How to learn SEO competition research or in fact anything at all? Well, there’s actually doing it, of course. But doing it without knowing what to aim for and what’s actually working doesn’t do you much good. There’s, of course, reading about it. But as far as I’m concerned, the most effective way to learn to do something is to watch somebody do it well.
A large part of SEO[1] efforts is about monitoring what actually works for other people in your particular niche.
So you need to keep an eye on the people that rank higher than you. Then, using specialized tools you’ll be able to reverse engineer the strategies they used. From then on, you’ll be able to implement those same things in your own campaigns.
What do we talk about when it’s about competition research?
Doing SEO competition research means analyzing your competitors’ SEO efforts in order to augment your own. So how to actually research your competition[2]? Generally, it all boils down to the following steps:
- Picking the right competitors — people from your own niche, that consistently rank higher than you.
- Figuring out what you’re looking for — from researching their ranking keywords to backlinks, there’s a bunch to discover, and you have to know what it is that you want to find out.
- Using a tool to extract the data you’re interested in.
- Applying those insights to your own website.
Where in the world are your SEO competitors?
So this might seem like a trivial point. Anybody can name six to eight competitors off the top of their head, right? But, as usual, it’s not quite as easy as it appears.
For any SEO campaign, what you need first (if not foremost) is a list of main keywords you want to rank for. That’s the most basic