If you own an e-commerce website or have an online market presence, you might often question why you cannot rank higher than your competitor on the search engine results page. 

When it comes to online marketing, appearing on top of organic searches is vital for business success. Here is where competitor analysis by the top digital marketing agency in Portland becomes crucial. Keeping a tap on your business rivals will help you enhance your business strategy and open new ways to effectively market your products or services.

Instead of just blindly following general SEO principles, a solid competition analysis will allow you to focus on critical SEO aspects for your business and your website.

 Now, the question is, what the components of a successful SEO competitor analysis are? Here is the answer.

Usability 

Sites offering a positive user experience are valued highly by Google. This might be a useful approach to assess your website and modify it if your rivals’ sites include usability factors that affect their search ranking. Consider the following characteristics of usability in particular: 

• Page load time
• Call-to-actions
• UI/UX
• Broken links
• Content

1. Website Layout

Since Google introduced its page structure algorithm, which affects 1% of all Google searches, sites must prioritize web page format for Search engine optimization. Sites with high SERP positions, for example, have no above-the-fold banners. Highly rated websites also employ CSS grid applications and adaptive designs to improve the site’s mobile user experience.

The URL layout, navigation structure, and internal connecting structure are all key components in website layout, in addition to the aesthetic appearance.

Examine the technology used to build the website.

Find out which CMS or website designing software your competitors’ websites are based on. Several website platforms well optimize most on-site SEO parameters. Other technical factors, such as the hosting server, have a small but significant impact on on-site SEO. For example, if a website’s DNS server is unreliable, the customer experience will suffer, negatively influencing the site’s overall SERP position.

Keyword Density 

Keywords and search terms play a crucial role in SEO. When conducting competitor analysis, check what keywords your rivals are bidding on and how frequently they use the keywords in their content. In addition, check if their targeted keywords are present in their title, headers, alt tags, or Meta title descriptions.

Look for Robot.txt and XML Sitemap

Examine your rivals’ websites for an XML Schema and a robots.txt script. These components help in the indexing of a website’s content quickly and efficiently. However, because of Google’s enhanced algorithms, sites can be crawled without them; it is best to supply them to search engine crawlers.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are search results that incorporate more information in the snippet that shows in SERPs. Rich snippets provide searchers with more detail about a particular site than a standard, optimized one. When you search for a term on Google, you’ll notice that the top ten results are frequently enhanced with rich snippet features. Likely, one of your competitors has already done so. Take notes on how your competitors have incorporated rich snippets and devise a strategy for how you can do it too.

Content Analysis

Content analysis is something you can’t miss out on when doing SEO competitor analysis. 

When analyzing your competitors’ content, examine the length of the content, keywords for which the content is optimized, whether the content has images and videos, how valuable the content is for the readers, and so on.

These are the key aspects to consider when conducting an SEO competitive analysis of your website. First, assess which variables you have overlooked or enhanced on your site after all the data. Then start making adjustments depending on what would have the greatest impact on your SERP ranking.