In today's competitive digital landscape, understanding how your app user experience stacks up against the competition is crucial for success. But, all too often, competitor analysis falls flat, providing vague insights that fail to drive meaningful results.

Why does this happen? Because without concrete data, it's impossible to uncover actionable strategies for improvement. Your competitors aren't going to share their secrets with you, after all!

Fortunately, the world of SEO offers a treasure trove of accurate (or near-accurate) data points about your competitors' performance. By leveraging these insights, you can reverse-engineer your own success and leave the competition in the dust.

In this article, we'll dive into the essential strategies for conducting competitive analysis in SEO, helping you to:

What is App User Experience Competitor Analysis?

App user experience competitor analysis refers to the process of identifying, exploring, and analyzing apps that rank beside yours in organic search results for your target keywords. If they're not SERP rivals, then they're not competitors, and it's not competitive research.

Why is Competitor Analysis Important for App User Experience?

The goal of a competitive analysis is to uncover opportunities, diagnose potential weaknesses, assess keyword difficulty, and strengthen your app user experience strategy by finding out what's already working (or not working) for your competitors. With competitive analysis, you can improve your:

  • Keyword research
  • Meta descriptions
  • Content strategy
  • Link building
  • On-page optimization
  • User experience SEO
  • App user experience strategy

When Should You Conduct Competitor Analysis?

In app user experience, competitor analysis isn't a one-time job; it's something you should revisit frequently. Though you may kick off a new campaign with a thorough analysis of the competition, every time you write a new blog post, optimize a new page, or seek out new backlinks, you should revisit competitive analysis to help inform your strategy.

At the very least, you should revisit competitive analysis at the following times:

  • When doing keyword research. Find out who's ranking already, identify long-tail keywords your competitors have overlooked, and assess how rankable a potential keyword is (aka "keyword difficulty").
  • When link building. Make a list of the high-quality backlinks your competition has acquired that you haven't so you can target them with outreach.
  • When creating a content strategy. Identify what content your competitors rank for but you don't, devise a content strategy that fills an underserved niche, and pinpoint the exact type of content (e.g., list, course, guide, long-form, etc.) you'll need to rank.
  • After a ranking drop. Did your rankings drop significantly overnight? If so, how did your competitors fare over the same timeframe? Use competitive insights to better diagnose the culprit of your dip.
  • If there's a shift in domain authority. Domain authority is a relative metric, so if yours drops, you better check to see if your competitors dropped too.
  • When there's an algorithm update. It's always a good idea to monitor the competition after Google rolls out a core update, especially if you saw significant movements in rankings, up or down.

Who Are Your Real App User Experience Competitors?

In app user experience, you have two types of competitors: direct rivals and content competitors. Well, three if you count Google, but we'll shelf that conversation for another day!

Direct rivals include businesses that offer the same products and services as you.

Content competitors include businesses, blogs, and publishers who compete for the same search rankings as you, whether or not they sell what you sell.

For example, let's look at the competition for the keyword "pH balance of skin" and let's pretend we're Dermstore, a store that sells skincare products. Out of the ten organic snippets on page one of Google, only two of those spots compete directly with Dermstore (i.e., they sell skincare products).

Ironically, your direct rivals may not be content competitors at all (not every direct rival invests in search engine optimization), but you'll always have content competitors.

Finding Your App User Experience Competitors

How do you find your app user experience competitors?

The easy way or the hard way: with tools or without tools. First, you can manually check SERPs for specific keywords you want to rank for and see who occupies the first page of Google. Want to rank for "vitamin C serum"? Cool, just type it in Google and see who ranks on page one. Those are your keyword competitors.

Or you can use a tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush