Why to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis in WordPress

January 13. 2022

There’s a good reason why many site owners should consider doing a competitive analysis. Still, there are not too many of them that actually do it properly. An in-depth competitive analysis is a great way to learn what you need to improve on your website so it can stand equal to others. The question is: do you want your website to be competitive? If so, keep on reading this text to find out why should website owners do an SEO competitor analysis in WordPress.

What else should you know?

Well, there’s one thing we forgot to mention in the intro. You can use an SEO competitor analysis to find out what are the strengths or weaknesses of your site, as well as your competitors’ sites when it comes to everything from simple SEO to search feature victories. You’ll “employ” this data to scan for areas where you’re weak and “repair” them. Also, you’ll see the areas where your competitors aren’t doing so well, so you can profit from those deficiencies.

Remind me why is an SEO competitor analysis so important

By analyzing your competition, you’ll take a much-needed step back and evaluate the broader market. You’ll have a picture of where you stand in it, who are your competitors, and how do many of them scan the landscape for important terms. It doesn’t matter if you’re already showing up on the first page of Google for all the keywords you find essential for your website. You’ll always benefit from analyzing other websites.

Guide to success

Basically, a competitive analysis will serve as a guide for what you need to do in order to boost your search ranking and your visitors’ experience. Before you get into it, you should know that you’ll always stumble upon aspects of other websites that are in a way superior to your own. For example, don’t be so surprised to find that they “shine” at certain aspects of search results such as having a good number of pages showing up in the “people also ask” section of Google. Also, even though you might appear first on Google for your most crucial keywords, if your competitors dominate featured snippets, you’re losing a whole lot of potential traffic.

Page by page

A detailed, thorough study of your competitors’ websites will enable you to learn what exactly are they doing on a page-by-page basis. This will help you identify any potential gaps in your website’s functionality and performance (compared to your competitors’ websites). Maybe you’ll notice their blog posts are getting a lot of shares and links (something that your site might lack). Or maybe you’ll notice that some of your competitors are attracting a lot of traffic to their website just by generating and sharing videos. While you, on the other hand, might be kind of weak in that area.

Who’s your competition anyway?

While you’re conducting an SEO competitor analysis, there’s something you should have in mind. Your biggest competitor might be the one you thought to be a bit smaller since they don’t possess top rankings for the so-called “money keywords”. They might be still cleaning up on the long tail, so it’s very possible that the opposite is true. Also, your study might feel a little distorted if you focus your attention solely on keywords.

Anyway, all this can be easily said about taking your client’s word for when it comes to who their main competition is. Why’s that? Well, standardly they focus their attention on major keywords but forget that there might be a competitor who’s winning over certain parts of the market or the long tail which they, on the other hand, consider pretty inconsequential. Unless you’re conducting a competitive study for a local customer, always do your “homework” on who their real competitors are.

How to decide who not to compete with

Your main objective is to find competitors that might rank better than your website in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but aren’t “real” competitors, as well as websites that aren’t as crucial for you to outrank as others. If there’s a situation when the only site ranking above you for certain keywords is Wikipedia (or Pinterest), it’s not always worth the time invested. Instead, you should look at other phrases where your “real” competitors are topping you and causing you to lose traffic. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that your keyword research backs up the assumptions on who those competitors are.

Discovering keyword gaps

This is also very important. You’ll want to put your focus on the keywords for which you already rank, but, at the same time, definitely lag behind the websites you consider as competition. That’s especially crucial if you’re just a position or two away from your main competitor for a specific keyphrase.

Finding popular pages

One of the things you should pay attention to while you do an SEO competitor analysis in WordPress is your competition’s most popular pages. This is equally important as knowing the keywords your competition ranks for. You want to know which of their pages have the biggest audience. For instance, here are a couple of questions you should ask:

• Firstly, which of the pages on your competitor’s website rank for the most keywords?
• Also, which of the pages attract the most traffic?
• Lastly, which pages earn the biggest portions of the overall traffic on your competitor’s website?

Your competitors can drive a great deal of traffic to a certain website or a set of pages. It’s important you never assume you already know which parts of your competitor’s site are the ones that attract the biggest number of internet users. Surprises are where the fun is when doing an SEO competitor analysis in WordPress.