Competitor Analysis

Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I'm not just talking about your traditional competitors, I'm referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting.

Analyzing your competition should be the second step taken during the SEO process (right after and sometimes even during keyword selection). Looking at what and how your competition have positioned their website where you want yours to be placed will lend great insight into how to get yours there.

The above statement should not be taken as meaning that early in the campaign is the only time that competition analysis is important. Once you are holding a top position your competition will undoubtedly renew their efforts to take back what you have replaced. Competition analysis is a step that must be taken to find out what you need to do to take a top position but which also should be performed periodically to detect your competitor's efforts to take back "their" former positions.

In our competition report we will cover inernal site (on-page) factors which must be considered and secondly we will cover the external factors (off-page) analysis including incoming links, anchor text, PageRank, etc.

On-page (internal) SEO Factors

On-page factors of your website are the easiest to address as they are factors which are under your complete control.

You have the power to change anything within your site from the content, internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself. Key onsite factors that must be considered in competition analysis are:

• Titles and meta tags - While meta tags definitely don't hold the weight they once did they are certainly worth adding to your site. Titles on the other hand hold significant weight and must be created carefully to insure that they hold maximum SEO effectiveness and also that they appeal to the searchers.
• Keyword density and content - There has been much discussion over the years as to whether there is an optimal keyword density or whether density even matters. While there are SEO's out there who might disagree, the entire debate seems obvious to us at least. If the search engines are looking at onsite factors at all (which they are) and looking for relevancy then it naturally follows that there is a percentage of your content that can consist of the targeted keywords and indicate to the engines that your site is relevant for a given phrase. With that said, and like the Meta Tag Titles, it is not about cramming in keywords just anywhere to boost the density in your content. We analyze your top competitors density and content and calculate an overall average of the targeted keyphrases needed for your site and give you a full report of how it should be applied to your web site.
• Special formats and positioning - Special formats will be considered content elements such as bold, colors, anchor text, or any other content characteristics that sets specific text out as different when a search engine is spidering your site. Positioning refers to the position of the keywords in relation to the entire content on a given page. Aside from this type of positioning there is also the consideration of how the content and keywords are positioned relative to the code of the page (and sometimes these can be two very different things).The use of these formats, provided that it is done correctly, can not only help improve that rankings of your website for specific phrases but can also enhance the usability of your website in general by drawing the human eye to key content.

Off-page (external) SEO Factors

External SEO factors generally refer to the internal links to your, and your competitor's, website.

To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including:

• How many links do they have?
• How many of these links come from the same sites?
• Are these sites relevant?
• What is the PageRank distribution of the links?
• Are these links image or text links and if text, what anchor text is used to link to your competitor's site?

These factors are important as they define the value of the link. The number of links is perhaps the least important of these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and if they are all from a single unrelated site with a low PageRank then the value of these links is negligible.

Knowing how many of the links to your competitor's site come from the same site or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising and also help isolate weakness in their link counts. Multiple links from the same website are not given the same value as multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have thousands of incoming links that come from 5 different websites you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple hundred, all from different sites.

Our SEO Competition Analysis

Here we follow the 10%-more rule

In regards to onsite factors, all you can do is work with the average keyword densities and make sure your content is well written while maximizing the usage of keyword density and special text to give you the biggest boost possible. After that the 10% rule comes into effect. Once you know exactly what your main competitors have done in regards to their incoming links, do that but add 10% either in numbers or in value and relevancy.

While this entire process can be very time consuming, the goal here is not to save time, it is to maximize the effectiveness of the SEO performed on your site. Spending a fraction of the time to produce little or no results is never as desirable as insuring you're doing it right from the beginning and then taking the time to do what's needed, thus increasing your odds of success greatly.