These are the 4 steps to your analysis plan.
Can you guess the first step in your competitive analysis?
Strengths?
Weaknesses?
Opportunities?
Threats?
If you chose “threats”, you chose correctly.
You can beat your competitors at their own game. That is how:
Step 1: Find blogs like yours, in your niche with your DA.
To do this, I go to Alexa.com.
Scroll down to Browse Top Sites and enter their URL.
Scroll down to Which Sites Are Related To [Your Blog Name].
Copy the URL of the first site.
Step 2: Go to semrush.com/dashboard/.
If you don’t have an account, create one.
Paste the competitor’s blog URL where it says All Reports, Post Domain, Keyword or…
Make sure the dropdown says Domain Overview
Scroll down to Top Organic Keywords.
This is what I found:
tribe 11(6) 880
One of my competitors ranks for the keyword Triberr. It is in position 11 with 880 searches per month.
In fact, I have a draft started on Triberr. Suppose you wanted to beat your position 11.
What should I do?
Step 3: Click on the keyword. In Semrush, keywords are links.
You will see all of your competitors that are ranking for this keyword.
When I clicked on the link, I saw this article in Position 2:
https://ninjaoutreach.com/hacking-triberr-got-5-million-reach-two-weeks-80-twitter-followers/
Considerations:
NinjaOutreach is a respectable blog. Would they have a higher DA than mine? Probably.
Look at the numbers in the headline. You want to be able to beat those numbers to get people to click on your link. In fact, I can beat that number since I have a reach of 8 million on Triberr. Writing about Triberr is still a possibility.
Notice how I now have guidance on naming my item. I want to make sure search engine users see my 8M number in my title so they click on my post.
Can I get to Position 1 so people see my post next to Ninja Outreach?
Note: Semrush only allows 10 free uses per day.
Step 4: Go to the Moz Open Site Explorer: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/.
You need to see if your competitor has a higher Domain Authority Ranking than you do.
Paste your competitors link where you see the URL.
As of this writing, Ninja Outreach has a Domain Authority Rating of 55. Mine is 46.
Google is more likely to show the Ninja Outreach article to its readers than mine.
Conclusion: At least for now, I won’t finish my Triberr article.
You might ask, wouldn’t Position 3 be fine for me? Do I have to be at the top of page 1? My answer is yes, I do.
No one will click on my post, even if the numbers in the headline outnumber what’s already on the internet. No one will click on my article if they don’t see it.
If these are your conclusions, go back to Alexa and repeat the procedure in Semrush with #2.
Nice and easy! Rinse and repeat!