SEO Competitor Analysis using Ahrefs
Do you want to know what SEO competitor analysis is and how to do it? Let us help you understand this stepwise with our guide on SEO Competitor Analysis using Ahrefs.
Your website’s Google ranking is not forever. You may rank on the top of SERPs today for a specific keyword, but this may not be permanent. Your competitors may overtake your search engine ranking by mastering content optimization with time. This is Where we find SEO competitor analysis useful.
Overview of Competitor Analysis
Your competitor’s website is a great opportunity to find the SEO tactics and information that you can use to increase traffic to your site.
Businesses need to continue to analyze their SEO competitors on a consistent basis to find out the actions of their rivals and how they are performing in SERPs.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to overlook competitor analysis, believing they’ve done everything they can to optimize their content. But, you can always improve yourself to rank better by gaining a competitive advantage.
If you can observe what’s already working for others, you will be on a boom rather than assuming what will work for you.
The goal of SEO competitive analysis is to discover which links, keywords, content, and other tactics of your competitors are the most successful so you can adapt them to your own SEO strategy.
Now, let us dive deeper into what SEO competitor analysis is, its importance and how to do it properly.
What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?
An SEO competitor analysis is a process of analyzing and comparing your website with your competitor’s website to find the tactics that can help you improve your SEO.
It helps you research and identify different content elements such as links, keywords, and topics your competitor has covered on their site.
Moreover, It allows you to determine the gaps between two competing websites by analyzing their SEO strategy.
To put it simply, you can determine keywords, backlinks, content, and keyword gaps between the sites to find out what is working for others that you lack.
This way, SEO competitor analysis helps you find out the good and bad about your site as well as your rival’s sites.
How can you do it?
You can do SEO competitor analysis with the help of SEO competitor analysis tools. The tools can help you ease your analysis process and provide important data related to your and your competitor’s site in an analysis report.
There are many competitor analysis tools out there in the market, but the most popular are Ahrefs and SEMrush. In this post, we’ll help you perform SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs, but you can check our other post discussing both tools- Semrush and Ahref
These tools provide in-depth data that can help you peek into your competitor’s site and suggest to you the areas of improvement that can help you to boost your ranking and harvest traffic to your site.
Why SEO Competitive Analysis is Important
If you are working on your SEO strategy, you can include your competitor’s website information in your SEO strategy. It is a rich source of valuable information that can help you improvise your site’s presence on SERPs and boost traffic to your site.
By doing SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs, you can easily scan your competitors, get their site’s overview and find the opportunity for your sites.
It can help you reach the top of SERPs or maintain your position if you are already present there.
To avoid losing your position to your competitors, you need to monitor your SEO performance, even if you are already ranking high for your key terms.
An SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs can help you to:
- find out your current SEO performance
- Discover the areas of improvement
- find out the strengths and weaknesses of your site and your rival’s site
- find out any competitor gaps between the two sites
- Discover the new keyword opportunities for your site.
- Perform competitor’s backlink analysis.
- keyword analysis
How To Do Competitor Analysis Using Ahrefs
After explaining what SEO competitor analysis is and why it is important, it’s time to get into the stepwise process of SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs.
These are the simple and common steps that you can follow. We will use Ahref to do competitor analysis. You can also use Semrush for the same. Both are solid tools that can help you well.
1. Identify Your True Competitors
The first step in the competitor analysis is to figure out who your actual competition is.
You can make a list of sites that you think are your rivals. Add those sites that usually rank for the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
These websites compete with you for the keywords in organic search.
While listing the sites, you must not consider or focus on the sites that rank for your single keyword. The reason behind this is you are aiming at numerous keywords and topics covering diverse pages. Therefore, it is best to find out who is actually competing with you all around.
Using Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can access the Competing domain report that can help you find out your real competition. You can follow the below sequence to help yourself.
Site Explorer >> enter your domain >> Organic search >> Competing domains
Do not compete with bigger brands or consider them your competition
Like every website in the search result of a particular keyword is not your actual competitor similarly, it may not be possible to surpass some bigger and established brands.
You can evaluate the website’s current ranking, resources, and time investment to find out who not to compete with.
For example, sites like Wikipedia or Pinterest are the brands. It is hard to compete with them, or you may need to perform extraordinarily to compete with them. All these can affect your all-around strategy. Therefore, focus on those who are your true competitors and are stealing your major traffic. Do not consider major brands your competitors.
2. Conduct a batch analysis of competitive websites
After finding the competitive domains, next, we will take an in-depth overview of competitive websites.
Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool can help you find out the details of different competitors’ websites.
Batch analysis Report’s key stats and SEO metrics give an overview of the sites and suggest how rooted the competition is.
Follow the below steps sequence-wise:
Batch Analysis >> Enter competitors’ domains >> Analyze
After this Batch Analysis, you will get useful data related to each site, such as:
- Domain Rating (DR)
- Ahrefs Rank (AR)
- Referring domains
- Organic search traffic
- keyword rankings
Let us explain what these are in brief-
Domain Rating (DR):
DR is a score between 1 to 100, the latter being the most potent. It estimates the ‘relative link popularity’ of a website. The value of links from sites with high “link popularity” is generally greater than that of links from sites with low “link popularity.”
Websites with high DR score suggests that it has a strong backlink profile.
Analyze the DR in comparison to your own website. Let us explain this to you with an example.
Suppose your site’s DR is 40, and your rival’s site’s DR is 50, then your competitor’s site’s link popularity is more popular than yours.
If your site’s DR is 30 and the DR of another site is 90, this suggests that you both are not the actual competitors. This is like comparing a smaller store with bigger popular shopping marts.
Ahrefs Rank (AR):
Ahrefs rank is determined by the strength of backlink profiles. The sites with lower Ahrefs rank suggest that the site is strong and popular. In general, Ahrefs Ranking and Domain Ranking indicate the same thing, but AR is more detailed than DR.
AR can help when you encounter two websites with the same DR. For example, suppose your two competitor websites have a DR Score of 40, Ahrefs rankings can help you to decide the strongest one.
Referring domains:
These are the number of domains or websites that link to another website or its page. The more the sites are linked to a particular page or website, the more it is considered to be valuable.
The higher number of referring domains to a site indicates the site to be a stronger one. However, the link referring to the site should be a high-quality link.
That is why, along with referring domains, you should consider domain ranking ( DR ); this way, you can focus on the quality as well as quantity of links to a site.
Organic traffic & keywords:
Both these factors can suggest the organic search performance of a website. The better it performs for the targeted keywords, the higher organic traffic the website enjoys.
So, the increased numbers of organic search traffic and keywords suggest a sounder organic search performance. It is no secret that the farther your stats are away from your competitors, the more work you will need to do to catch up.
3. Study backlink growth
Using Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can also get details on your competitors to link building efforts.
This can help you find the rate at which your competitors are developing new referring links to their sites. That way, you can set a rough target for your link-building efforts.
Visit Ahrefs site explorer >> Enter domain >> Overview >> Referring Domains graph >> Set to ‘One year’
You can calculate the monthly gain of new domains to your competitor’s site by taking the current number of referring domains minus the number of domains they had a year ago. And then dividing the result by twelve to get the monthly average of referring domains.
You can do this for each of your competitors.
For example, a site has 7603 domains currently, and it had 5599 a year back. Therefore, (7,603 – 5,599) / 12 = 167
So, the website is getting an average of 167 new referring domains.
With this data, you can analyze and set a link-building target for your website.
4. Find your competitor’s superfans
Using Ahref, you can also find out your competitor’s superfans. These are those who have linked to your competitor’s site multiple times.
You can use this data to build a relationship with the superfans, which is worth it because they can link you on a regular basis.
You can use the Referring domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer to find the superfans.
Follow the sequence below for this:
Site Explorer >> Referring Domains >> add a “dofollow” filter >> sort by “links to target / dofollow”
After that, you will get a list where you will come across the superfans of the domain you entered.
You can try to build your relationship with them to get links regularly.
5. Find broken pages
When doing SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs, you can also take advantage of the broken pages on your competitor’s site.
The Best by links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer can help you find that. Follow the sequence below to help yourself.
Site Explorer >> enter competitors’ domain >> Best by links >> add a “404 not found” filter >> sort by the Referring domains column (high to low)
This will display if your competitor’s site has any broken pages with backlinks. If these are related to your niche, you can take the benefits from it. You can find out what the broken pages are about so that you can create similar but stronger content.
Find out the people linking to that pages using the backlinks report, and then reach them to link back to your similar working source.
6. Study traffic breakdown by country
Using Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can find out which country holds the most organic traffic for your niche by knowing where your competitors are getting most of the traffic.
Follow the sequence of steps to get this data.
Site Explorer >> enter competitor’s domain >> Overview >> Organic search tab
This will help you prioritize your content for the country you find holding the most traffic in your niche and where there is high demand.
7. Find out your competitors’ organic keywords
In the line of analyzing your competitor’s website, you can also find the keyword opportunity from your competitor’s site. You can find current keywords that are presently trending in your niche and are driving traffic to your competitor’s site.
You can use Ahref’s Organic keywords report for your competing websites to find the opportunity keywords for your site by following the given steps.
Site Explorer > enter competitor’s domain > Organic search > Organic keywords.
You will get a list of keywords your competitor is ranking for. You can also use different filters to this list to find the most relevant keyword for your sites, such as top ten keywords, country-wise filters, keywords with low KD and much more.
This will help you to find out the keywords from your competitor’s website to create a more stronger piece for your site.
8. Spy on your competitors’ featured snippets
When you are studying your competitor’s website, there is one more thing you need to pay attention to. These are the featured snippet on SERPs for which your competitors rank.
Featured snippets are displayed above the organic results and get the most clicks on SERPs.
You can use Ahrefs Site Explorer to find out the featured snippet for which your competitors rank by following the below steps.
Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Organic search > Organic keywords > SERP features filter > Featured snippets > Only linking to target
This will give the number of feature snippets country-wise that your competitors own.
If there are many snippets, you may also have the chance to rank on some featured snippets.
This is because the snippet does not always belong to the site that ranked at the top of organic results. The sites on the 2 to 5 position on the SERPs also own the featured snippets for many keywords.
Therefore, if you could reach the 2 to 5 position of the SERPs, you, too, have the chance to rank on the featured snippet.
9. Find content gaps
Ahref also lets you find the content gap between you and your competitor’s website. The content gap includes the keywords you have not covered on your website that your competitors are already ranking for.
Obviously, these are the opportunity keywords you will want to cover for your site.
You can use the Ahrefs Content Gap tool to find the missing keywords by following the steps below.
Site Explorer > enter your domain > Content gap
Now, enter your domain in the “But the following target doesn’t rank for” field. Then, enter the competitor’s domain in the “Show keywords that all of the below targets rank for” field. Check the box below it saying “at least one of the targets should rank in the top 10” box and run the tool.
This will provide a list of keywords that you lack on your site. Covering all of them is a bit harder; therefore, you can filter the results using low/medium difficulty, high-volume opportunity filters, and more.
You can now pick the opportunity keywords from the low difficulty filter that will be easier to rank or from the search volume filter that can boost your search traffic.
10. Find competitors’ most popular content
Although you can perform keyword research to find the opportunity keywords, the intent of the search is more important to Google than ever.
Therefore, a single page can rank for many keywords, including the long tails keywords. The research tools can not help you understand the intent of the keyword research. You can find the keywords with search intent by finding the most popular content of your competitor’s site.
By finding the top pages, you can find out which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for multiple keywords and which are attracting a lot of traffic to their sites.
Using the details and getting the keyword ideas, you can cover those in your content to create a strong piece for your website to gain traffic to your site.
Ahrefs Site Explorer’s Top Pages report can help you find the top pages on your competitor’s website by following the given steps.
Site Explorer >> enter competitor’s domain >> select “prefix” mode >> Top pages
This will offer a list of your competitors top performing pages that you can utilize to find the opportunities for your site.
11. Find the most linked content of your competitor
Quality links lead to gaining more traffic to your site. Therefore, we know links are important for a website, but how we can build them?
When doing SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs, you can find the link opportunity on your competitor’s website by determining what is working for your competitor. This can help because something similar will probably work for you if it is working for them.
Ahrefs Site Explorer’s Best by links report displays your competitors most linked content.
Follow the sequence below to find competitors’ top pages.
Site Explorer > enter competitor’s blog subfolder/subdomain > Organic search > Best by links
This will provide you with the links to the top pages of your competitor’s websites. With this, you can find what type of content works well for your competitors.
Therefore, you must focus on the efforts to make similar content to get more links.
12. Find your competitors’ PPC keywords
While working on your SEO strategy, you can also look at your competitor’s Pay-per-click activities. These can help you find the importance of a particular keyword for your niche.
This is because if your competitors are paying for getting traffic from a particular keyword, then the keyword is presumably profitable for their site.
You can use Ahrefs Site Explorer’s PPC keywords report to find the PPC keywords.
Follow the sequence of the steps to help yourself.
Site Explorer >> enter competitors domain >> Paid search >> PPC keywords
This will provide a list of PPC keywords that you can find opportunities for yourself.
13. Learn from your competitors’ PPC ads
Your competitor’s PPC ads are great to help you with the ads strategy that you can use for your ad campaigns. It can suggest the patterns for writing the title and descriptions that can boost your CTR.
This is because your competitors are paying to attract traffic from a particular keyword, and more relevant ads are chosen by Google that have a lower cost per click.
Therefore, they make their ads suitable enough to get a click.
You can use the similar PPC keyword report again to find the ads for the keyword you want to rank for.
Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Paid search > PPC keywords
Like above, this will give you a list of PPC keywords. Now to preview the ad for that particular keyword, you can click on the yellow ‘Ad’ icon.
Their strategy appears to involve speed, cost, and simplicity to entice customers.
Similarly, you can use all the things in your titles and meta descriptions to attract more traffic to your site.
To conclude-
When you think of analyzing your competitor’s website to improvise your SEO strategies, it is best to use an advanced SEO tool like Ahrefs and semrush to audit your competitor’s site.
In this post, we have performed SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs. Using its reports, you can analyze different aspects of your competitor’s website to find the opportunity for your website.
Our competitor’s website is a great source of valuable and practical information that can help us to improvise the areas where we are behind them. By analyzing our competitors, we can find out what is working for them to boost ourselves.
Start with Ahrefs and follow the above-suggested steps to dive deeper into your rival’s website for competitor analysis.
We hope our stepwise guide has helped you do proper SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs.