How to SEO-analyze your competition

Besides from creating optimized content on your web site you’ll have to keep an eye on what your competition is doing and how they do it. And by that I mean that you’ll have to check a whole bunch of things before you attempt to create a page that will target a certain keyword and also after you’ve done it. Why ? Because if you are on the first page there’s a big chance of you being analyzed by others. You always have to know what your competition is doing. This might seem a little odd at the beginning but as time goes by, it will become a habit and doing a quick check on a competitor’s web site will let you see how well they’re doing. Here are a few things that you should check and analyze in what regards the web sites you compete against.

How many

This is the most basic thing. Doing a basic Google search on a keyword will show you how many web sites you are going against. Don’t be get scared about this number no matter how big it is. Why ? Because this is not really your competition. Try and see how many web sites target the keywords in the title of their pages by searching “allintitle:keywords” and after that how many use the keywords in URLs “allinurls:keywords” and finally how many have links with text containing the keywords “allinanchor:keywords”. These 4 basic searches combined will offer you a much more accurate image. See if in all 4 cases the top 5 remains the same. If it changes then you should try and see why ?

Another thing to look for is if the web sites that rank on the first page are ranking with the top domain or with a particular page. A particular page is much more easy to analyze then a top domain in terms of how they are using the keywords and what backlinks do they have to that specific page. If the top domain is ranking well then you should try and find out more informations about it, like : how many backlinks and from what anchor texts and what web sites, how many pages on that web site target the keywords in titles, URLs, anchors and text and so on.

How well are they doing it

Analyzing the traffic that the top web sites get is a good indicator of how well are they doing their job. This is something you can do with Alexa.com or Compete.com. Another interesting tool is Google Trends which will provide all sorts of informations like which countries deliver the most traffic to a specific web site, what other web sites were visited by the same users and what other keywords they’ve searched for. All these web sites let you run comparison searches on two or more website. The results can be really interesting and could indicate which one has a much more powerful brand image and in what countries or language.

All these informations are a part of how to analyze your competition and the results can offer a good image of who your are going against. Automated tools are really helpful to help you get a much more accurate image of the competition’s web sites.

SEO Tools to use

Backlinks analysis tools : backlinkwatch.com or webconfs.com

Link search or directory search : soloseo.com

Here is a tool that will take your keyword, run a search and then see what other keywords does the top ranking web sites also target : justsearching.co.uk

Here is a tool that will perform an analysis on a web site and also offer comparisons :  spydermate.com

A good way to analyze your competition’s presence on social networks is bizshark.com or how they are targeting a specific keyword with nichewatch.com

So tell me how do you analyze your competition ? What tools do you use and what are the things you consider to be most important ?