How to Analyze Competitor's SEO Strategy

When optimizing your website, you must always consider the strategy of other market players. When you lag behind and see that you are losing, running a competitor site analysis can help you understand what you might be doing wrong. It'll also help you find their weaknesses and strengths, which will give you a better vision of what path to follow.

Even when you outstrip the market, it's still important to run a competitor SEO checkup. It seems to make no sense: why watch others when you're on the bright side? Checking up on competing businesses is an effective approach since you can overlook the tactics that can help your competitors catch up to you. This article will dismantle the most critical stages of competitor SEO analysis and the ways of their implementation. Let’s cut to the chase!

What is competitor traffic analysis all about

Competitor website traffic analysis helps you improve your own website's performance by using insights and data retrieved from your direct competitors. In other words, it's the process of researching your competitors' websites to detect their weak spots and high-performing keywords, generate new content ideas, and reshape your overall SEO strategy in a way that's more beneficial to you.

Now, you can choose among dozens of tools that can help you analyze competitor website traffic and compare the stats to your own. Website crawlers and analytical tools like Netpeak Spider, Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics, and the Search Console will always come in handy for that—and, often, it's better to combine using several of those services for more efficiency.

Thanks to these tools, you'll be able to monitor numerous metrics and insights:

• The volumes of traffic your competitors are driving to their websites;
• The growing or declining tendencies among their audiences;
• The most efficient traffic-driving channels;
• User experience metrics (e.g., the average session duration or bounce rate);
• Demographics and user locations that drive in the most traffic;
• The pages users visit after their websites, and many more.

So, as you see, competitor web traffic analysis helps you know what’s already working for others and how you can implement those elements into your current SEO strategy.

How to use Netpeak Checker to analyse competitor website traffic

One of the most powerful modern SEO tools to analyze and view competitors website traffic is Netpeak Checker. It's a Windows app for monitoring over 450 SEO parameters that can somehow impact your website's performance. It's straightforward to work with, although it includes multiple features like integrations with third-party services, bulk cache, and index checkups, custom SERP scraping, and many others.

If you need to check competitor SEO stats, several valuable features facilitate this process. See the list below.

1. Identify direct competitors in the SERP

Your competitors in the SERP are the websites that work in a similar or extremely close field and go for promotion by the same search queries.

We’ve already done our homework and written this comprehensive guide with E-commerce examples: "Comprehensive Guide on Competitor Marketing Analysis (with E-commerce Example)."

To find them, gather the list of the core search queries and do the following in Netpeak Checker:

1. Open the built-in instrument "SE Scraper;"
2. Enter the list of queries in the tab with the corresponding name;
3. Go to "Settings" to choose the search engines from which the data will be scraped. For more customized analysis, go to the tab with additional settings;
4. Set the needed number of results (any value up to 30 will be enough);
5. Press "Start" to run scraping;
6. When scraping is completed, you'll see the pool of URLs on the requested keywords;
7. Hit the "Transfer hosts" button to have only competitors' domains displayed in the main window table;
8. Export results.

Take a look at the Netpeak Checker program overview to see how other features can be handy for your tasks: "SEO Tool for Bulk URL Analysis – Netpeak Checker: Overview and the Main Advantages."

SERP scraping is a Pro feature available in Netpeak Checker. To access this and other Pro features, such as estimation of website traffic and export to Google Drive / Sheets, you need to subscribe to the Netpeak Checker Pro plan.

Buy Netpeak Checker Pro and Feel Its Power

You also can search for competitors with the help of the Serpstat service. To do so:

1. Add a query or your website domain into the search bar and start searching;
2. Open the "SEO research" tab and after that, "Competitors;"
3. Export the results.

In a separate table on the computer, sort out data and compile a list of your primary competitors.

The good thing is you can also integrate data from Serpstat into Netpeak Checker and add the necessary metrics to your overall dashboard. It lets you monitor the stats from multiple sources in one convenient location.

2. Keyword analysis

Thanks to keyword analysis, you can find out what queries bring traffic to your competitors, expand the semantic core, and find the missed words and phrases, which you can fill the pages with.

Compare domains by keywords in Serpstat:

1. In the "Site analysis" tab, open "Domain analysis" → "SEO analysis" → "Compare domains;"
2. Paste domains into the domain name field and press "Compare;"
3. Analyze keyword phrases.

To find competitors' keywords and see the content gap, use Ahrefs. Enter the domain, select the "Organic search" tab and "Content gap."

Read more about keyword research: "How to Do Keyword Research: A Go-To Guide for Beginners."

Analyze which competitors have more search queries and which have fewer, what pages can be created based on the gap phrases, and what should just be optimized.

3. Technical optimization analysis

By analyzing the technical optimization of your stronger competitors, you can borrow their on-page techniques and optimize your website even better than they do.

First things first, determine the main parameters for analysis. Among them, there should be:

• Website structure;
• Compliance and availability of the pages;
• Websites that have SSL certificates;
• Websites that have an AMP version of the page;
• Internal linking;
• Response time.

Let's check all these indicators in Netpeak Spider:

1. Tick the necessary parameters for analysis.
2. Collect all HTML pages on competitors' websites: home page, category page, product card, and / or article. Open several pages from each website in the crawler (three to four will be enough) and crawl them. This way, you'll see major issues and techniques that your competitors use.
3. When completed, review the results and export them for further work.

You can conduct a comprehensive competitor traffic analysis even in the free version of Netpeak Spider crawler — it won't limit you by the term of use and the number of analyzed URLs. Other basic features are also available in the Freemium version of the tool.

To access Netpeak Spider for free, you just need to sign up, download, and launch the program. 😉

Sign Up and Download a Freemium Version of Netpeak Spider

P.S. Right after signup, you'll also have the opportunity to try all paid functionality and then compare all our plans to pick the most suitable for you.

After thoroughly analyzing your competitors' technical optimization, gear up for changes on your website. Your fiercest competitors need your exceptionally watchful eye.

So that it's easy to change your track, we've prepared these instructions:

1. Website structure: How to Build and Analyze It.
2. How to Speed up Your Website with Netpeak Spider.
3. How to Find Broken Links with Netpeak Spider.
4. How to Find and Fix Duplicate Content on Your Website.

4. Content analysis

It's worth checking what content pages are sought-after and what brings traffic to your competitors. To check out their websites' content, follow these simple steps:

1. Visit your competitor's content page on their site — it can be a blog page or one featuring how-to tutorials.
2. Find an engagement rate icon of your interest (it can be views, comments, shares, etc.) from the page source code and copy it into the selector.
3. Open "Settings" → "Scraping" in Netpeak Spider. Write the thread's name — it'll help you quickly navigate through the scraping data received. Fill the last column with a copied selector. In the middle column, choose the "CSS-selector" crawling type from the drop-down list and tick the search space as an "Inner text."
4. Press "OK" and close the settings window.
5. Export the list of pages or add a link to the blog, and tick the "Crawl only in directory" item in the settings.
6. Hit the "Start" button.
7. The results are in the "Scraping" tab in the sidebar.

Don't lose your heart if this scraping method doesn't work out. Read more about crawling settings in the blog post "Comprehensive Guide: How to Scrape Data from Online Stores With a Crawler."

To find out which pages of competitors' websites lead the way by various indicators, go to the "SEO analysis" tab in Serpstat → 'Top pages' and export pages from this report.

After you’ve gathered a list of URLs, knuckle down to competitor analysis: take a glance at what topics your competitors flag up, what tone of voice they use, etc.

To analyze the elements of content, you can use Netpeak Spider.

1. Upload the list of pages or select necessary parameters: metadata, h1-h6 headings, images, content length, etc. in the "Content" tab.
2. Start analysis and, in the end, export data for further analysis.

When you finish analyzing your competitors' content, it's time to set about surging your relevance.

Read the blog post to bring more light to this topic: '"How to Make Your Content More Relevant with Netpeak Spider and Checker."

5. Design and usability analysis

Unlike checking competitors traffic and other similar metrics, you have to run the usability analysis of their websites manually.

Consider checking these elements to properly assess the competitive environment and understand how your competitors interact with their visitors:

• Design aesthetics;
• Simplicity and convenience of the interface;
• Location and design of the vital information (breadcrumbs, filters, linking);
• Location and design of buttons;
• Original functionality;
• Pop-ups and their design;
• Multiple languages;
• Feature for leaving comments.

Read more on this topic here → Competitor checker

6. Website quality indicators, traffic, and link equity checkups

To see the strengths and shortfalls of your competitors and the strategy they use, scrutinize the following indicators and factors.

Read more about how to sift through unwanted link donors and analyze their quality in this blog post: "How to Size Up Quality of Link Donor For Effective Link Building Campaign."

6.1. Backlinks and referring domains

Read more → Competitor backlink analysis

To find out which sites your competitors get backlinks from and what domains refer to them, time and again, go to Serpstat. In "Backlink analysis," select "Referring domains" and "Referring pages." 15 Ways to Get Free Backlinks."

2. And what actually a backink is: "What Is a Backlink: Dissected and Explained in Layman’s Terms."

6.2. Domain authority

Analyze the authority of your domain and the domains of your competitors. It might become a spur for positive changes on your site.

To evaluate the authority of several domains simultaneously, use Netpeak Checker:

1. Upload the list of competitors' sites.
2. In the "Parameters" tab, select the metrics that will help you choose domains highly ranked by competent services:
   • Moz → Domain Authority. A ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank in search engines on a scale from one to 100.
   • Ahrefs → Domain Rating. According to Ahrefs, domain rating shows a website's backlink profile compared to the others on a 100-point scale.
   • Majestic → Citation Flow. Metrics based on the number of websites linking to the domain on a scale from one to 100.
   • Alexa → Local Rank, Global Rank. Alexa gives a website a local and global rating. The lower the number, the better.
3. Also, you can tick the "Whois" item to know the domain age.
4. Start the analysis by hitting the "Start" button.
5. After the analysis is completed, export data. SimilarWeb can be useful for determining how much traffic your competitors get and where it comes from.

   In this tool, you can track:

   • The approximate traffic volume, average visit duration, and bounce rate;

   • Paste the list of URLs into Netpeak Checker, tick "Google SERP" and "Bing SERP" items in a sidebar, and start scanning. Megaindex.

     The purchase of SEO backlinks is believed to be a blackhat optimization method. However, you can still find out whether your competitors do it or not.

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