SEO Step By Step Guide: 11. Competitive Analysis

In the previous post we discussed about website analysis and the factors that we need to take into consideration for website analysis. This post will concentrate on competitive analysis as the next step to our optimization. While the entire concentration in website analysis was on our website, here our concentration will be our website’s ranking with reference to the competition in the search engines.

Here the word competition has a little different connotation and it is not to be understood just in terms of our business competitors. Our business competitors however can be part of the competition that we are discussing here as long as they are affecting our position in the search engine. If your business competitor does not have a website then he is not to be considered part of your online competition.

If our website is a brand new website then we will have no search rank history. If it happens to be an old site, you will have search engine history which will be your starting point or point of reference.

When you want to perform competitive analysis, you must start with your main keywords and check your position in the search engines and the top 10 websites that are listed for the same keyword or key phrase. These will be your competitors for that specific keyword. They may be offering the same or similar services that your or offering or selling the same product that you are selling. Or they may be from an entirely different field.

When you want to perform competitive analysis, you must do a complete website analysis of your competitor’s website taking into consideration all the factors that we discussed in our previous post and document how they are superior to your website. When you do this you will be able to notice that your website has missed out a number of factors. Probably your website might be having the same page title and meta keywords for all the pages. Whereas, your competitor’s website would be having unique page titles for each page that are keyword rich. Your competitive analysis should be able to document such differences.

The next important aspect is to compare your link building efforts with that of your competitors. You can find out the number of sites linking to your competitor’s website by making the following search in Google: “links: xyz.com”. You will also be able find the links for your website too using the same search by just replacing xyz.com with the domain for which you would like to check the back links. This will only give the total number of links followed by the search engine spider and indexed.

If your website has faired well in all the other aspects and linking is the only area where you are outdone, then by reinforcing your link building efforts, you will be able to get better ranking in the search engines. You must also remember that it is just not the number of back links but the PR of the webpage from which you are getting the back links matter the most.

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