Understanding your Competitors and identifying their strengths and weaknesses is the most significant step of SEO strategy. It is always a best practice to notice on a regular basis what your competitors are doing to get high rank and study their marketing strategies and notice their mistakes and learn from them so that you do not make the same mistake while making your own strategy. 

You need to pay double attention when it comes to organic rankings, as you can get unexpected low ranking by indirect rivals as they can also use the same keyword for ranking. A perfect starting point to perform competitive research and find the gaps in your competitors’ strategies is to get the big picture by using the Domain Overview report. It provides you with a quick overview of any queried domain’s overall search engine presence.

This report provides you:

• Your competitor’s estimated organic and paid traffic, and the number of backlinks
• Analyze their top keywords in terms of organic positions, recent position changes, and advertising keywords
• Preview other organic and paid search reports

Domain overview

Let’s first understand what domain overview reports provide you. Start by typing the competitor’s domain into the search box. Then choose the desired database and decide whether you want to obtain mobile or desktop data. 

You will see all the necessary information on a listed domain,

• Paud traffic cost
• Keyword distribution between databases
• The number of backlinks
• AdSense data
• Comparison between paid and organic traffic
• Organic traffic cost, it is the estimation of cost that your competitor would pay if were to bid on a organic keyword through Google Ads

In the further part of the report, this information is divided into subsections. From the SEO point of view the most essential  one is the organic search section.

It has the following information contained in the subsections:

• Top organic keyword list, which displays the keywords that drive the highest organic traffic to your site
• The organic distribution lists, you can use this to find the number of keywords that your rivals use to hit the spot.
• Provides you the number of competitors and competitive positioning map. It gives you this list based on the percentage of common organic keywords.

Market research and benchmarking – Traffic analytics

You can use Google analytics tools to analyze the traffic. If you want to check that your SEO strategy pays off then you need to regularly check the google analytics report. The report provides you with insights on your competitor’s audience, online presence and following data:

• Overall website performance according to user engagement 
• Marketing channels and their efficiency 
• Distribution of traffic by source 

You can use this report for:

• Different kinds of traffic channel analysis
• Benchmarking and comparing multiple competitors 
• Market and presale research

What is SEO Traffic Analysis?

When you type any domain in the search bar of an analytics tool, it provides you the report that consists of main user engagement metrics for last month. Among this metrics there are 3 main areas to pay most attention to:

• Pay per visit
• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate

These metrics give you an idea about how the visitors interact with the domains. This may also give you information about which of your competitors have the most engaging  content from the user’s standpoint.

You can see the estimated number of visitors, unique and new visitors, average visit duration, and bounce rate of your domain across different devices. When you scroll down, there is a widget that shows the percentage of desktop and mobile traffic and a list of top subdomains sorted by the traffic share. 

For the benchmark purpose, you need to add four other domains to compare their performance in terms of traffic and user engagement.  You can change the graph view by choosing Visits, Unique Visitors, Avg. Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate and by switching between desktop/mobile device type. You can change the graph view by choosing Visits, Unique Visitors, Avg. Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate and by switching between desktop or mobile device type.

You can find the type of traffic like if it is referral, direct, all, search, social, and paid.

You can see from which locations your competitors are getting more traffic and you can also start targeting that location for more traffic. You can also identify weaknesses and strengths of your website and check the areas where you need improvements.