E-Commerce SEO Competitor Analysis (Getting Started)

E-commerce SEO competitor analysis isn’t rocket science. It all comes down to taking the right approach and using the best tools. In this guide, I will break down how you can hit the ground running with e-commerce SEO competitor analysis and topple competing domains.

If you’d like a slice of your competitor’s traffic (and revenue), you’ve found the right article.  Let’s dive in.

What Is E-Commerce SEO Competitor Analysis

E-commerce SEO competitor analysis is all about researching and analyzing the strategies, tactics, and techniques of your competition. In doing this, you should eventually identify SEO opportunities for improvement. If you’re facing fierce competition in a popular e-commerce niche, establishing a clear competitor analysis strategy is a smart move.

Here are just some of the areas you may explore during SEO competitor analysis:

• Website page structure
• Blog content formatting
• Niche-relevant backlinks

While this may sound pretty basic, a full range of tasks will come with exploring these three areas. If you have the time for competitor analysis and really want to dig deep, you can unlock a treasure trove of useful data for your e-commerce business. After all, knowledge is power.

Why Is Competitor Analysis Important In SEO

The rules of the game are constantly changing. If you want to see success, you must keep a close eye on your surroundings. Assessing the landscape and monitoring looming competition in your niche is key to staying firmly at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). By knowing how competitors approach SEO, you can build on their strengths and find ways to differentiate yourself.

To climb the SERPs, you cannot simply reproduce content created by your competitors. You need to bring something a little different to the table. Once you have critical insights into the type of keywords your competitors are targeting and how they are structuring their content, you will eventually find that they are your greatest source of learning. Competition is often useful!

SEO Competitor Analysis for E-Commerce (Checklist)

When you are conducting an SEO competitor analysis for e-commerce, we’d recommend considering the following areas:

Content Gap Analysis

Look at the types of content your competitors are creating and identify any gaps in the information they are providing. This can help you identify opportunities to create unique and valuable content that will attract more visitors to your site.

Link Gap Analysis

You can analyze competitor backlinks using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify any potential opportunities to build high-quality links to your own e-commerce website. This can include pinpointing broken links, picking out possible link building opportunities, and analyzing the overall strength of the niche-relevant domains linking to your competitors.

Number of Indexed pages

You should take a look at the number of pages on your competitors' e-commerce websites that are indexed by search engines. This will give you a clear understanding of how much content they have and how much effort they are putting into SEO. If they have dozens of optimized articles on a specific topic and you only have a handful, this is potentially something to address.

Tool-Centric Metrics (DR, KD)

Make use of popular tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to analyze the domain rating (DR) and keyword difficulty (KD) of your competitors. This data will enable you to measure the quality and authority of their websites and help you understand exactly what you are up against. If you do not have the time to get familiar with these tools, you could use a specialist SEO agency.

Competitor Analysis for E-Commerce (3 Major Mistakes)

Based on our experience, we’d recommend avoiding these rookie errors:

Not Understanding Your Target Market

Before you can begin analyzing your competitors in any meaningful way, you must have a clear understanding of your target market and the types of queries they are likely to search for on Google. This knowledge will lay the foundation for both competitor analysis and keyword research going forward.

Focusing on Keywords with Poorly-Aligned Search Intent

While it’s important to pay particular attention to keywords in your niche with high search volume and low competition, it’s also critical to make sure that these keywords are fully aligned with the search intent of your target market. If the keywords are unlikely to attract those who are interested in what you sell, you may not want to pour your writing resources into these.

Blindly following Your Competitors

Blindly following your competitors can have disastrous consequences, especially if you have no way of assessing their general experience or competence with SEO. You should aim to draw inspiration from many different competitors. By looking at a broad range of competitors in your niche, you can build a clear picture of what is working and what is not.

Identifying which Stores You Can Learn from

While it’s easy to identify the competitors in your niche that are ranking the highest in the SERPs, how much can you actually learn from them? It’s often better to identify domains that are operating at the same level as you - with similar backlink profiles and domain authority. By learning from these competitors, you can see what keywords you can realistically rank for.

Closing Thoughts

If you are about to embark on SEO competitor analysis for the first time, I hope the above tips and tricks will help you kickstart the process. Once you get in the rhythm of things, the entire process is remarkably straightforward. If you need a helping hand or simply don’t have time to do this yourself, consider partnering with Searchant for hands-on SEO support.