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.
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.
It's a near-universal experience for consultants and in-house SEOs who've worked on numerous organic search campaigns. The first 3-6 months (longer if the site is very large or complex) of any SEO effort is almost always exclusively dedicated to fixing mistakes, improving existing issues, tweaking and tuning the suboptimal, and generally closing the gap between what exists now and current best...
If you believe the hype about Google+ being dead or dying, you're missing out on a great opportunity to grow your community and your brand.
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Competition in local search is fierce. While it's typical to do some surface level research on your competitors before entering a market you can go much further down the SEO rabbit hole. In this article we will look at how you can find more competitors, pull their data, and use it to beat them in the search game.
Are you marketing content across generations? If so, there's a good bet you're missing some key opportunities, many of which are revealed in this study.
Many marketers balk at the prospect of creating content for industries that just aren't conducive to interesting topics. This post explains why that's short-sighted, and offers a different approach.
A spreadsheet and term frequency analysis can yield surprising insights into what Google might see when it looks at your content
In this post, Simon details a new content process designed to take advantage of the trend toward long-tail keywords by tying your content to more specific search opportunities.
Size up your competition and gain the upper hand with this second installment of the Next Level video series. We'll take you on a SERP-fari where you can try out three ways to use the Moz tools to conquer your competitors.
We've all been there. Trying to improve our organic rankings so we can get more traffic from the search engines. And every time we do that, we are left with some big questions in our minds, like: How much traffic would I actually get if I rank on the first page? This post offers a new study of click-through rates of various positions on SERPs in an attempt to answer those questions.
Somewhat inspired by a Pete Wailes YouMoz post from many years ago, I set out last week to explore Google Maps with a fresh set of eyes and an open mind to see what I could discover about how it renders local business results. Read on, for what I think I found.
An integral part of keyword research is an in-depth look at your competition. This post offers a concise flowchart to visualize and guide you through that process.
BuiltWith has cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.