Loading ...Delving into the sites of your competitors can provide you with great insight into not only what has allowed them to reach the top, but what might be holding you back. If you’re in a competitive field, spotting the one thing your competitor isn’t doing as well as the five things they are may be what it takes to get you above them in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Analysing a competitor’s site isn’t that hard, and should be a part of the basic initial work you do for search engine optimisation. If you’re really desperate for an edge over a competitor, however, your competitor site analysis requires a little more in-depth approach. It usually helps to have a professional on your side if you’re trying to succeed with a high-competition keyword, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about in-depth competitor site analysis. The best thing you can do is to look at competitor sites as if you were a search engine.
Dig a little deeper
There are basic things about your competitors’ sites that are easy to uncover. You can easily see how they’ve composed their title and description tags, what their content is like and where their keywords are in their text anchors. To get the best outcome from a very basic view of a competitor’s site, think like a search engine when you look it over. Do you notice the keywords too much? What are the site’s strengths?
For best results, look even deeper. There are certain aspects of a page that make it strong in SEO terms:
- Have they planted header tags within their code to identify important headings? This can help direct search engine spiders to the right information.
- Are these appropriate? Your competitors might have a habit of misdirecting search engines.
- Are they channelling PageRank using nofollow tags? This indicates a sophisticated SEO plan.
- Have they submitted an XML sitemap to the search engines?
- What links are they attracting, and where?
It’s particularly important to look at pages that are successful in the SERPs and identify their strengths. Competitor site analysis can be a little tricky because you’re looking not only for faults and flaws, but for the strengths that have got your competitors where they are. Identifying these strengths can give you inspiration for your own pages.
This is particularly important when it comes to analysing links. A lot of search engine optimization experts advise that you make a list of your competitor’s inbound links because there may be links that you yourself can use. This is great advice, but only half of what your competitor’s links can tell you. As well as providing pointers for specific links, analysing the page that attracted the link can help you craft your own link magnets. If they have a dynamite article that attracts constant links, perhaps you should explore that subject too.
Competitor analysis, like all SEO work, requires creativity as well as technical know-how. Don’t just look at the stark facts. Look at the connections, and add it up like the search engines do.
Related posts:
- How to dismantle your competitors
- Step-by-step simple site analysis
- What your competitors can do for you
- Seeking out competitors
- The SEO 8-step program
Tags: content, Keywords, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Consult, sitemap
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