Blog

Are you trying too hard to rank on the first page of Search Engine Result pages and yet not succeeding? Maybe there is something lacking in the way you are implementing the SEO and Internet Marketing techniques. Another reason could be that you are already in a very competitive niche. In that case ranking on top of your competitors becomes really a difficult task. You really can’t afford to neglect this competition.

And sometimes you may find that your niche is not much competition. Though the competition is not much, it is a nice idea to track your competitor’s success and failure to rank well. Below are some steps to analyze your SEO competition:

1) Find out your competitors:

If you don’t know who your competitors are, then you won’t be able to analyze them. In some cases, finding your competitor may be an easy task. For example, if you are having an offline business and you already know your competitor, you can just check their websites for the purpose.

However, when it comes to internet marketing, tracking your competition is not very easy. You may find your competitor sites ranking well for your major keywords or for your long tail keywords. This list of competitors could be really very long. You can’t analyze all your competitors. You will have to perform a search on Google for your target keywords and list websites that rank high in the search engine results pages (SERP). You can think about these websites as your competitors.

2) Analyze your Competitors websites:

Once you have a list of competitors, visit and analyze your competitors’ websites. Check if their websites are professionally designed or not, find how much content they have and also the quality of content. Check if they are using dynamic URLs or static URLs. Such a kind of review will give you plenty of information about your competitors’ web presence. Thus you can know if your competitor websites are search engine friendly or not.

3) Analyze the keywords your Competitors are using:

Find out the keywords your competitors are using. In case they are using some other keywords in addition to the keyword you are using for your website. Check the keyword density of your competitors’ keywords. Also, do not forget to find the location of the keywords that is if they keywords are in the headings, meta tags, image tags the URLs, etc.

4) Check the competitor back links:

Back links form another important aspect for good rankings. That’s why you will have to comprehensively examine the back links of your competitor. Find out the number and origin of the back links, the anchor text used for these back links and thus you will be able to know your competitor activities. With this, you can even find out some back link source for your website , i.e. , for example , if you observe that your competitor has back link from some very popular sites you are knowing about, then in that case you can approach the webmaster of those popular sites to add your link to their website and get a back link.

5) Check other important SEO Aspects:

Competitor website’s page rank is another important aspect along with keyword and back links. You will need to find the competitor’s page rank in Google and how are they performing in other Search Engines like Yahoo! Search and Bing. Do not forget to find the number of already indexed by search engines for your competitor websites.

6) Measure Your Competitor’s occurrences on Social Media websites:

Social media drives a lot of traffic to the website. That is why you can’t avoid finding out how your competitors are performing on social media websites. Unluckily, this task is a bit hard to perform. Social bookmarking sites are categorized as social media websites and you can start researching from them. Identify some of the social bookmarking sites and check if your competitors have posted there and also find the popularity of these posts.

Twitter and Facebook are other sources of huge traffic to your website. Find out if your competitors have accounts on these social media sites. If they already have an account, you can befriend them. Unless you don’t do that, you won’t be able to know what exactly they post. If your competitor allows all to see their posts and tweets, you can easily find their activity on these social media sites.

7) Analyze How Your Competitors Are Using PPC Ads:

Today many businesses have found PPC (pay-per-click) an efficient way to drive quality traffic to a website than optimizing it to rank well in organic search results. Google Adwords is the most favored tool for PPC. You can find out how your competitors are keeping up with Google Adwords advertisements/campaigns.

Supervising your competition is a never-ending job. All the activities mentioned here are quite time-consuming but if you don’t take the time to analyze your competition, you may find it difficult rank well. You can certainly learn a lot from these techniques and it will keep you ahead of your competition and make you more efficient in the future as far as Search engine optimization is concerned.