Competitive SEO Analysis

Ask any business professional to explain how they became successful and they’ll tell you it takes hard work and keen insight, especially when it comes to watching your competition.  There is a saying in life – "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer".  This applies heavily to the business world because you are in direct competition with other companies.  You can be guaranteed they are watching you, just as you should be watching them.  The World Wide Web is no different.  Another website may be gaining more traffic because they have honed in on search engine optimisation words and phrases and know how to get their websites to the top of the results.

When you are analysing your internet competition, limit the number of websites that you are using for comparison.  If you tackle too many sites, you will be wasting valuable time.  By keeping your list to less than a dozen, you will be able to analyse a nice selection of companies without overburdening yourself.  The next step entails studying the keywords or phrases that are entered into a search box most commonly.  Incorporating those terms can help you to draw internet traffic.  Incorporating commonly used keywords or phrases will increase your ranking.

As you start compiling information from your competition’s websites, make sure you are studying:

• Backlinks:  Having other websites that link back to your own website helps raise your ranking.  You need back links that are of good quality – and, you need a number of them for this method to work.  Take a look at the competitions’ back links and see where they are marketing their business.

• PageRank:  Another item that is important to analyse is the Pagerank of your competition.  Google offers a score of zero to ten to rank the value of a website’s pages. It uses the website’s incoming links to come up with a score to see a website’s popularity.  It is not the most accurate measurement, however, so use it as a general guide and not a certainty.

• Pages Indexed:  How many of the web pages on your competitor’s sites are listed in the different search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo for example).  The more pages that are listed, the better likelihood of getting seen in the engines.  You should look closely at this information and make sure the majority of your web pages are indexed. 
  
  To gain a higher search engine ranking, you should also have your site indexed frequently.  The goal is to have your website indexed at least once a week, especially if your website content changes regularly.  The date is available by clicking "Cached" from any search result.

• Strongest Web Pages:  Check to see which of your competition’s website pages are the strongest based on the number of backlinks and its ranking in the search engines.  This can help you gain insight into what potential clients or customers are looking at.  This way you can see how tough your competition is on different keywords.

• Website Age:  There are millions of websites out there, and some gain far more traffic than others.  You should always take time to look at the age of your competition’s websites.  If you find a site that is a decade old, you should try to uncover what has made that site so successful and high ranking, even after all of these years and with so many other competitors.

Once you have analysed different competitor’s websites, you will start to come up with a plan that allows you to avoid the pitfalls other companies have fallen into and shape your website to be one that visitors enjoy.

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