How to Perform a Competitor Audit

From this you can easily see the different competitors, the number of keywords they are ranking for and the organic traffic. Then going deeper, into the Market Explorer you can view which competitor URLs are performing the best for a cluster of keywords. In the example below, it shows the best competitor URLs for “tv” related terms.

Keyword research is one part of the competitor analysis, but it is important to also look at the other aspects such as post sale services. If your client is an eCommerce site, does it offer free delivery? What are the delivery terms and conditions? Go through the checkout process. Is it easy to add products to your cart and buy what you wanted on the site? Nearly 70% of carts are abandoned, even if they may be ranking high in the SERPs. High rankings does not necessarily equate to generating more sales. Many sites lose customers through the payment gateway. Your competitors may be suffering from a high cart abandonment rate, but if you do not, then you can focus your efforts on other areas of marketing such as content.

Check out the blogs of the competitors, are they keeping their site up to date? If they have a multinational site, do they have an updated blog in other languages? Do they have a FAQ section on their site about delivery and getting in contact? Do they keep all their social media profiles updated? Do they respond to comments and questions from customers?

What does their email marketing look like? You could always sign up to their newsletter, see what offers they have. Are there any special deals for the different seasons, e.g. Black Friday, Christmas, Valentine’s day?

As we discussed in the On-page SEO Ultimate Guide, website performance and page speed is crucial for all sites. In May 2020, Google announced that it will be rolling out the Google Page Experience update in 2021 and Core Web Vitals will be ranking factors next year.

Core Web Vitals, also called Web Vitals are the performance metrics that affect user experience including how fast the page loads, the visual stability and the interactivity. So no more slow sites! If your competitors’ sites are performing poorly now and still by 2021 and yours is loading quickly, then you will be one step ahead of your competition.

Within the insurance and financial services, the user journey is considerably more complex than – for example – a low-cost retailer. Why? Financial and insurance decisions are often a larger monetary commitment or investment that may span a considerable amount of time and impact an individual’s quality of life. This makes viewing, understanding and analysing competitor content essential. Not only to see what is working within the sector, but to establish how to go a step further in your strategy.

The first and most crucial step is not only identifying competitors and benchmarks, but how you chose them.

Your direct and indirect competitors may be different from your SERP competitors, but both carry equal weight in importance. Your business competitors are those that offer the same or similar products to you. For example, within home insurance in the UK, Aviva and GoCompare may be considered direct and indirect competitors of another provider. Your SERP competitors are those who compete with you on the premise of ranking, meaning they are higher up in the SERPs than you or dominate more of the SERPs. For example, in finance this would be a publication such as the Financial Times.

Identifying a small selection of your core business and SERP competitors will reveal best-practice tactics for both the content itself and for appearing in the SERPs.

In addition to your competitors, you should monitor two industry benchmarks. The first should be the best of the best. They should be doing a great job in positioning their online presence and act as your inspiration. The other is a business that isn’t doing such a great job. The purpose of these benchmarks is to always have what good and bad looks like at the forefront of your mind.

As the financial and insurance industries produce a variety of content types such as copy, video, infographics, and podcasts, evaluating competitor content types in the SERPs is essential to know where to dedicate your efforts for measurable results. Evaluating ranking content types will enable you to make well-informed decisions for your strategy with the goal of visibility and traffic. For example, the query ‘investing in stocks for beginners’ returns web pages, videos results and ‘People also ask’ snippets:

The high positioning of video results tells you that, as well as producing text-based content, video is popular among searchers of this topic, so Google prioritises it. If business scope allows, making a video part of the strategy is advisable.

The ‘People also ask’ feature is a great way to understand what, specifically, people want to find out around the topic. This can then inform the body of your content.

There are many different crawlers in the market which will let you see the competitor performance in the SERPs. Authoritas’ Content 360 lets you crawl any competitor you have set up in your project area.

Screaming Frog allows users to crawl competitor sites and gather useful information such as headings, tags, word count and publish dates, which can also help to identify trends. It is important to cross reference this with SERP performance to find what is not working and quickly identify competitor blind spots. To dig even deeper, use a social tool such as BuzzSumo to gauge if and how their audience is interacting with it. Needless to say, strong engagement rates often come off the back of great content and yield results.

As mentioned in the introduction, a complex conversion funnel requires a tailored approach. Bucketing and analysing competitors’ existing content through the awareness, consideration and decision stages can indicate how effective their user journey is. Do they have pages for those looking for more information, those weighing up their options and those who are ready to convert?

A deep dive will give you an idea of what to incorporate, and what not to, which you can then work into your strategy. Any common gaps revealed could also become quick wins if filled by your business. For example, a user starting their journey in the awareness stage on a competitor site may hit a wall if there is no consideration stage content. Therefore this would be an opportunity for your business to provide this content and potentially attract these prospective customers.

BuzzSumo is also great to gather performance metrics. These will give you the dos and don’ts for each stage, helping to maximise your strategy. A personal takeaway I have discovered is the effectiveness of video at the awareness stage is rarely replicated during decision-making.

Use SEO software tools to explore where and how your competition is ranking for your target keywords and identify opportunities. Analyse the features of top and low performing pages to reveal where you can and can’t compete. This ensures and reassures your efforts are being exercised in the right places. Look for features for identifying keyword gaps that you could target and win. Everyone has their own favourite to use. There are many in the marketplace and Authoritas has a keyword ranking tool and SEO visibility explorer tool which allows you to see where your competitors are ranking in the SERPs helping to identify gaps

Looking into the search intent behind keywords is just as important as identifying competitor rankings. Once you have gathered your competitors’ ranking information, investigate the pages to understand whether the SERPs are favouring informational or transactional pages for your target keywords. As Google incorporates user activity into its algorithm, it has a pretty good idea of whether people are looking for more information or are ready to buy based on keywords used by the searcher. As a business, you would want to make sure any pages being created or updated to fulfil an intent is targeting it correctly.

As we can see below, the term ‘income protection for self-employed’ largely favours informational pages with eight of the top ten results being long-form content pages, with an answer box featured snippet taking the top spot.

This tells us those searching this query require more information and that therefore any pages being created on this topic should be informational.

Gaining backlinks is becoming increasingly challenging, however, obtaining them in the financial and insurance sectors is exceptionally difficult. If a competitor is gaining backlinks, investigate it. The acquisition of backlinks often indicates a site’s strongest content and give you a list of tactics and potential prospects for yourself.

Find out why, how, and where they are getting backlinks. Knowing which high-authority sites are linking to competitors will reveal which topics and formats are getting the most attention from other sites.

All five tips pay essential parts within a content audit for the financial and insurance industries. In a time where content and link building are becoming more saturated and trickier to navigate, it’s important to tailor your approach and utilise the strategy and performance of others to inform your own.

All five tips pay essential parts within a content audit for the financial and insurance industries. In a time where content and link building are becoming more saturated and trickier to navigate, it’s important to tailor your approach and utilise the strategy and performance of others to inform your own.

At a glance, the concept of a content gap analysis seems pretty straightforward: Find things your competitors are writing about that you aren’t. While this is true, it doesn’t embody the full extent of what those “things” are. Let’s break it down.

In short, it’s easiest to start your audit with a high-level, topic gap analysis. This will help you identify specific pages other similar sites have that yours does not.

Next, you’ll want to break those topics down into queries (keywords).

Finally, those keywords will help you identify even more specific opportunities to outdo your competitors and take up more real estate in SERPs via SERP features and other “content” mediums like video, images, podcasts, etc.

In simplest terms, the goal of a topic gap analysis is to find pages your competitors have that you don’t. For single or multi-location businesses, for example, this will probably include both blog topics and service pages.

• Blog Pages – Generally speaking, blogs are a great opportunity to target long-tail keywords and question-based queries.
• Service Pages – Service pages, on the other hand, are going to focus on the specific thing customers pay your business for (i.e. Legal representation or veterinary care).

Content analysis for an ecommerce site, on the other hand, might include product pages, shelf pages, etc. in addition to long-form resources such as blogs, how-tos, etc.

Let’s say you’re an SMB that offers both HVAC and plumbing services in Tampa, Florida. In this situation, you probably want to rank for terms like, “Tampa HVAC repair,” “plumber Tampa,” and so on, since that’s how people who need your services tend to search.

Check out competitor websites (3-5 competitors are usually enough) and review the specific subtopics and niche service pages their sites include. In this situation, you might end up with a comparison that looks like this:

With this information, you can create a content plan to expand your current content using page ideas from both competing sites.

The result? A hub of plumbing & HVAC information that neither competitor has, which means your site now provides greater value to potential customers and may stand a better chance of ranking for a larger body of topics and keywords.

While topical gaps focus on finding opportunities for new pages and sections of content, query – or keyword – gap analysis goes one step further.

In short, identifying keyword gaps is similar to topical analysis but focuses on specific keywords and their variations opposed to entire pages or sections of content.

You and a competitor are both targeting air conditioning-related search terms with the goal of obtaining business for AC repairs, installations maintenance, tune-ups, and more. Even if both pages include an “AC services” page, along with appropriate subpages, it’s likely that one site is getting more traction by successfully targeting a larger pool of search queries.

One way to identify keyword gaps is by manually reviewing the keywords target on your site and others like it. In the AC page example, you might find that your site tends to target “AC services” keywords while competitors have additional subsections targeting more, related searches within the same topic, like this:

By implementing specific sections of content competitors target that you don’t, you’ll increase the pool of keywords for which your air conditioning page is relevant. The result could look something like this and would create a hub of AC-related information that is more valuable than either competitor:

Generally speaking, auditing competitors manually will only get you so far (and can be pretty time-consuming). On the keyword and topic level, you can use many different SEO software to find gaps and opportunities more quickly.

In Authoritas for example, you can see in the below, an overview chart showing the topic clusters of keywords where multiple competitors rank and you don’t.