The SEO landscape has advanced considerably in the past decade. Research shows that the search advertising market was worth approximately $260 billion in 2022. Businesses understand that SEO is arguably the most effective way to generate organic traffic. Research shows that most marketers share a similar opinion, considering it one of the most effective channels for acquiring new customers.
These factors have also made the landscape fiercely competitive, with businesses employing digital marketing agencies to perform SEO tasks. Ranking well on search engines has become an ongoing battle. As a result, competitive SEO analysis has also become crucial for agencies.
If your agency doesn’t offer SEO services, you’re missing out on a lucrative channel for helping clients achieve their marketing objectives. You might want to partner with a white label SEO reseller agency like Rocket Driver. The industry leader’s white label SEO services can help your agency get better marketing results for clients.
What is competitive SEO analysis?
Competitive SEO analysis refers to identifying the weaknesses and strengths of your client’s SEO strategies against their competitors. SEO competitive analysis is similar to traditional competitive analysis. The goal is to find gaps between your client and competitor.
Agencies perform competitive SEO analysis for several reasons. Firstly, it helps benchmark their client’s current SEO performance. In addition, it also helps them learn more about the successful strategies the client’s competitors have implemented, enabling the agency to use similar strategies to help their client rank better.
SEO competitive analysis is also beneficial because it lets your agency identify weaknesses within your client’s current SEO strategy so you can improve them. Finally, it’s also useful because it reveals competitor gaps.
Why is competitive SEO analysis important?
Performing a competitive SEO analysis will let your agency review the overall market, competitors, and the current search landscape. It’ll provide a more nuanced understanding of the right keywords to target and SEO elements to improve.
Identify your client’s SEO competitors
Your client likely has some big players within their industry, but these competitors don’t need to be your client’s main SEO competitors. Your client will likely be contending against competitors outside their niche in certain scenarios. For instance, let’s assume your client operates a small Mexican takeout restaurant.
Your client will want to rank for keywords like “best tacos in New York City.” It’ll be competing against fellow Mexican restaurants and fast-food establishments in this scenario. However, your client might also create a blog post about creating empanadas at home and want to rank well for this keyword.
That’s where things become difficult because it’ll now face competition from massive corporations outside its main niche, like the Food Network. Food Network isn’t your client’s business competitor, nor is it in the same niche. However, it’s competing for the same search engine rankings as your client.
As this example illustrates, it’s important to distinguish between your client’s business and SEO competitors because they won’t necessarily be the same. If your client operates in multiple niches, they might compete against companies with little overlap in their services.
The good news is that your agency can determine your client’s competitors by inserting keywords into Google and noting the competitors that appear on the first page.
Evaluate keyword difficulty
Once you’ve analyzed the main competitors for your client’s SEO, you’ll want to develop the right on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies to improve your client’s search rankings.
But it’s important to be patient and evaluate the strength of your client’s SEO competitors first. For example, you could help your client rank better for some keywords and even outperform industry giants like Food Network, but the resources needed to accomplish this wouldn’t be worthwhile.
You can use a competitor analysis tool to determine the strength of your client’s SEO competitors. These tools will provide valuable information about their domain authority, search engine indexing, catalog listings, backlink data, Alexa rank, traffic volumes, and social signals.
Unfortunately, such tools are often expensive, making them unfeasible investments for some digital marketing agencies. If your agency is looking for the right tools to perform competitive SEO analysis, consider partnering with Rocket Driver. Rocket Driver’s white label agency tools can help your agency perform competitive SEO analysis without investing significant capital into tools and other solutions.
Assess new keyword opportunities
Agencies often perform TF-IDF analysis to enrich their client’s existing content with the right keywords. TF-IDF analysis is an abbreviation for term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis. This process involves measuring a keyword’s term frequency on a webpage and multiplying it by how often the keyword is expected to appear on the page (inverse document frequency).
After conducting TF-IDF analysis, you might discover that most top-ranking pages for your client’s targeted keywords might share similar terms and phrases. If your client’s content doesn’t include topic-relevant terms, you’ll want to update existing content or create new content to increase your client’s relevance in semantic search. In addition, it’ll also allow your agency to discover low-competition keywords your client might have missed in their content.
Focus on on-page optimization and content
Analyzing on-page optimization and site content is also important because it’ll give your agency more useful information. You’ll want to know how often your client’s competitors publish content, the type of content they publish, and their targeted keywords.
You’ll also want to focus on how competitors optimize metadata and their headline strategies. Analyzing on-page optimization and on-site content also lets you explore their internal linking strategies, which you can use as a benchmark for your client’s on-page SEO efforts.
You can use the obtained information to inform the client’s content. Many agencies will often pair content marketing with SEO as services because they complement each other. If your agency doesn’t offer content marketing services, consider getting white label copywriting and content writing services from Rocket Driver.
Dissect competitor backlink profiles
Another important part of SEO competitive analysis is analyzing where competitors get their backlinks. Obtaining this information will allow you to create high-quality backlinks for your client. Dissecting competitors’ backlink profiles requires a robust SEO tool since you can’t perform this step manually.
Examine site structure and UX
Google and other search engines also heavily emphasize user experience in their documentation for search engine ranking factors. Most recent updates have focused on improving user experience by making websites more mobile-friendly and web pages loading quicker.
You’ll want to examine your client and their competitors’ site structure and user experience. If your client’s website loads slower than rivals or isn’t as navigable, it won’t perform as well in SERPs.
You’ll have to redesign the client’s website by optimizing the sitemap for better crawlability. Similarly, you’ll also need to improve page loading speed. If your agency doesn’t provide these services, consider partnering with a white label web design agency like Rocket Driver.
Get Started with Rocket Driver
If you’re searching for white label marketing solutions and considering outsourcing SEO services, check out Rocket Driver. The industry leader offers several services to agencies, including White Label SEO, White Label Marketing, White Label Reputation Management, White Label Social Media, White Label SMS Marketing, White Label Content Marketing, and White Label Web Design.
Check out their website, www.rocketdriver.com/. You can also contact Rocket Driver to kickstart a white label partnership today.
Book a demo now with Tom Lombardi, one of the founding partners, who will give you a 45-minute, one-on-one tour of the Rocket Driver Partnership to show you how incredible they are!