Doing an SEO analysis of competing law firms can help reveal where your SEO is excelling as well as what areas can be improved. You may find potential website optimizations that would not have been discovered by doing an SEO analysis of just your own firm. Completing the following steps, you can find new opportunities for your firm to grow its own SEO.

Step 1: Identify SEO Competitors

First, you’ll need to establish who your firm’s SEO competitors are. This doesn’t necessarily mean the firm down the street. They may be firms located across the country. This is because your SEO competitors are those who rank on the first page of search results for keywords you want your firm to rank well for. You can simply search these terms and make a list of those who outrank your firm or if you can enter the keywords into an SEO analysis tool like Moz or Aherfs to find your SEO competitors.

Step 2: Evaluate SEO Strength

Once you have a list of your firm’s SEO competitors, gather data on their SEO strength. This means things like domain authority, number of backlinks, traffic, etc. Here is where you can identify weaknesses that your firm can capitalize on. Maybe a competing firm has a lower domain authority or less backlinks. You can then use this data to outrank them. Let’s say you find that your firm has the same domain authority as an SEO competitor but they outrank you on search results. You’ll then know that putting an emphasis on getting more backlinks or adding more high quality content can help increase your firm’s DA and search result rankings increase.

Step 3: Examine Backlinks

As mentioned in evaluating SEO strength, backlinks can play a big part in a SEO analysis. Not only should you look at the number of backlinks a competitor has, but also what types of sites are linking back to them. Do they have sites with high domain authorities or a lot of small sites pointing back at them? Do you have all the same organizations linking to you too? If not, you’ve just found some new potentials for backlinks for your firm!

Step 4: On-Site Content Analysis

Different SEO analysis tools can help you look at your competitor’s on-site SEO. On-site SEO includes things title length, title tags, keyword strength within a piece of content and more. Look at the landing pages that are outranking yours and examine the title length and word count. If their pages have a higher word count than your firm’s, you know to add some content to your current pages or start writing longer, better quality pieces.

Step 5: User Experience

How is the site set up? Do the pages load fast? Is the internal linking structure easy to follow with different breadcrumbs? Sites with linking structure that make it easy for users to navigate and Google to crawl typically rank better than those who do not. If their site seems outdated or isn’t easy to navigate, optimize your firm’s site so that it is. This can be an easy solution to increasing your firm’s search rankings.

Step 6: Putting it All Together

Once you’ve finished gathering as much data on your SEO competitors, you should be able to find areas where your firm excels and areas that should be improved upon. You can then use these to your firm’s advantage and optimize your site to increase your rankings. Each quarter, you can then follow up to see if your optimizations are producing results.

Source: searchenginejournal.com/seo-competitive-analysis-the-definitive-guide/