While your SEO depends on multiple factors and efforts you put to rank higher you almost certainly keep a wary eye on your competitors. Knowing what works well for your niched competitors gives you a ready framework to excel them.
Naturally, we’re looking at our competitors’ off page strategies, spying on their ad campaigns, commenting on their posts, and maybe other stuff of ungentlemanly conduct.
But when it comes to competitors domain analysis the very first thing we’re looking at is keywords. Of course, our goal is to “borrow” best keywords to “steal” traffic from our competitors’ most successful pages.
The way we research competitors’ pages is cumbersome and takes time. A lot of it. Exporting researched URL’s keywords to Excel docs or spreadsheets and then adding a list of keywords of another competing URL (and god knows how many others) and then manually looking through thousands and thousands of keywords to identify weak spots is hard. And boring.
We’re here to tackle boredom and make our businesses more profitable while our daily tasks easier.
This how-to manual will show you the best new approach to competitors research and how you can push your pages to the top of organic search beating your competing pages.
Jack and the Giant
What we all did for the past years is we simply put our researched (competitor’s) domain in SEO tool and, based from the tool itself, we could get either a list of keywords for which this domain was ranked top-50 or top-100:
Which leaves you with raw data (read: thousands of keywords) to analyze and identify weak spots.
But the crux of this matter is in the fact that sometimes domains that rank so well for “our” keywords are also ranked for many keywords which are completely irrelevant for us. Think of Wikipedia or Amazon for instance. These have insane amount of pages and correlating keywords which makes them competitors for great many domains out there. But think of all those keywords that their whole domains contain. Would you manually look through all of them to separate sheepes from goats!
Today pages can be ranked for thousands of keywords thus we have to treat them like we would treat domains. Sometimes the limelight your single page receives can make up a considerable amount of your whole domain’s traffic. Efforts to be ranked higher for our certain pages are more than justified. Therefore, the competitors analysis should be scaled down from domain’s to page’s level. But we still don’t have the right tool to work with URL comprehensively. Or do we?
The One and Only Page Vs. Page comparison
Serpstat is the growth hacking multitool for SEO. We’ll talk about its features briefly but our focus here would be on it’s unique URL vs. URL comparison and how it revolutionized page analysis.
It’s the only SEO tool that works with URLs in-depthly. Not only it shows all keywords for which a URL is ranked top-100 for (paste URL in the tool>chose database>hit “Search)”:
But it allows you to see all URLs that any domain has with keywords for which these pages are ranked for. Enter domain in the tool>choose database> hit “Search”> go to “SEO Research”> hit “Tree View”:
Which is itself a powerful feature that can be used to boost your traffic, but we’ll talk about it later. Now let’s focus on the one and only Page vs. Page analysis. But before we even start comparing our pages with competitors’ let us first identify them.
Know Who’s on Top
You can easily identify top ranking pages for each query by simply putting your research query (buy laptop, for example) in the tool and click on “Keywords Analysis”>”SEO Research”>”Top Pages”:
You’ll have the list of top-ranked URLs and their “measurements”: numbers of organic keywords they use, how many facebook shares they received, and their potential traffic figures.
With the list of pages to beat you now compare them with your page. For that simply put your page’s URL in Serpstat, click “Search” and go to “URL Analysis”>”URL vs URL”:
Here you can compare up to three URLs back to back – the ultimate option we’ve been waiting for so long! Also note that the tool automatically suggest competing URLs based on the number of matching keywords from top-10 of search, i.e. – pages suggested by the tool are ranking in top-10 for keywords that your page is ranked for in top-100.
Now put competitors’ similar pages in bars “URL 2” and “URL 3” and hit “Compare” (you can also click on URLs suggested by the tool to quickly add them):
You’ll have data on keywords that would usually take a long time to collect: all the keywords that our URLs have in common; unique keywords, and core keywords which are keywords presented on all three pages.
Now you can work with lists simply pushing on the “Export Data” button on the right side of the screen:
You have your complete lists ready. You just saved yourselves hours and hours routinely putting all these keywords for each page manually. It’s insanely time-saving and advanced technique. It takes just few seconds to export your ready comparative list to CSV, MS Excel, as .TXT, .PDF files, or straight to your Google Docs:
We have three pages back to back with around 5k keywords combined ready to use, no sweat at all:)
But we’re just getting to the best part of this unique tool.
Use Serpstat to Identify What Keywords you’re Missing
Enter you domain or URL (for page analysis) in the tool and in the sidebar go to “URL Analysis” then click on “Missing Keywords”.
And get the list of keywords for which your competitors’ pages ranked top 10 but your pages misses out. While the keywords themselves are a goldmine and can be used to expand your semantic core, there are two more metrics to help you.
First, the “Connection Strength” metric shows you how many of your competitors from top-20 of search have keywords that your page don’t. The “relevancy” of these keywords is defined by the number of competitors who use them on similar pages – thus “0” value of “Connection Strength” means that no other page from top-20 is ranked for this keywords, while “10” means that 10 different pages from top-20 of search contain this keywords.
Second, the “Other URLs contain” metric shows you the position your domain’s pages hold for given keywords (“none” if you don’t have this keyword on your domain at all).
But the coolest part is that with these keywords you have the ready-steady-go list of good keywords (now you know how to measure if its good using our metrics) and you can use them to expand your page’s keyword pool smartly.
Bottomline: You can’t beat a giant like Ebay, but luckily you don’t have to. All you have to do is to make your single page (product page, for example) better than those that rank top-10 in SERP for this query .
Summary
Described techniques insures your pages’ total dominance because now you know:
- how to identify Top pages for each query
- how to find competing pages
- how to compare up to 3 pages back to back without spending hours of manual work
- how to identify missing keywords
