Competitor analysis

To reach your target audience, you want to be found using search terms related to your product or service. However, you’ll find that if you keep these terms too broad, you can expect stiffer competition. It’s therefore a good idea to narrow down your search terms or opt for a longer search term. We carry out a search term analysis as the first step in your competitive analysis, so that we know what your competitors are focusing on and where opportunities still lie specifically for you.

Your online competition consists of websites competing for the same search terms, usually because they offer a similar service or product. By identifying these competitors, we can carry out a comprehensive analysis of their online behaviour. For which search terms is there already visibility, and which competitors can be found for the same search terms? This analysis takes into account both SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEA (search engine advertising). Components of this overview include:
– Your search terms
– The search terms per position
– Your competition based on your search terms
– Your current position relative to your competitors based on these search terms
Once this picture has been established, we cross-check it against the keyword analysis from the first step. This ensures that the work we deliver is carried out correctly.

Now that we have mapped out your competitors, it is time to scrutinise them further, specifically by examining the authority they have built up within Google. In doing so, we look at Trust Flow (the relevance of backlinks) and Citation Flow (link juice passed on), the number of external backlinks, the number of referring domains, IP addresses and subnets. Once we have gathered this information, we’ll identify which types of websites pass on the most relevance and value. By determining this authority, we can capitalise on it by developing an even more valuable website, in accordance with Google’s guidelines. This research forms the basis of your link-building strategy.

The final step in the competitive analysis is to examine online behaviour in the form of social media and other content (blogs or other website texts). This step is, however, only carried out if it is relevant to the client in question. We identify which social media channels your competitors use and how much this yields for them in terms of followers and likes. This enables us to assess their engagement with the target audience and subsequently determine whether this is also relevant to you. Questions we answer in this part of the analysis include, for example:
– How often does the competitor publish content? (Daily, weekly or monthly)
– Is the competitor developing new pages, or are they articles being added to a blog or knowledge centre?
– How is the content received by the target audience? (Number of shares, likes, comments, etc.)
Naturally, we focus not only on the frequency of your competitors’ content, but also on the quality of the on-site content. Examples of this include the structure of a page, the amount of text, the use of search terms, the presence of images and/or videos, and the number of internal links. This enables us to determine a page’s success precisely, as high-quality on-site content can be a real ‘make’ or ‘break’.