Search Me On Web (SMOW)

Below are top 12 key things one need to consider while doing SEO competition analysis –

1. Estimated Traffic
2. % Search Traffic
3. Pages/Visits
4. Bounce Rate
5. Avg. Time on Site
6. Backlinks
7. Content Ratio
8. Keywords Diagnose
9. Social Signals
10. Pages Indexed on Google
11. Anchor Text Phrases
12. Mentions

Recently, I have done website audit for reputed brand in banking sector who wants to make an entry to general insurance business.

There are many well-known brands such who provide general insurance. I analyse them for competition study for the site I have audited. ICICI Lombard is one of the well-performing brand or website among the general insurance providers from an SEO perspective. Let’s check all the key factors of competition analysis I have observed for the website I was auditing, for ICICI Lombard and other competitors.

Estimated Traffic

You need to check estimated monthly visits, pageviews, daily visitors, monthly visitors, yearly visitors. Free online tools like Similar Web and SiteWorthTraffic can provide you this data. This data is just an estimation and may not be accurate but can get you fair idea of the performance of each website of your competitors.

% Search Traffic

You need to check how much traffic each brand is through the medium of Search (Organic Search + Paid Search) . This will help you to plan your SEO strategies. Similar Web and Alexa Tools can help you to get search traffic data.

Pages/Visit

This is important to understand user’s interest in your website and his intent to read more and more content on your site or how helpful your site is for him/her to satisfy his queries. More pages per visits also increases probability of potential conversion rate. This indicate site is able to provide all information to the user he is seeking for.

Bounce Rate

This too indicates user engagement on website. Pages/visit and bounce rate are directly related to each other. If site is able to engage user on multiple pages bounce rate can be low. Everything leads to site to get improved popularity. You can again use Similar Web and Alexa to check bounce rate.

Time on Site

Avg. Time on Site is an important factor in competition analysis that helps to win over other competitor and gets you more SEO value.

Below is the competition analysis  table showing all above data for competitors –

Website	Estimated Visits(Avg. Monthly)	Pages/Visit	Time on Site	Bounce Rate	Search Visits (%)	Visits from India	Category Rank(Finance–>Insurance)
www.website-1.in	90 k	7.53	7.27 mins	22.93%	45.11%	97.71%	550
www.website-2.com	8.30 lacs	4.89	4.47 mins	46.86%	36.39%	96.01%	76
www.icicilombard.com	9.86 lacs	6.05	7.17 mins	36.73%	28.76%	95.16%	54
www.website-4.com	76 k	4.34	5.20 mins	27.38%	35.01%	97.18%	669
www.website-5.co.in	2.23 lacs	5.59	8.02 mins	37.24%	42.31%	96.84%	199
www.website-6.com	3.11 lacs	6.51	6.38 mins	34.62%	32.95%	97.41%	144
www.website-7.co.in	5.73 lacs	6.96	11.43 mins	37.43%	22.08%	97.81%	89

Backlinks

Its not just number of backlinks but number of source domains or referring domains from where links are flowing to your website is also an important factor in order to improve your search presence. It is also essential have good ratio or proportion of nofollow and dofollow links that flow to your website. You can check backlinks, referring domains and other related link aspects such as subnets,IPs, Source countries, top TLDs , CTLDs (Country-level TLDs) with ahrefs or WebMeUp.

Website	Backlinks	Referring Domains
www.website-1.in	4,595	236
www.website-2.com	29,292	1,231
www.icicilombard.com	8,356	571
www.website-4.com	2,611	156
www.website-5.co.in	3,937	263
www.website-6.com	125,736	444
www.website-7.co.in	4,826	406

In given table, you can see that www.website-6.com has more number of backlinks than best performing site ICICI Lombard, but number of referring domains are less i.e. ICICI Lombard is getting backlink from diverse domains.

Content Ratio

Amount of content and text to code ratio on webpage matters a lot for better ranking on search engines. SEO Quake is one of the best tool to check amount of content , content ration to source code. Do analyse your competitor’s content as well. If they have larger amount of content and quality content than you, possibly, they will rank better than you.

Keywords Diagnose

Keyword-rich content (NO keyword stuffing) is next thing you need to check while competition analysis . You need to have targeted keywords in important parts of your webpage. They should be placed in meta titles, meta description, meta keywords and in your heading texts and content too. SEO Quake can help you to check keywords prominence and density.

Social Signals

While posting a social media content on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or Google Plus etc. , it is matter that how many posts you make with your website source link. In other words, is your website content is worth to share ? Apart from posting photos and videos that are not hosted on your website , you need to post content (in the form of text i.e. blogs , news etc. ,photos,infographics, videos) hosted on your site. This helps you to get more social signals than your competitors, hence more SEO value to have improved search presence. You can use ahrefs to check social signals for your website as well as competitors websites.

Pages Indexed on Google

Number of pages indexed on Google is an indication of amount of pages hence amount of content as well as number of pages on site that has ranking potential. You can optimise these pages for your desired keywords. You can simply type “site:www.websitename.com” into search box of Google and this will get you number of search results i.e. number of pages indexed on Google.

Anchor Text Phrases

By having look at anchor text phrases , you can have an idea whether incoming links to site are constructed around targeted keywords or not. If not you need to use keywords as an anchor text phrases while link building. Higher percentage of targeted keywords in anchor text phrases matters a lot in order rank on search engines for desired keywords.

Mentions

Mention or citations can be checked with Moz tool. It is key important factor to have mention along with well-known industry brands to improve search engine presence and web popularity.

With all above observations you can predict how site is well-performing and what are its strength and where they are lacking.

Do you want to know more aspects of competition analysis? OR do you have anything on your mind that needs to be included in this post. Well, you can leave the comment and we can discuss. Hope, you enjoyed it. Thank you.