SEO Competitor Analysis

A big part of any SEO plan is the preparation you must do to get ready to start making changes to your website and adding links. This involves doing a competition analysis and doing keyword research. If you don’t have the right keywords, your SEO efforts are going to be useless. The keywords you choose should not be too competitive or you will have a big fight on your hands.

What does competition analysis involve and what information are you looking for? The following are the five most important factors in SEO competition analysis.

1. How many backlinks and how good are they?

There are good tools you can use for this step including Web Comp Analysis by Jonathan Leger. This tool will go through the major search engines and find all the websites that have links to your website. The tool can then tell you the PageRank and the anchor text for each link. If your SEO keyword is "red dog", for instance, and the best website out there contains around 4,000 backlinks, you can use Web Comp Analysis to figure out the number of links that use your keyword phrase. Anytime the most popular websites contain close to 10,000 or more links with your keyword, you should look for another option.

2. How old are the existing domains?

The most popular search engines give a lot of SEO weight to how old a domain is when figuring the rankings of websites. They assume an older website is one that people trust and that is well established. If the competition for your keywords are all websites that have been around for longer than 5 years, you probably want to look for other keywords.

3. Are they indexed for the main page or the subpages?

You can easily get your search engine rank up if the competitors are only using subpages by indexing your main index page.

4. Include SEO keywords in your title.

The keywords of your SEO strategy need to appear in the title and more specifically, at the start of the title. That is a good way to beat your competition with easy onsite optimization.

5. Are they using onsite SEO techniques?

Go to the websites for the top results in Google and look to see if they have H1 tags associated with the keywords, what their keyword density is, if they use valid code, and if they have an XML sitemap. If your competition is not taking advantage of the onsite SEO techniques like these, you will probably be able to beat them by doing as much onsite optimization as you can. You may want to check out a tool called SEO Quake that will help you figure out what your competition is doing to optimize for specific keywords.

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