When developing a promotion strategy in an unfamiliar topic, controversial issues often arise - how best to break requests into landing pages, how much text to place, how to structure it, what maximum keyword density is acceptable, etc. The best way to dispel such doubts and decide what to do is to analyze the top competitors and follow their example. In this post, I will talk about three methods of express search results analysis that we use when we need to get data very quickly.
Quick top analysis
When we need to quickly determine the basic characteristics of top sites, we use the . With its help, you can get data on age, TIC indicators, PR, presence in catalogs and the number of backlinks from top competitors in a few seconds - and based on them, draw conclusions about the level of competition on request:
Analysis of the semantic breakdown of top competitors
But this tool has another useful feature that helps a lot. decide on the breakdown of queries by promoted pages.
Example 1
Imagine that you have a site for renting housing (apartments and rooms), and you need to make sure to promote it to the top for three main queries: “housing rental”, “apartment rental”, “room rental”. What is the best thing to do - optimize the main page for all queries or is it better to distribute them? The wrong choice in this matter can not only “stick” the site far beyond the top, but also lead to the imposition of sanctions (everyone knows that Yandex does not like pages created specifically for the request).
Let's analyze the search results using the tool and use the “highlight identical pages” function:
For example, I took an arbitrary site and analyzed its positions for relevant queries. The screenshot shows that for all the selected queries, except for one, the site is in the Top 10. The icons in the column on the right indicate the types of featured snippets that appear in the Top 10 for each query. For example, for the query “cleaning apartments”, 3 sites from the Top 10 have quick links, and 4 have phones. And for the query “office cleaning”, quick links and phone numbers in snippets are found twice, the address is found once.
It is obvious that the site we are analyzing does not have rich snippets at all (look at the “snippets” column), while for many requests, SERP competitors have them. That is, in terms of optimizing snippets, the patient clearly has something to strive for.
The tools described in this article are developed by our programmers according to our requirements. If you have any ideas or wishes for improvements, please write to me at [email protected] .
Shares a list of sites that will help you get a report on the position of competitors on the Internet (and not only). Search, compare - and win!
Today, a huge number of sites operate on the Web: companies and specialists, online stores, portals, a wide variety of services, etc. An important step in the development of the resource is the analysis of competitors. You need to be one step ahead, or at least keep up. There are several simple and free ways to analyze competitors, which we also use to develop Nethouse.
1. Studying the search results of Yandex and Google: Site-Auditor
The positions of competitors' sites in the search results and the dynamics (history) of changes are most conveniently tracked in the completely free Site-Auditor program. By specifying the address of the resource of interest, in one click you get all the key data on the site from search engines, incl. positions according to the generated list of requests (independently or through Wordstat.yandex.ru).
With its help, you can also conduct an express audit of a competitor's website: find out how many pages are indexed, see which statistics systems are installed, TIC, PR, and much more. Also, Site-Auditor can be used to check the SEO promotion of your site and to regularly monitor the dynamics of position changes.
2. Competitor analysis in Yandex and Google searches: Spywords
You can find out how your competitors are promoting their site using services such as Spywords.ru, Advse.ru, Advodka.ru, Adtrends.ru. Their functionality is not much different, so we will consider in detail only one of them - spywords.ru - it provides the most information and has a limited free version.
With the help of the service you can find out:
Dynamics of various indicators (number of requests, budget per context, etc.) over time;
When analyzing, be careful: do not take statistics figures as absolute and exact values, since these data are calculated using a certain algorithm and an error is possible.
3. Traffic comparison: Similarweb
The service will help you compare traffic with competitors and find opportunities that you are not yet using in your business.
Here's what you can learn from the service:
Traffic to the site for the last month and traffic dynamics for the last 6 months;
Behavioral factors on the site: bounce rate, average time on site, browsing depth;
Traffic sources for the last 3 months: ratio of direct, search, etc.;
4. Studying trends: Google.com/trends and Wordstat.yandex.ru
With the help of Google and Yandex Trends services, you can see the dynamics and history of requests in each country or around the world.
You can find out if your competitors are growing in popularity. To do this, look at the trends for requests for their names in Russian and English. If the scale on the graph grows, then, accordingly, the popularity of this brand among Internet users also grows. You can check the trend by the names of competitors both in Russia and around the world.
In website promotion, as in business, the appetite comes when the competition is eaten.
Good afternoon, readers of my blog. Today we will talk about the analysis of the sites of your competitors. In his article "Website promotion - where to start?" I noted that the analysis is one of the very first stages of promoting your site.
A lot of young optimizers neglect this stage, they think that you first need to deal with your site, and only then analyze competitors. This is a big mistake, a very big one. If a competitor site got into the TOP3 of the results, then the optimizers did something, and they did it right. The task of your analysis is to find out how the site was developed, how it was optimized, what external promotion factors were used and how effective it was. To be honest, you can learn about the site practically, and this will allow you to get a complete picture of what is happening.
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Competitor website analysis: internal optimization
We will start our not tricky analysis with internal optimization. Enter the query you need in the search engine, open the first 10 sites.
1. Meta tags. This is the first thing to analyze. Here we focus on the occurrence of keywords in the title and description. Yours should be similar. Ideally, description should contain one direct occurrence and one word form.
2. Content. Next, look at the presence of text on the page. The main thing here is to determine the volume of text, the density of keywords, the occurrence of the key in the headings h1-h6. Pay attention to text structures, markup, use of various tables and pictures. If all this is not there, then you have a chance to beat your competitors due to better optimized text.
3. Linking. When analyzing linking, you need to understand how many pages of the site link to the one in the TOP, what weight it has.
4. Evaluate the usability of sites. What modules they use, perhaps they use various features (pop-up menu, tips, etc.) that allow the user to quickly find the information they need. Recently, search engines have begun to take into account this factor, so do not hesitate to borrow interesting ideas from competitors.
If the first item can be checked manually, then there will be a problem with the subsequent ones. To do this, you need to use special software and various analyzer sites. I wrote in more detail about the software and all kinds of programs in the article "Programs for auditing and analyzing the site."
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Competitor site analysis: external site optimization
External optimization refers to the quantity and quality of backlinks that lead to this site, or rather to the page in the search results. What you should pay attention to:
1. On what resources and how links were placed. If these are trusted, bold resources, with articles written for the analyzed site, then we can conclude that competitors approached the selection of donors responsibly and purchased high-quality backs. It becomes clear that your backs must be of no less quality.
3. You also need to analyze the anchors and the number of non-anchor links.
In order to see all the backs of a competitor, I use several sites. Firstly, this is solomono.ru The site is good, but it has a number of shortcomings, the main of which is the speed of updating backs. It does not always give up-to-date information, but you will understand the big picture.
Secondly, I always use ru.ahrefs.com. Its disadvantage is that the free version is limited. For a full analysis, you will need to buy a subscription. But the service is really great. With it, you can see all the backs, what pages they are from, where they lead, with what anchor, how much weight they convey. In general, all the necessary information in a few seconds. Also, this service will show the growth dynamics of backs, referring sites by domain zones, and a lot of interesting information.
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And in the end, I would like to add that you should not postpone a detailed analysis of competitors until later, because if everything is done correctly, you will be able to build the right development strategy and achieve TOP positions for your key queries much faster.
Outbound links - good or bad?
SEO audit of competitor sites involves taking into account a number of factors - from the age of the domain to the number of indexed pages. About how to spend SEO competitor site analysis will be discussed in this article.
Initial promotion evaluation
Using the Yandex.Wordstat tool, you can give an initial assessment of the competitiveness of a query - the greater the number of search queries per month, the higher the level of competition.
The low frequency of the key in most cases indicates weak competition, but in the case of the query "seo site optimization" this is not the case - the query is low-frequency (has a frequency of about 200 per month), but a further SEO audit for other parameters shows that competition for this request high.
How to perform SEO analysis of competitors from the TOP?
SEO analysis of competitors from the TOP-10 search results allows you to see how competitive this or that topic is, and how much time and effort search promotion will require.
An SEO audit involves several steps:
Step 1. Analysis of the competitor's positions
We enter a key query into the Yandex search line and get the result - TOP-10 competitor sites for this key. Further SEO analysis will be based on checking each of the competitors.
Step 2: Check the domain age
The age of a domain is the amount of time that has passed since it was registered. The age of the domain also coincides with the length of time the site has been on the Internet. The older the age, the better search engines treat it. So, breaking into the TOP for highly competitive queries for a young site (less than a year old) is not an easy task.
You can check the age of a site using the WHOIS online service. By evaluating how many young sites are in the TOP, you can judge the competitiveness of the request.
Breaking into the TOP is much easier if it is filled with mostly new sites. The opposite is also true - the more “old-timers” are in the TOP, the more time the search promotion will require.
If there are no young sites in the TOP at all, then this indicates a high competition of the key and the topic as a whole.
Step 3. Checking the authority of the resource
PR values may differ for different pages, while the TIC is calculated for the site as a whole.
If in the TOP there was not a single site with TIC below 100 and PR 3, then the topic is highly competitive.
Step 4. Presence of registration in directories
Registration of a site in the YAK and DMOZ directories is one of the ways to improve the position of the site.
An example of a highly competitive key is the situation when more than half of the sites from the TOP are already registered in directories.
Step 5. Checking the degree of site indexing
Indexing is the process by which search engine robots traverse the site, discover and store new pages in the search engine's memory.
You can check the number of indexed pages as follows:
- We enter a query into the Yandex search, consisting of the word "site:" and the address of the competitor's website. For example, "site:konkurent.ru".
- Press Enter and see the result - a list of site pages listed in the Yandex index. The number of these pages is also displayed here.
The more pages of the site are involved in the search, the more visitors the site receives, the easier it is to move on the search query.
If there are sites of completely different sizes in the TOP, and the number of pages in the index varies from 10 to several thousand for different competing sites, then we can conclude that external site optimization will be of paramount importance in search promotion. And to get one of the first places, you first need to get a lot of quality external links.
In the case of a low level of competition, the SEO promotion strategy can be built on internal optimization: increasing the number of pages and competent linking can make the page weight large enough to bring the site to the TOP.
With the help of online services, you can immediately remove a set of ratings of all competitor sites and compare with your own.
To do this, you need to add your site to the list of competitors, upload the list to the Checktrast service, create a new project, set the parameters that need to be removed (you can remove all available ones), wait for the analysis to be completed, upload the received data in excel format.
What parameters will we get:
- Age
- spam level
- Number of pages in the index
- Number of links
- Trust is a complex parameter of trust on the part of search engines
- Page load time - which is very important
- Even attendance data is possible
*It is important to understand the specifics of programmatically collected data! The data may not be accurate, you should not blindly rely on them, especially when it comes to competitors' attendance - this can only be taken into account as additional information. Data from different analyzers may differ from each other.
But in any case, an approximate picture of how much your site loses to competitors in terms of age, number of pages, quality and links will already be available to you.
Analysis of requests (keywords) of competitors
How to find out what queries your competitors are promoting?
We look at which keywords their pages are optimized for.
We parse pages with the SeoFrog program, for example. We get data on the Title, Description meta tags, look at what key phrases are in them. 
We look at the headings H1-H6 on the pages of sites.
Install the SEO META in 1 CLICK extension in your browser. While on the landing page, activate the plugin and get data on the phrases that are used in the headings on the page. 
To collect all the keywords for which the site is ranked in Yandex and Google search engines, of course, you will have to use paid tools such as Semrush, SerpStat. But you can immediately get a large amount of data for comparative analytics of semantics. These services have all the detailed instructions for uploading the necessary parameters.
The main tasks of this stage of the analysis:
- Find out the keywords for which you should promote your site
- Find keywords for which there are no sections and pages on your site to promote
- Optimize the structure of your site sections for new key queries and directions
- Assess the quality of your meta tags compared to competitors
- Compare the depth of study of the semantic core of your site and competitors.
Analysis of texts of competitors
As part of the article, we can recommend the CheckTrust service, which will help select the purest white donors. 
Visual inspection and analysis of competitor marketing
No services can replace a careful inspection and study of sites with your own eyes!
We research competitors, look for their successful solutions for:
- Navigation (menus, widgets, navigation tips, linking)
- Design of through blocks (header, footer)
- Designing typical pages (home page, catalog section, product or service card, shopping cart, order form, contact page, about us, price list, etc.)
- Content (images, texts, documents, videos, graphics, etc.)
- Marketing (USP, promotions, conditions, special offers, etc.)
- Design and decoration.
And of course we compare with our site. If competitors have excellent polished sites in terms of usability, content, internal optimization, navigation, etc., etc., and everything is dull and sad for you, then the chances drop significantly.
It is also worth paying more attention to the commercial factors of Yandex. One of the most important factors is the range! If you have much less goods, services than the top leaders, this will play a negative role when trying to promote.
How to use the received data to promote your site
So, you have conducted the selection and analysis of competitors on the Internet. What to do with this information?
Semantics and content
- Make a plan for redesigning the structure of the site sections - which ones need to be added, maybe something should be abolished
- Prioritize creating new pages and preparing information to populate them
- Make a plan to work out the semantics - which new clusters need to be explored in depth
Internal optimization
- Think over the existing pages on the site, what can be changed in their optimization (rewrite texts, add new words, change markup and code)
- Think about how to deal with common factors: design, functionality, commercial factors. It is impossible to promote a site that is far behind the top ones in terms of its technical equipment and design.
External optimization
- Build a link building strategy using quality donors that link to top competitors.
Good luck with promotion!
