When it comes to the online world analyzing your competitors can be done a lot easier than in the brick and mortar world. Sure, you can’t look into their office or home and see how they run the website behind the scenes, but you can study their site and see how they put it together. Here are a few ideas on how to study your competition when it comes to search engines and optimizing your site to compete.
First, you want to do searches for the keywords you want to compete in. Once you have located the sites that are in the top of the rankings for those keywords you can do a little research to see what makes them tick.
- View source on their site and see how they do their meta tags. You don’t want to copy them, but you can get an idea of what they have done.
- Use some online tools and check the keyword density of their site. Keyword density isn’t always an exact science, but if the top five sites have a keyword density of 3% and you have 6% you might be a little too high. This will at least give you a target area to shoot for.
- Do a reverse look-up in Google to see how many inbound links they have and where they are coming from. Simply go to Google and type in “site www.theirsitename.com.” Doing this will give you a list of all the sites linking to that site. This gives you a few pieces of information. First if you have 10 inbound links and they have 100 you now know you will need to get more links. Also it tells you where they are linked from. You can check out those sites and see if perhaps you can get listed there as well.
- Determine what type of design the site is using. If their site is mostly text and yours is flash and javascript, maybe you are doing too much and should make it simpler. Sometimes a plain text site is best.
- Determine the age of their site. You can do a whois and see how long the domain is registered. If the top sites have been around for years and your site is new, it could be a while until you can fully compete with them.
- Decide if this keyword is best for you. Say for example you want to optimize your site for the keyword ‘dog food’ and you see there is tons of competition comprised of long established sites that have a ton of inbound links. It may be very difficult for you to compete. If you happen to be selling organic dog food, you might find the keywords ‘organic dog food’ to be less crowded and actually more effective for you. Sometimes analyzing the competition means determining what battles you can actually fight and win and sometimes choosing a different tactic.
- Watch your competition over time. If you watch the competition’s site for two months and determine that they update five days a week with new content and are always adding new inbound links, you will need to be able to do the same in order to compete with them. If you can’t you might want to choose a smaller, less competitive keyword to work in.
Analyzing your competition can give you a big head start in building your site because you can see what others have already done and build your site to compete with them right from the start instead of heading down the road and then having to fix things and re-optimize months into the game. Always check out the competition before starting a site and find your niche, it will make your life much easier.