Assessing Your Online Competition

Have you ever really taken a good look at your online competition?  If you want to succeed in the SEO battle, this is something that is a must (not an option).  First off, there are 2 ways to go about this–yes I mean only 2 ways.  The first is to follow the few steps that I will point out soon, and the second is to talk to your SEO expert about doing this for you.  If you are new to the online market, I would refer you to the latter (it will save you a lot of stress and time).  Ok, I am biased to that being an internet marketing specialist and all.  So shoot me, I want to get make some money like every one else.   After all that is what this is about right?  But I digress–now on to what you will need to do.

First:  You need to run a report on the # of incoming links to your site, as well as your competition’s sites.  You will need to make a list of all the links that you and each of your competitors sites.  There are many tools out there that can help out with this, for example yahoo site explorer tool.  This will give you a good idea of the # of links that are coming to each of the sites.

Second:  You need to look at the Authority (google page rank) of each of those links to determine the quality of them.  This is important, as a link from a PR 5 site is many times more valuable than a link from a PR 0 site.  One link from a PR 5  site can be more valuable than 100 links from a PR 0 site.

Third:  The Anchor text from those links is also an important factor to look over.  The more anchor text links you have that use the keywords you want to rank for the better for you.  You can also see what your competition has for Anchor text and adjust your strategy as needed.

Fourth:  You will need to gather the domain age of all of these sites.  Google uses this a factor in their Page Rank that we discussed in previous steps.  If your competition is older, it may be harder to compete, while if it is younger there may be more opportunity.

Fifth: The index count or the number of pages on the sites also needs to be calculated.  This can be done by typing in site:www.website.com in the google search box.  This will tell you how many pages that google has indexed for each site.  This is important as google looks at the indexed page count as part of the PR and SERP ranking in their algorthims.

The above five steps will give you the off page factors in determining your SEO competition.  The On-opage factors that you will need to find are:  Keyword used in title, Keyword used in URL, Keyword used in description and Keyword used in H1 heading tags.

As you can see and not say “I told you so”, this is a very time consuming and tedious task to get all this information compiled.  There are tools to help you with this, but wouldn’t it just be easier to let your SEO team handle this for you.  They will also be able to analyze this information to determine if there are opportunities in the market you are trying to break into.  Take my advice, hire a professional SEO team and sleep better at night.

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