Knowing what your competitors’ SEO strategies are, especially when they are outperforming you, can help give you insights that will help improve your own SEO campaigns. Here are some tips on reverse engineering your rivals’ SEO tactics.
SEO Strategy
- Learn about the competition’s information structure and compare their IA against yours. Look for depth of pages and URLs, size of IA, and the URL structure.
- Check the spread of page depth. How many pages are there at each level and how deep are they located?
- Generate an internal links report for your website. You cannot directly do that for your competitors’ site, but with the right tools, you can create an internal links report for your competitor’s site and compare that with your own.
- Conduct page level analysis to assess content readability, page speed and more. Other tools to use include White hat and URL profiler.
- See how Google has indexed the site and how many pages the website has by running a “site:competitorwebsite.com” search. You can also disable JavaScript and reload the site to see how much it depends on JavaScript.
- Evaluate the competitor’s search visibility against your own.
- Use SEMrush to learn important qualities about your competitors. These include organic keyword rankings to help you find out keywords that are common between your sites. Determine the top 20 websites using the same search queries that you and competitor use; this can also help you look into new competitors. Find how much traffic is generated by the keywords ranked in the top 20 positions in Google, along with the position split of those keywords.
- Use tools to see the top performing pages of your competitor’s site as well as the content with the most links and shares.
