Competitor Analysis: When Is The Best Time To Do It?
Updated: May 11, 2022
Lawyer SEO Competitor Research, And Why You Need It
The Lawyer SEO tactics and strategies you implement are ways to rank high in the searches—and stay there. Observing the sites and pages your competing against clues you in on what you need to do, what you shouldn't be doing, and how you can do better.
As a law firm, your Lawyer SEO competitors may not necessarily be other law firms. It could be any website about legal services, such as lawyer marketing agencies, directories, referral services, and Lawyer SEO tools.
Basically, your competitors are sites that produce the same content and optimizes for the same keywords. Therefore, before publishing or optimizing any pages aimed at ranking for a given keyword, you need to understand who you're up against.
Finding search competitors you may not be aware of is also an important factor in competitor analysis. For example, your website and content will have different competitors from different industries and legal sectors.
When Do You Need To Implement A Lawyer SEO Competition Analysis?
How you rank in the searches isn't isolated to what you do on your website. It's always compared to your competitors, and your rankings can change depending on how well they optimize or how many new competitors pop up.
Analyzing your competitors on a regular basis allows you to see where you stand in the search results. This lets you know whether you're doing well or getting left behind.
Here are some of the best times to run a Lawyer SEO competitor analysis:
1. Whenever You Create And Plan New Content
Search engines like Google love constant streams of content. However, just because you're posting blogs several times a day doesn't mean you'll rank higher than others.
Remember: Search engines also look at the quality of your content. They don't want to give users articles and blogs that are unhelpful, irrelevant, or harmful.
When staking out the content your competitors publish, take note of the following:
What makes their content high-quality? Is it the details? The keywords they choose? The way they structure the blog posts? Try looking for what makes their content better than those who rank below them.
What is lacking in their content? Find details, explanations, and clarifications that your competitors are lacking. Is the legal language they're using too complicated for non-experts? Are there new updates in law and legal practice they're not tackling?
To be fair, with all the websites talking about the same things, it sometimes feels like you have nothing to add to the conversation. However, you don't have to be the first to break the news or explain a new law. You just have to be the best at delivering it to your audience.
Remember: What users perceive to be useful to them isn't just about the originality of the topic. It's how many takeaways they have after reading about the said topic.
Analyzing what your competitors are doing well and adding your own unique twist is a terrific method to increase relevant search engine visibility. You can also use Lawyer SEO competitor analysis to determine how much work it will take to outrank competitors for a given keyword.
2. Whenever Your Ranking Dips
New competitors emerge, and old competitors improve. That's why Lawyer SEO strategies should be adaptable. So when your rankings suddenly dropped, it's either:
New competitors have emerged
Old competitors have passed and outranked you
The algorithm was updated
In either of these scenarios, you can't just change your content without taking a step back and considering what's pulling your rankings.
Specifically, look at the pages that passed you and see what they brought to the table. Are they new? Is there new content? Did they change their Lawyer SEO tactics? Did they get new covetable backlinks?
Remember: Competitor research doesn't just involve looking at the pages ranking above yours. You also have to look at their backlinks, their off-page strategies, their social media marketing, and so on.
Analyzing them can give you an idea of what to do next—or how to do them better.
3. When Your Rankings Are Not Improving
Competitive analysis might help you uncover optimization gaps. If your pages are stagnating, or you're struggling to move up in the search results, it's not always because you lack on-page optimization.
Your pages might have the right keywords, alt texts, meta descriptions, and HTML tags and still miss out on relevance. Sometimes, how you interpret the keywords or topics is different from how your competitors do, and while that's a point for originality, you might lose out on relevance. Worse, you might be misinterpreting user intent and not giving searchers what they're looking for in a specific keyword.
Knowing what your competitors are doing about it lets you out of your bubble, and it's an opportunity to improve what you initially thought was the best Lawyer SEO tactic.
How LawyerLeadMachine Can Assist Your Law Firm
Lawyer SEO strategies need to be sustainable. Otherwise, you might get buried under the search results. However, when done right, it can boost site traffic and expand your client base.
If you need an SEO expert to help you out, review your options here.
