Competitive Research

Competitive research in SEO means, in a nutshell, stealing your competitors’ rankings and traffic.

Well, not exactly stealing.

But it does involve reverse-engineering what's working for your competitors, and using that information to your advantage!

Competitive research typically follows a few common lines of inquiry: identifying competitors, keyword research, content gap analysis, and backlink exploration . If you're not sure where to start when it comes to establishing your competitors, check out the True Competitor feature in Moz Pro, and start building your competitive strategy.

In addition, we've listed some companion resources on competitive research and analysis for SEO.

How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO : A terrific introduction to SEO competitive analysis with a free template to copy for your own campaigns.

The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide : An effective competitive research process starts with keywords, and this guide outlines a step-by-step process you can implement today to identify keyword opportunities.

Link Gap Analysis for SEO : Identify opportunities to increase your authority based on your competitors’ backlink strategy.

SEO Competitive Analysis Certification : Learn how to confidently build an SEO competitive analysis plan and get certified with this 6-part series. This certification combines on-demand video lessons with tasks and quizzes to affirm your understanding.

Google Organic Click-Through Rates in 2014
Competitive Research Search Engines

Google Organic Click-Through Rates in 2014

We've all been there. Trying to improve our organic rankings so we can get more traffic from the search engines. And every time we do that, we are left with some big questions in our minds, like: How much traffic would I actually get if I rank on the first page? This post offers a new study of click-through rates of various positions on SERPs in an attempt to answer those questions.
Generic SEO
Competitive Research

New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings

BuiltWith has cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.
Generic SEO
Competitive Research

Competitive Link Analysis: Link Intersect in Excel

Without a doubt, one of the main steps in creating an SEO strategy is the competitive analysis. Competitor backlinks can offer information on their link building strategies, as well as giving you opportunities to strengthen your own link profile. Read on to learn how you can build your own competitive link analysis in Excel, including a template to help you start right away.

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