Top Seo Trends For 2022: How To Compare Yourself Against Your Competition

The internet is a very dynamic place.

Things are constantly shifting.

Algorithms.

Trends.

Buyer behaviour.

Competitors’ activities.

This last one – competitors’ activities – has a direct impact on how your website performs on search engines, when and how and if you appear high enough on search engines, how it influences potential leads, and so on.

You may have done everything wonderfully, beautifully well in terms of SEO and content.

But then one day, if your competitor does something better on their website or SEO, they can displace you. Boom!

That’s all it takes.

That’s why SEO is also about constant jostling for the top spot.
And being constantly vigilant.

If you can do SEO to rank high, so can your competitors (and they most likely are already doing it.)

Let’s get into the ways you can quickly compare your website to your competitors. Because you wanna rank HIGHER!

1. Evaluate Their Website Technology

Search engines love a website that is fast, easy to crawl, and easy to use.

Because all these 3 affect your bounce rate.

And the higher your bounce rate?
The more the search engines will avoid you.

While you don’t need a specific technology to accomplish these, it is worth checking out how your competition is doing these:

• Analytics and tracking.
• Widgets.
• E-commerce.
• Frameworks.
• CDN.
• Mapping.
• Mobile.
• Payment.
• A/V Media.
• CMS.
• JS libraries & functions.
• Advertising.
• Verified links.
• SSL Certificates.
• Web hosting providers.
• Name servers.
• Email hosting providers.
• Web servers.
• Operating systems & servers.
• Syndication techniques.
• Webmaster registration.

Ask your SEO provider to draw these up or use the BuiltWith tool of SearchEngineJournal.

Website Architecture

Understanding your competitors’ website architecture can be useful in terms of establishing parent and child page hierarchy as well as discovering a potential product or content gap.

The best and easiest way to determine this is by creating a competitor analysis sitemap.

2. Check Their Website Content

Organic Keyword Research

No SEO success happens without winning the keyword game.

At any point, and at every point, you need to develop the right list of keywords.

Your competitors probably already have worked out their own keyword strategy already, which can be a great reference point for you.

A great tool for competitor organic keyword research is Ahrefs.

• They have a large database of search rankings by website.
• On Ahrefs you can also determine which phrases drive traffic and their potential for ranking.
• They also list top pages.
• On top of it, they include the number of keywords that a particular page ranks for as well as a list of those phrases.

All this can help you do focussed work on creating a better version of a top-performing page than to focus on a single keyword or phrase.

Best part?

The Content Gap Tool helps you locate any “opportunities” you may be missing out on.

This is a great way to find both highly relevant keyword opportunities as well as some potentially new business opportunities.

3. Analyse Competitor Backlinks

In my last blog and email (if you’re not on my Friday email list, you may want to join for free tips to rank higher) I explained how backlinks are powerful and some quick ways to get some solid ones.

Competitor’s backlinks are a great starting point to make sure you’re not losing out on some opportunities. While just hogging up their backlinks to get quantity in without quality, as always, with everything on Google is a bad idea.

But still they’ll give you good food for thought to acquire some nice links.

Ahrefs has this neat Link Intersect tool that mines competitor links.

The tool offers two different filtering options:

• Show who is linking to all targets.
• Show who is linking to any of the targets.

FINALLY…

Frankly speaking, SEO is a discipline that has developed after years, decades actually, of work, rework and re-rework. While these tips can help you see a lot of results on your own, hiring SEO experts will change your game so you can see results within a quarter!

The SEOPro team is happy to help you with this, get in touch with us today..