How to Steal Market Share from Your Competitors Through SEO

By Prime Rank

Are you tired of being the underdog in your industry while bigger competitors dominate the online space? Well, it's time to turn the tables using the great equalizer of SEO. This guide will walk through how to analyze your competition's SEO strengths and weaknesses to identify gaps you can exploit. From there, we'll cover simple tactics to optimize your online presence and start siphoning away their hard-earned search traffic and customers.

Step 1: Assess Your Competitive Landscape

Before you can outmaneuver the competition, you need to understand who they are and get a full lay of the land. Make a list of your top 5-10 primary business competitors, focusing on those you're looking to steal market share from in search.

Step 2: Conduct a SERP Analysis

Now it's time to analyze where you and your competitors currently rank in Google for your most important keywords and topics. Use a tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs or even Google Search Console to get this data:

Identify 10-20 of your highest-priority keywords based on search volume and business value
For each keyword, see where your site ranks compared to competitors
Note who currently occupies the top 3-5 rankings you're gunning for

Seeing who outranks you for your target terms gives you an initial view into who you need to upstage. It also provides a snapshot of how much ground you need to make up compared to the leaders.

Step 3: Technical/On-Page Audits

Once you know who to target, drill down deeper to uncover their technical and on-page SEO strengths and weaknesses. Use site crawler tools to compare key metrics:

Study page load times, core web vitals scores, and mobile-friendliness
Check for issues like 404s, redirect chains, XML sitemap problems, etc.
Analyze title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, keyword targeting

Look for gaps and opportunities. Maybe their title tags are well-optimized but site speed is poor. Or the metadata is lacking but their information architecture is solid. Identify their vulnerabilities to strengthen your future strategy.

Step 4: Backlink Analysis

One of the biggest ranking factors Google looks at is the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing at a website. So take a deep dive into each competitor's backlink profile:

Use link analysis tools to see the total referring domain and backlink counts
Assess the overall quality and relevance of their highest-authority link sources
Note any low-quality, spammy links that could represent a disavow opportunity

The goal is pinpointing any weaknesses in their off-page link authority that you can overcome through a focused link-building campaign targeting high-value sources.

Step 5: Content Audit

Content is a huge piece of the SEO puzzle that many businesses miss the mark on. Dive into the topical areas and types of content your competition is (or isn't) creating:

What topics do they focus their blogs and articles on? Are any key areas underserved?
How frequently do they publish new content? Are there consistency issues?
What content formats and mediums are they using? Videos, infographics, tools, etc.
Look for gaps in information coverage, quality, or ability to match search intent

By analyzing their entire content strategy and execution, you can identify weak points to develop a more authoritative, impactful, and optimized approach.

Step 6: Develop Your Battle Strategy

With a full competitive audit complete, you should have a solid grasp of each competitor's holistic SEO strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and missed opportunities across all major areas.

From here, it's time to map out your own custom SEO game plan to directly counteract their shortcomings and assert your newfound dominance:

Prioritize the key pages/areas you need to beef up to match/outperform their presence
Build out a keyword research and targeting blueprint to occupy untapped spaces
Develop a technical SEO checklist to solidify your foundation and eliminate issues
Map out a short and long-term content roadmap to produce best-answer material
Plan a strategic link-building campaign focused on quality over quantity

Roll out your customized SEO offensive following best practices, track your progress over time, and make continuous refinements. With persistent effort and a sound data-driven strategy, you'll soon start to see your competition's market share eroding as you siphon away more and more of those coveted search rankings.