Competitive analysis is a step
you should take in the very beginning of your SEO efforts. It should be right
at the top of your to-do list, along with keyword analysis and tagging your web
site. In fact, you should probably do a competitive analysis even before you
begin tagging your site. But did you know that your competitive analysis
doesn’t end there? Like analyzing your web statistics, conversions, and other
elements of your web site, your competitive analysis should be ongoing.
As you’re going through this
analysis process, the first thing to keep in mind is that you’re not checking
out only your direct competitors. You need to look at those competitors who are
ahead of you in search rankings, even if their offerings are different from
yours.
Your competitors will change.
They’ll learn how to reach a search engine better. They may even change their
customer approach just enough to always stay ahead of you. They’ll keep you
guessing, and the only way to figure out what they’re doing that you’re not is
to spend the time it takes to analyze what they’re doing.
Plan to spend a few hours a
week on this analysis. You should look at all the sites that are ahead of you,
but specifically those sites that rank in the top five to ten position in the
SERPs.
You already know what you
should be looking for. Look for the same indications that you examined during
your original competitive analysis. These include:
Site rankings: Where in the
SERPs is the site ranked? Make note, especially, of the top three to five
sites.
Page saturation: How many of
the competition’s pages are indexed? Not every page on a site will be indexed,
but if your competition has more or fewer pages ranked, there may be a factor
you haven’t taken into consideration about how to include or exclude your site
pages.
Page titles: Are page titles
consistent? And what keywords do they contain, if any at all? How your
competition uses titles can give you an indication of what you’re doing right
or wrong with your own.
Meta data: What meta data is
your competition including? How is it worded? And how does it differ from your
own? Remember that you can access the source code of a web site by selecting Source
from the View menu of your web browser.
Site design: How is the
competition’s web site designed? Site architecture and the technology that is
used to design and present the site are factors in how your site ranks. Learn what
the competition is doing and how that differs from what you’re doing.
A robots.txt file: The
robots.txt file is accessible to you, and looking at it could give you some
valuable insight to how your competition values and works with search engines.
Content quality and quantity: How
much quality is included on your competitor’s site and is it all original, or
is it re-used from some other forum? If a site is ahead of you in search
rankings, its content is probably performing better than yours. Analyze it and
find out why.
Link quality and quantity: Your
competitors’ linking strategies could hold a clue about why they rank well.
Look at the link structure. If they’re using legitimate linking strategies, what
are they? If they’re not, don’t try to follow suit. Their actions will catch up
with them soon enough.
