How to Analyze Competitors and Improve Your Rankings with Advanced Web Ranking

If you want to succeed in the highly competitive world of online business, you need to stay one step ahead of your competitors. 

That’s easier said than done. How do you do that? 

The answer lies in practical competitor analysis. By researching your competitors and analyzing their strategies, you can gain valuable insights that will help you improve your own business and outrank them in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

OK, that sounds complicated. Is there a tool that can help with competitor analysis?

The best competitor analysis tool available for this task is Advanced Web Ranking (AWR). The following post shows how AWR can help analyze your competitors so you can improve your search engine rankings.

Find competitive keywords

The first step in analyzing your competitors is to research the keywords they're targeting and how they rank for them. Let’s start with the “Keyword Suggest” feature from AWR. You can find it in the “Add new keywords” section.

Click on the “Show Suggestions” button, type the competitors' URLs and you will get a comprehensive list of keywords that your competitors are targeting, ordered by search volume:

Now add the most important keywords to your project and run an on-demand ranking update. You will soon have a report with all their positions in SERPs. This way you can compare it with your rankings and see how visible your website is for these keywords.

The next step is to run a Keyword Difficulty update, to see how difficult is to optimize your website for the analyzed keywords:

By analyzing all this data, you can identify new keyword opportunities that you may have missed and find ways to improve your rankings for the keywords you're already targeting. 

For example, you can filter the list of keywords to show only the keywords that have a lower difficulty and for which you are not ranking on the first page.

Analyze competitors' best landing pages

The next step is to analyze your competitors' best landing pages. A landing page is the first page a user sees when they click on a search engine result or ad. AWR can help you identify your competitors' best landing pages and what makes these pages effective so you can apply these lessons to your own landing pages.

You already identified your most important competitors and saw their top keywords. With AWR, you can easily see the exact page they rank for each of these keywords, by accessing the Keyword Ranking report:

Once you have their landing pages, you can run a short on-page audit for each of them and try to find their strategy.

An overview of their landing pages can give you a picture of their most optimized pages so you know how to start the audit:

Here you can see the top keyword for each of your competitor’s URL and also its search intent.

Click on the number of keywords in the Keywords column to see all the keywords that a page ranks for.

Analyze competitors' evolution in time

Another important aspect of competitor analysis is tracking your competitors' ranking evolution in time. AWR can give you historical data on your competitors' rankings, and other performance metrics.

Start this analysis from the Keyword Ranking report. Select the competitor you want to see the evolution in time for. 

You can see how the competitor ranks for each keyword, in a nice and clear chart. Each point on the chart will help identify the landing page that ranks or that specific keyword for each update date:

Another great feature AWR has is the Dates Comparison in Trends, where you can find the position trend for each keyword and also the landing page that shows up in the SERP:

From this chart, you can also see how any Google Algorithm changes may have affected the ranking of these keywords.

By carefully analyzing this data, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors' ranking trends and adjust your own ranking strategy accordingly. 

By monitoring when they experience upward shifts in rankings, you can investigate the changes they made during that period and leverage those insights to improve your own website.

Analyze competition performance metrics

In addition to tracking your competitors' evolution over time, AWR can also help you analyze their performance metrics in real time and compare them all. By monitoring these metrics, you can quickly identify changes in your competitors' strategies and take action to counter them.

To gain a complete understanding of your competitors' strategies, you need to perform an in-depth market research. AWR can help you do this by revealing your competitors' organic search strategy. This includes information on the keywords they're targeting, and the content they're producing. By analyzing this data, you can identify gaps in your own strategy and find new ways to outrank your competitors.

The best report you can use in AWR for this task is the Market Share, which contains useful performance indicators that can be analyzed simultaneously. You will see in a few seconds how much your slice represents from the total traffic opportunity, and how that performance compares to your top competitors.

By analyzing the Top 20 competitors or the ones already added to your project, you can gain valuable insights. You may quickly discover that your direct competitors have a greater number of indexed URLs, rank for more target keywords, and have higher Click Share, Estimated Visits, and Visibility Percent than your website.

However, this presents an opportunity to focus on optimizing your strategy. By ensuring more relevant pages are indexed and improving the internal linking strategy, you can achieve better rankings for targeted keywords. This will lead to an automatic increase in Click Share, Estimated Visits, and Visibility Percent, resulting in improved performance for your website.

In conclusion, practical competitor analysis is a key component of any successful SEO strategy. By using Advanced Web Ranking, you can research competitive keywords, analyze landing pages, track performance metrics, and perform in-depth market research to obtain your competitors' organic search strategy. 

Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions that will help you outrank your competitors and improve your search engine rankings.

So, why not start using AWR today and take your SEO strategy to the next level?