Chapter 2. Understand competitors’ SEO performance

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.