Stop Guessing - Study Your Competition!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Watching the Giants dismantle the Patriots last night reminded me of a critical step to every website strategy: competitor analysis. I find it amazing how little people actually talk about it. Yet, with every audit I complete and with every web strategy I create, a competitive analysis still remains a priority.

Kimberley Bock from Learning SEO Basics wrote up a great beginners guide to competitive analysis. I’d like to take a closer look at some of the great points she made in her tutorial.

Keywords

One of the first places I go when doing keyword research is the list of competitors that I ask my clients for. I ask my clients to come up with 10-15 online and offline competitors, and then I dive in. Reviewing your competitors’ sites will help give you an understanding of how competitive the industry is online, and what keywords they feel their customers are using. Many times I’ll find a gem or two that I hadn’t found before. You can get a good idea of what keywords they are going after by doing a mini audit on their website. Look at:

• The keywords used in their Meta tags
• Keywords used in headers and in their content
• Anchor text
• ALT text

I’m not saying that you should be targeting the exact keywords they are, but keep track of all the keywords you see they are targeting. Then, use your keyword research tools to figure out if the keyword is worth targeting. Obviously these tools don’t give you an exact number of the popularity of the term, but it can give you a good idea as to whether or not it is worth targeting.

On-Page Factors

Run through their site and figure out how strong it is. I’d recommend using Matt McGee’s guide on how to SEO your site in 60 minutes. From his guide I’d recommend looking at the following on-page factors:

• Look for any black hat techniques they are using (hidden text, shady redirects, etc.)
• Look at their site navigation and figure out how Search Engine friendly they are
• Do a site:domain.com in all 3 main engines, and look to see where the search engines are having trouble

And most importantly…

• Figure out what strategies they are using that are putting them ahead of the game (a blog, widgets, videos, etc.)

This is the most important part of your competitor analysis because you need to figure out what they are doing wrong (so you can avoid it and take advantage of it), and what they are doing right (so you can create a strategy that can compete with it.)

Off-Page Factors

In addition to the on-page factors, you can also learn valuable information from the off-page factors on your competitors’ websites. Most importantly, what great links they have that you need to get. This can take some time, but investigate the backlinks that your competitors have that might be helping them with their search engine rankings.

What blogs and forums are they commenting on? Are they providing unique content to industry magazines or resources?

This will give you a great head-start on your link building campaign.

Final Thoughts

Once you choose which keywords you’ll be targeting, figure out which keywords are your most important. From that list, I also like to go through and take a look at what I’m up against. The information you find from these competitors and the competitors mentioned above is priceless.

Capitalize and learn from their mistakes, and put your client in the best opportunity to dominate on the web. You should be prepared enough that there won’t be any surprises. Remember, there is no reason why your website can’t be the juggernaut that everyone is trying to compete with. Stay ahead of the game and become that website.

Tagged as: competitor analysis