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Do you know your SEO Market Share against your competitors?
As a brand, if you’re wanting to enhance your organic strategy and gain a competitive edge, you must analyse the search landscape to determine how much market share you have against your competitors.
As a leading SEO Agency, we understand the key role competitor analysis plays in shaping a strong digital strategy. By identifying your top competitors and dissecting their SEO tactics, you can uncover valuable insights to inform your own strategy.
The bigger your brand the more consistent your search engine results pages (SERPs) competitors will be. The top positions typically are dominated by the largest retailers, and if your one of them, you will know that maintaining this consistent exposure is key in receiving traffic from the SERPs.
But how do you evaluate your organic competitors? How do we even determine who our competitors are?
Depending on the scale of your product categories, your business might span far and wide, from homeware to childrenswear. If this is the case, other ecommerce websites that you compete against for children’s terms will not be the same you will compete against for pillowcases and bed linen (unless it’s another department store for example such as House of Fraser or John Lewis).
With extensive experience working in Ecommerce SEO, what we therefore want to do in the first instance is determine which product categories we need to identify competitors for, and then evaluate those competitors for that specific product category.
These 5 websites will be your category competitors to evaluate.
Once you have identified these competitors, there are a number of actions you can take to monitor their performance against your own:
/ Track their rankings in a rank tracking software.
/ Evaluate their competing landing pages against your own for on page tactics.
/ Evaluate their backlink profile to determine what their approach is to PR.
/ Evaluate their SERP listing and reverse engineer their SEO success.
/ Use a tool to determine how much market share they have against you.
The primary purpose of a landscape audit is to take learnings from competing brands that outrank you so that you can apply them to your own strategy and then compete more effectively to increase market share.
Tools to help you evaluate SEO competitors.
There are a number of tools that you can use to gain competitive insights from an SEO perspective. Different tools offer different insights and varying degrees of detail. Typical SEO tools will provide you with SEO insights related to:
/ Keyword positions /overlaps /gaps
/ Backlinks and domain authority
/ Estimated traffic levels
/ Keyword research around trends
The following SEO tools offering a variety of competitive insights that would support an organic strategy being informed.
SEMRush
Brief description: “Sem rush is the online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform.”
What is this tool?
/ SEMRush offers an all-in-one tool suite which can help digital marketers with various insights. This SEO tool offers help with the following marketing services: SEO, PPC, Keyword research, Competitor research, PR, Content Marketing and Campaign Management.
Who is it aimed at?
/ SEMrush’s tool is aimed at marketers of any specialty.
What are its benefits?
/ By using SEMrush’s tools, you are able to identify trends that occur within an industry niche.
/ SEMrush can help you optimise your pages and improve your on-page SEO through its onsite audits.
/ SEMrush can also help you identify target keywords for your SEO campaign.
What are the features it offers for competitive analysis or competitive auditing?
/ Traffic analysis: Allows you to benchmark your website traffic against competitors to understand where you stand in terms of organic traffic. This tool allows you to view a competitors total traffic, top traffic sources, bounce rate and time on page.
/ Organic research: Learn about your organic search competitors and discover opportunities to compete against them. Learn about the value of the keywords that a competitor is ranking for.
AHREFs
What is this tool?
/ AHREFs is an SEO software that offers tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits. All tools inside of the software is designed for marketing professionals.
Who is it aimed at?
/ AHREFs is aimed at marketing professionals that are looking to improve their site SEO in order to rank higher within the SERPs.
What are its benefits?
/ AHREFs specialised in analysing a websites link profile.
What are the features it offers for competitive analysis or competitive auditing?
/ Content gaps: Able to find content gaps between you and your competitors and discover new content ideas.
/ See where your competitors get their backlinks.
/ Monitor your organic share of voice.
Spyfu
What is this tool?
/ SpyFu is an SEO and PPC tool that uses web scraping technology to gather its data.
/ This tool is widely used by marketing professionals to improve their online search performance through the use of keyword research and competitor analysis.
Who is it aimed at?
/ This tool is aimed at marketing professionals that wish to improve their online search performance.
What are its benefits?
/ SpyFu is fast and reliable.
What are the features it offers for competitive analysis or competitive auditing?
/ PPC competitor analysis: Spy on competitor ads, campaign history, spend and their most profitable keywords.
/ SEO & rank tracking: Target the keywords driving traffic to competitors
/ Keyword research: Plan campaigns seamlessly with UK and US data
/ Backlink outreach: Steal the competitions backlinks and manage outreach.
Recommended by Neil Patel.
Serpstat
What is this tool?
/ Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that helps a marketer analyse competitors and conduct keyword research for SEO and Google ads.
Who is it aimed at?
/ Serpstat is aimed at SEO and PPC professionals.
What are its benefits?
/ Complete SEO ranking tool
/ Affordable
/ Easy to use
What are the features it offers for competitive analysis or competitive auditing?
/ SEO competitive analysis
/ Find all competitor keywords in organic search
/ Track the growth of competitors
/ Detailed domain comparison
Evaluating last year’s SEO performance to take learnings forward this Christmas and Q4.
A key part of the competitive analysis equation is to analyse what occurred in the previous year. A typical Q4 or Christmas SEO strategy will require a year-on-year analysis of your own brands performance but also looking at what worked well for your competitors will help shape your approach for the upcoming year ahead.
Key insights you can gather by looking at YoY data include:
/ Search trends and consumer demand YoY (declines and increases in demand for product)
/ Product sales and category sales that performed well / not so well
/ A market share analysis of organic traffic and sales per product category
/ The SERP landscape, and how your brand performed in the SERP’s over key trading periods in the lead up to Christmas
POLARIS partnered with Hampers.com to guide the gifting business on how to maximise sales during their biggest trading period of Christmas. Having experience of the Christmas gifting landscape for the previous 3 years, the team at POLARIS were aware of the key process required to dominate the SERPS and maximise revenue from customers looking to gift hampers.
POLARIS advised the gifting company that the organic results become more and more volatile as we get closer to Christmas Day, with rankings for all competing sites fluctuating based on a series of factors.
Read more on Hampers.Com case study.
Many aspects of this strategy to dominate the Christmas SERPS was derived from analysing activity conducted by brands in the previous year, applying them to the gifting companies strategy.
Organic Strategy Success
Conducting thorough competitor analysis and leveraging SEO tools are essential for enhancing your organic strategy and gaining a competitive advantage.
By identifying key competitors and analysing their tactics, you can gain valuable insights to inform your own approach and improve your brand’s visibility in the SERPs.
Additionally, evaluating past SEO performance and year-on-year data allows you to understand search trends, consumer behaviour, and market dynamics, enabling you to understand search trends, consumer behaviour, and market dynamics, enabling you to tailor your strategy for maximum impact.
