A good competitive analysis can provide you with invaluable insights into what is working for others in your niche. What we mean by “good” here is using the right tactics. If you don’t know what the right tactics are, we are here to help you know how you can perform a complete and correct competitive analysis.
Step 1 – Identify your competitors If you think you know who your competitors are, and you are pretty confident about that only because you type a keyword into Google and see who is ranking for it, hold on. Those may not be your actual competitors because you may be ranking for far many more keywords than you think! So, to identify your actual competitors who you will have to beat for every possible keyword, you can use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, which help to identify the competitors for all those keywords you rank for, across thousands of SERPs, by calculating and using advanced metrics.
Step 2 – Perform a keyword gap analysis Now, you know the competitors who are ranking for all those keywords that you rank for. But, what about those keywords that these competitors are already ranking for well – those that you don’t rank for? This is the keyword gap. You need to close this gap, especially if the keyword is valuable or high volume. So, list down all such valuable keywords. It may be a long and tedious process, but it is equally important.
Step 3 – Perform a link gap analysis Now, after keywords, you also need links to rank. So, where do you find the links? Who links to your competitors, but not to you? If someone is linking to your competitor on a relevant