to think that copying their actions will bring you success. That’s not always true and can do you more harm than good.

Every company does SEO audits and tweaks performance to better target their customers. Something that is a useful strategy for one company does not mean it will have the same success for the other.

A person writing the words Be creative and drawing a lightbulb on a piece of paper.
After doing a competitive SEO audit, you need to be creative and develop unique solutions that will help you beat your competition.

Furthermore, you need to have your own unique identity, which will help customers notice you over your competitors. If you are copying what they do, you can only do as well as they already did. That means, even if you pull it off, they will always be one step ahead.

Hire a professional company to help you conduct a competitive SEO audit

Even though you probably have skilled employees working in your SEO team, it doesn’t hurt to get a professional’s opinion when it comes to SEO. For example, Movers Development understands the backbone of SEO elements and uses it to help companies in the relocation industry. Having someone valuable who can analyze the data with you and provide feedback will speed up the process and help avoid potential setbacks.

The point of a competitive SEO audit is to help you identify your goals

It is vital to know why a competitive SEO analysis is so vital. By closely monitoring your competition and understanding their operations, you will have a full picture of how their business functions, what content promotion tools they use, and so on. It is a fact that two heads are smarter than one, so let them be your other head, a silent partner unaware of their role in your plans. As mentioned before, the idea behind analyzing your competitors’ SEO strategies is not to copy what they do but to find a way to improve your business. Even if they still perform better, you shouldn’t be worried. If your company shows an improvement, that alone is enough to mark the project complete.

Aside from that, this analysis is not a one-time thing. It is a process that should be repeated every few weeks. All of your competitors are continually working on improving their business as well, and they are probably analyzing you the same way you are studying them. What matters is who uses the data more efficiently. We hope that will be you! Good luck!

Photos used

  • https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-love-people-woman-4960420/
  • https://www.pexels.com/photo/chart-close-up-data-desk-590022/
  • https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-human-hand-256514/
  • https://www.pexels.com/photo/battle-board-game-castle-challenge-277124/

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