Competitor Analysis for Business SEO Campaigns

A decent SEO campaign really begins with keyword research and then comprehensive analysis and research into the activity of your search engine competitors. You can’t begin a campaign effectively without fully comprehending who you’re competing for rankings with and an idea of the strategies they have implemented to get their rankings. The target of a competitor analysis exercise will be to identify strategies you could customise for your own campaign and to devise strategies your competitors are not yet using too.

The process of competitor identification can always be a surprising one. The businesses that you might traditionally consider to be your biggest competitors might not be competing in the search engine optimisation stakes. Do Google searches on your core keywords and take a look at the top ten already ranking. These are the main sites you are competing with.

The next thing to do is to go through the websites of each of your competitors. Identify what the top three performers in Google have in common, where relevant. How are they using the keywords on their pages and how are they linking to their landing pages? You should not aim to replicate their websites – this will do you no favours. And don’t copy their content. Don’t look at this as an exercise on replication. Instead look at this as an opportunity to identify things on their websites that you can incorporate into your own site, without copying, and indeed identify opportunities where you can above and beyond what they have done and improve it.

Once you have assessed the websites themselves, take a look at the links pointing into your competitor’s sites. There are free tools, including Yahoo Site Explorer, that enable you to look at the back links. You should aim to find out how many links there are, how many different domains these links come from and the types of links they are. Go right through to some of the sites that link to your competitors to find out what sort of links they are – in content links maybe? Perhaps they are blog comment links?

The really hard work starts after the competitor analysis is complete though and it should be a really high priority for you to establish strategies that do not just replicate your competition, but that go above and beyond what they are doing in order to beat them in the search engines!

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