SEO Competitor Analysis Simple And Effective
If you are an internet marketer and engaged in various marketing campaigns for your websites, products or services, you are often busy researching the most effective keywords that send you targeted visitors. In order to rank your pages high in search engine results, its is important that you monitor the SEO methods your competitors are using to achieve their rankings. You can follow the guidelines below to do this successfully.
The question is: Where to start? Focus on your most important keywords first. You are looking for your website and pages to appear in top positions of search engine results for these keywords. In many cases, you may not be able to acquire top positions, but just by optimizing for these keywords you may rank for long tail keywords that also send you traffic from search engines. You have to analyse the websites and pages that are outperforming you in search engine results and the reasons behind their success.
There are several ways for you to do this analysis. You should investigate all your competitors’ sites, go through their content, and find out the links they are getting to their pages. However, it will take a lot of time to do all that. You can use automated ways such as free and paid software tools to get this information and make a schedule out of your regular activities to do this easily.
The most convenient tool is “SEO Quake”, which is a firefox extension, or a similar tool. After the tool is downloaded and installed, you should search for your main keyword. You can find out the main ranking factors for the websites that appear in results. It is important to search for the following key components:
- Total number of links that point to the competitors site.
- Find links to this site that use the target keyword in anchor link text.
- Check for links from related competitor domains.
- Use the Wayback machine (web.archive.org) to check the age of the page.
- Find the number of Digg and Del.icio.us listings of that site.
- Search if the site has a DMOZ listing.
- Find out how successfully the page has been optimized, i.e. its title, website URL description, and content in body.
- You can explore the ranking factors that give your competitors the maximum advantage for ranking by comparing each of them to your website. Check 4-5 sites of competitors using each of your vital keywords and compare them to your site. You can make a matrix. This can be very helpful for you to plan your strategy.
You can amend your content, if required and improve your target keyword optimization. Further, you may launch a campaign for improving PR and your link popularity to get more back links to different pages with various keywords in anchor text.
If you do your competitor monitoring and analysis regularly, you can really succeed by using keywords effectively and finally match up to your competitors.
