Competitive analysis is essential when you are designing an SEO strategy for your Los Angeles-based company. It helps you discover the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors and lets you know the path you should follow.

In this blog post, we will explore the most critical stages of SEO competition analysis for your Los Angeles business and how they are implemented. So let’s start! 

Identify direct competitors in the SERP

Your competitors in the SERPs are websites that work in similar or very close areas and promote with the same search query. Perform the following steps in a tool like Netpeak Checker and enter a list of queries with corresponding names in the label.

• Go to settings to select the search engine you want to crawl data from. For more custom analysis, go to the tab with other settings.
• Set the desired number of results (a maximum of 30 is sufficient).
• “Settings” window in the “SE Scraper” built-in tool of the Netpeak Checker program
• Press “Start” to run the crawl.
• After completing the crawl, you will see the URL pool on the requested keywords.
• Click the Transfer Host button to display competitors’ domains only in the main window table.
• How to transfer the host from the “SE Scraper” tool to the main window table
• Export results

Another tool that can help you do a competitive analysis is Serpstat service. It is good to organize your data in a separate table on your computer and compile a list of your main competitors.

Keyword analysis

With keyword analysis tools, you can find out which queries are driving traffic to your competitors, expanding the semantic core, and finding missing words and phrases where you can populate pages.

Compare fields by keywords in Serpstat:

• In the “Site Analysis” tab, open “Domain Analysis” → “SEO Analysis” → “Compare Domains”.
• Paste the domain into the domain name field and press compare.
• Analyze keyword phrases

To find competitors’ keywords and see content gaps, use Ahrefs. Enter the domain, select the organic search tab, and content gap.

Analyze which competitors have more search queries, which competitors have fewer, which pages can be created based on new phrases, and which content should be optimized.

Technology optimization analysis

By performing a technical optimization analysis of more powerful competitors, you can learn from their page technology and even optimize your website better than them.

First, identify the first parameters to be analyzed. Including:

• Site structure
• Page compliance and availability
• A website with SSL certificate
• Websites with AMP version pages
• Internal links
• Response time

Content analysis

It’s worth checking which content pages are accessible and which content is driving traffic to your competitors. It’s that simple:

• Go to a page with content on a competitor’s website.
• Find the participation rate icon (which can be a view, comment, share, etc.) from the page source code that you are interested in, and then copy it into the selector.
• Copy any element from the page source code into the selector
• Open “Settings” → “Grab”. Enter the thread name-it can help you to browse all received crawl data quickly. Fill the last column with the copied selector. In the middle column, select the “CSS Selector” crawl type from the drop-down list and tick the search space as “Internal Text”.
• How to configure crawl settings.
• Press “OK” and close the settings window.
• Export a list of pages or links added to your blog and check the “Crawl only in the directory” item in the settings.
• Crawl in the directory only setting.
• Click the “Start” button.
• You can view the results in the Crawl tab in the sidebar.

If this doesn’t solve the problem, don’t be discouraged. Read more about crawl settings in the blog post “Comprehensive Guide: How to use a crawler to grab data from an online store”.

To find out which pages of a competitor’s website are leading by various metrics, go to the “SEO Analysis” tab in Serpstat → “Home” and export pages from this report.

Design and usability analysis

Unlike the analysis of other indicators, the usability analysis of competitors’ websites should be performed manually.

Follow the promotion page and stay on other tags for a while:

• Design aesthetics
• Simple and convenient interface
• Location and design of relevant information (bread, filters, links)
• Button position and design
• original function
• Pop-up windows and their design
• multilingual
• Message function

With these factors in mind, you can assess the competitive environment and understand how competitors of your Los Angeles based SEO company interact with the visitors.

Analyze traffic sources and flows

Know how much traffic your competitors get and where it comes from. The major sources of the traffic often website get include 

• Search engine 
• Direct 
• Email
• Social media
• Referrals
• Display ads 

Analyze social media presence 

How strong is your social media presence contributes heavily to your website ranking. Social media is a great source of traffic and conversions. Look closely at the social media strategies used by competitors evaluates the following criteria:

• Post / Section theme

• Publishing frequency

• The visual content of the publication

• Contests and participation

Another equally important step in the analysis of competitors’ communication strategies: how active the conversation is with subscribers, how fast they respond to reviews, how they respond to negative reviews, and so on.

To automate the process, you will need various services, including Netpeak Spider and Checker, Serpstat, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and more.

Whatever tool you use to make sure you thoroughly study market competition so that you can get your website and scale your profits to the next level.