Have you ever had the feeling that
no matter what you do, you are not successful with search engines?
While it is quite possible that you are doing things wrong, one other
possible reason for your poor SEO performance is that your
competition is really tough. If you are in a very competitive niche,
then your competition can be really smashing and you just can't
afford not to keep an eye on them.
Well, even if
your niche isn't that competitive, you will only win if you know how
to monitor your competitors' success and failure. Here are some steps
you can do to analyze your SEO competition.
1) Find Who Your SEO Competitors Are
You can't
analyze your competitors, if you don't know who they are. In some
cases identifying your competitors is very easy – for instance, if
you have an offline business and you know your competitors there,
just check their sites and you are done.
However, in
other cases, identifying your competition isn't that easy. Your
competitors could be sites in your niche, sites that rank well for
your major keywords, or direct competitors for your long tail
keywords, etc. The list of your competitors might be a pretty long
one and obviously you can't monitor all of them. Perform a search
with Google about your target keywords and make a list of the
sites/companies that pop high in the search results. You can consider
these to be your main competitors.
2) Visit Your Competitors' Sites and Analyze Them
After you have a
list of your competitors – or at least the major ones – the next
step is to visit their sites and analyze them. You should be watching
if their sites are designed professionally, if they have much
content, what the quality of their content is, whether they use
static or dynamic URLs, etc. This basic site inspection can give you
a lot of information about how professional your competition's Web
presence is, hence how likely or unlikely it is search engines to
love them.
3) Analyze The Keywords Your Competitors Use
Keywords have
always been the most important factor for SEO success. This is why
you can expect that if your competitors are using keywords properly,
their site will rank well in search engines. You might have some
difficulty identifying the keywords your competition uses because
what you think to be top keywords for your niche, might not be on
their list at all. If you don't know which keywords they use, try
checking if they use your keywords – this is more than nothing.
Alternatively,
you can use the Website
Keyword Suggestion tool to check which keywords are
supposed to do well for their site. While doing the check, you might
find many useful keywords you have skipped and start optimizing your
site for them.
You should also
check the keyword density of your competitors' keywords. The Keyword
Desnity Cloud tool will help you get an idea. Also,
don't forget to check the location of the keywords – i.e. are there
keywords in the headings, metatags, image tags, the URLs, etc.
4) Check the Competition's Backlinks
Backlinks are
the other backbone of good SEO rankings. This is why you need to
thoroughly examine the backlinks of the competition. Look for their
number and origin, anchor text, etc. and you will get a clue how your
competition is doing on this front. Very often you might get some
backlink ideas for you – i.e. if you see that your competitors have
backlinks from popular sites you didn't know about, contact the
webmaster of the popular site to see if you can get backlinks from
them, too. The tools you can use are free and some of the best are:
Backlink
Anchor Text Analysis and Backlink
Summary.
5) Check Other SEO Factors
Keywords and
backlinks are important but they aren't everything. In order to get a
thorough idea of how your competition is ranking, you need also to
check your competitors' Page Ranks in Google and how they perform in
Yahoo and Bing. You should also look at the number of indexed pages
the sites of your competitors have with search engines.
6) Evaluate Your Competition's Presence on Social Media
Social media
tend to drive lots of traffic to a site. This is why you can't skip a
check how your competitors are doing on social media. Unfortunately,
this check is harder to perform. Social
bookmarking sites are one of the types of social media
and you can start your research from them. Have a look at some of the
major social bookmarking sites to see if your competitors have posts
there and how popular these posts are.
Twitter
and Facebook
are two other huge sources of traffic. You can browse to see if your
major competitors have profiles at these sites but unless you make
friends with them, you will never know what exactly they post. Still,
if their profiles have publicly available sections, this gives an
idea of what they do on Twitter and Facebook.
7) Analyze How Your Competitors Are Using PPC Ads
Many businesses
have figured out that using PPC to drive quality traffic is cheaper
and more efficient than optimizing to rank well in natural search
results. Google
Adwords is the preferred choice for PPC but there are
also other networks many webmasters will use. One of the best tools,
though it is limited to Google Adwords only, is the Analyze
Competition tool by Google. It allows to compare how
your PPC is doing in comparison to your competitors' campaigns.
Monitoring your
competition is a never ending task. All the activities listed in this
article are quite time consuming but if you don't want to be left
clueless about the world around you, you do need to take the time and
perform the analysis. Even if you see you can't beat the competition,
you will certainly learn from them and this will help you be more
efficient in your own SEO efforts.
Source from : Webconfs.com
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