Competitor Analysis
Struggling to Keep Up with the Competition?
Do you have a website, but your competitors are always ahead of you in the Google search results pages (SERPs)? Then use our competitor analysis to find out what your competitors are doing differently. Don’t settle for guesswork, get concrete metrics. With XOVI’s competitor analysis, you can learn almost everything about your competitors. Use this knowledge for your online marketing strategy and outperform your competitors.
Meet Paul and Oscar. Paul likes cats and is the proud owner of his own petcare business. But Paul has a problem. He’s not attracting enough new kitty customers…
Competitor analysis checklist
To help you keep track of your competitors, we offer you a handy template in PDF format to download.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
About our competition analysis tool
How do I recognize my online competitors?
If you don’t know your online competitors, check Google to see who ranks in the top positions for your focus keywords. Often the same domains keep appearing. You should add these when you create the project. This means that you no longer have to type in the competitor domains manually when you analyze them in the XOVI SEO tool, as they will always be pre-filled.
Why does the competition appear before me in the search results?
According to Google, your ranking in Google depends on over 300 factors. These can be roughly divided into on-page and off-page factors. On-page factors are all the adjustments that are made to your own website: good content, headings, titles, keyword selection, fast loading times, responsive web design, internal linking, etc. Off-page factors include the quantity and quality of backlinks and signals from social networks. By analyzing your website with XOVI, you can find out exactly why your competitors may be ranking higher than you. Do they have more relevant content, do they have significantly more backlinks than you, etc.?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of other competitors?
With the XOVI SEO Tool, you can analyze how your competitors are performing across key areas such as keywords, ads, backlinks, internal linking, social media, on-page optimization, and content. You’ll gain valuable insights into their online activities, enabling you to draw actionable conclusions. What types of content formats are they using? Which social media channels are they leveraging? Which campaigns are succeeding, and which ones are falling short?
How can I make good use of the insights I have gained?
Leverage the insights from competitive analysis to refine your online marketing strategy. Learn from your competitors’ successes and avoid repeating their mistakes. For instance, uncover keywords and ads they are ranking for or running that you may not have considered. Broaden your social media presence by exploring additional channels where your shared target audience is highly active, as observed from your competitors. Identify untapped niches that your competitors have yet to explore, and so much more
What is the aim of a competitor analysis?
The concrete to-dos that can be derived from a competitive analysis are manifold. What they all have in common is that by implementing them, you increase your visibility on Google. You maximize your traffic and thus your conversions. In addition, analyzing the competition enables you to make longer-term decisions regarding budgets and resources. This will give you a competitive advantage and leave your competitors behind. In general, you should carry out a competitor analysis at regular intervals to keep an overview of the current competitive situation. This is the only way to ensure that you can react quickly to changes. Especially online, new competitors can appear out of nowhere very quickly.
Where can I get more SEO expertise?
In our SEO Blog, SEO Kompass and Expert Advice, you will find everything you need to know and the latest articles on topics such as SEO, content marketing, backlink building, keywords and much more. The SEO Masterclass is XOVI’s free learning platform with courses on SEO and online marketing as well as videos on how to implement SEO tasks with XOVI. In addition, we offer 2-day seminars on SEO, Ads, Google Analytics. Tag Manager, Content Marketing and Linkbuilding. These seminars usually take place in Cologne and are held by external experts. Up-to-date knowledge and a high level of practical relevance are guaranteed.
Competition analysis
made easy
You should carry out an SEO competition analysis at regular intervals. The XOVI competition analysis tool makes this process easy, allowing you to stay informed about your competitors’ strategies and focus areas in online marketing. With this tool, you’ll gain insights into the topics and products your competitors are prioritizing. It helps answer critical questions such as:
- Which content formats do they use? Which ones work well, which ones less well?
- How can you find out the keywords of your competitors?
- Do they use Google Ads?
- Do they actively build backlinks?
- How often do they publish new content?
An SEO competitor analysis can answer a wide range of questions. The XOVI competitor analysis tool equips you withthe data you need to evaluate your competitors’ online activities. No need to rely on guesswork—you’ll have concrete figures at your fingertips. You’ll understand precisely why your competitors rank where they do on Google—often even before they do. Gain clear insights into your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to strategize effectively.
Use this knowledge advantage and draw concrete conclusions from the competitor analysis for your own online marketing concept. Set up new campaigns or optimize existing ones. This will increase your long-term visibility on Google, generate more traffic and leave your competitors behind.
Keywords of the competition
Do you want to know which keywords your competitors rank well for?
Nothing could be easier. With the help of the keyword tool, you can keep an eye on your own keywords and the current keywords and positions of your competitors. The information on monthly search volume, CPC (click per cost) and competitor density (value from 0-100) helps you to recognize opportunity keywords.
Chance keywords are characterized by the following parameters:
- High search volume
- low competitor density
- Clear search intention
If presented with a large amount of data, you can use filters to refine it further. Useful filters in addition to search volume and competitor density are, for example, threshold keywords (filter: position) and long tail keywords (filter: number of words).
What are the common keyword rankings of you and your competitors?
You can use the ranking comparison to find out your competitors’ keywords. At a glance, you can see which keywords you and your competitors have in common in our database of 25 million keywords and how you rank for your shared keywords.
Which keywords do only your competitors have?
This question can also be answered using the ranking comparison. By simply removing a check mark in front of your own URL, you can see the exclusive keyword rankings of your competitors in the results table. You can now check whether there are any useful keywords here that you have not yet considered in your keyword research.
Competitor advertising
Do you want to place your first ads on Google or optimize your existing campaign? In this case, it also makes sense to use a competitor analysis to check what your competitors are doing in the ads area. This way, you can find out which ad formats work particularly well for them and apply them to your campaign accordingly. This will save you unnecessary clicks that drive up your budget.
With the help of the XOVI Ads tool, you can check the ads that have been placed on each domain and compare them with other domains. Based on the performance indicators and the associated graphics, you can see directly whether your competitors:
- spend more money on ads,
- are placing more ads on different topics
- whether there are seasonal fluctuations in the placement
XOVI offers a range of tools for an even more precise analysis of your competitors’ ads. You can get a complete overview of the ads that have been placed under the sub-heading “Placed Ads”. Here you can see the complete ad as it is displayed in Google, including the title, description, URL, keyword and current position.
This is a great help, especially when you start writing ads. It is not easy to write short and click-friendly ad texts. You can get inspiration from the ads of your competitors. You can even export them to Excel for further processing.
Another effective way to compare ads directly is through the domain comparison feature. This allows you to view a list of all shared keywords—the overlap between your ads and those of your competitors. Curious about which keywords your competitors are targeting in their ads that you aren’t?
This can also be found out by removing the check mark in front of your domain. You will certainly also find some relevant keywords for your ad campaign with a moderate CPC here.
Keywords of the competition
The backlink tool gives you an overview of your competitors’ backlink profiles. The link performance indicators show you at a glance how many backlinks your competitors have from how many pages and how many domains they are distributed across. By analyzing the anchor texts, you can also find out which keywords your competitors are focusing on when building links.
You can also compare your own backlink profile with that of your competitors. The domain comparison provides you with a list of all shared backlink sources as well as the exclusive backlink sources of your competitors. The hub finder, on the other hand, allows you to search your competitors’ backlinks for backlinks with a specific anchor text. All results can be exported as a CSV file.
If your competitors have a lot of backlinks, it can be very difficult to identify the “good” backlinks. In this case, you should create an analysis in our Disavow tool. This function was originally designed to check your own backlink profile for dangerous backlinks in order to reduce the risk of a possible penalty from Google. The Disavow tool calculates a risk value for each backlink. You can use this value for your competitor analysis. You create a disavow analysis for your competitors and then display the backlinks that we have marked in green, i.e. those that are classified as neutral. This makes it easy for you to find good backlink sources and thus advance your own backlink structure.
