Competitive research in SEO means, in a nutshell, stealing your competitors’ rankings and traffic.
Well, not exactly stealing.
But it does involve reverse-engineering what's working for your competitors, and using that information to your advantage!
Competitive research typically follows a few common lines of inquiry: identifying competitors, keyword research, content gap analysis, and backlink exploration . If you're not sure where to start when it comes to establishing your competitors, check out the True Competitor feature in Moz Pro, and start building your competitive strategy.
In addition, we've listed some companion resources on competitive research and analysis for SEO.
How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO : A terrific introduction to SEO competitive analysis with a free template to copy for your own campaigns.
The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide : An effective competitive research process starts with keywords, and this guide outlines a step-by-step process you can implement today to identify keyword opportunities.
Link Gap Analysis for SEO : Identify opportunities to increase your authority based on your competitors’ backlink strategy.
SEO Competitive Analysis Certification : Learn how to confidently build an SEO competitive analysis plan and get certified with this 6-part series. This certification combines on-demand video lessons with tasks and quizzes to affirm your understanding.
Do the top startups build links? If they're getting traction, SEO is super important to their livelihood and future fundraising and revenue. So how are the top startups getting links, and how do their link counts change over time?
It's probably crossed your mind before. Should you optimize for your competitors' branded keywords? How would you even go about it effectively? Well, in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some carefully strategic and smart ways to optimize for the keywords of a competitor, from determining their worthiness to properly targeting your funnel to using third-party hosted content for maximum amplification.
It's no secret that Google keeps a lot of secrets. From keyword data to link data to traffic data (and surely more), there's a lot that we could benefit from — if they'd only share it! Since that's not likely to happen anytime soon, Rand takes us through various ways to access that all-important data in this week's Whiteboard Friday.
Using social listening to spy on the competition is an underrated tactic for marketers looking to gain the upper hand in competitive verticals.
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