Wednesday 12 June 2013

Competitive Analysis – Fun, Easy & Important


Competitive Analysis – Fun, Easy & Important

Written by  on April 23, 2012 in Keyword ResearchSEMSEO - 3 Comments
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Competitive analysis should be a fundamental part of any SEO campaign. It goes hand in hand with keyword research by allowing you to understand what will be required to achieve a first-page ranking for a given keyword phrase. This means seeing the futility of targeting certain phrases or being given the path to a top-ten result for others without wasting any time or effort. Understanding the competitive landscape drives your keyword research and overall strategy. To provide your clients with real value as an SEO advisor, you have to find keyword phrases to target that match their business objectives and can achieve a competitive ranking within their budget, available resources, and time frame.
To begin with, you need to have an understanding of your client’s goals and business model. What sets them apart from their competitors (advantages and differentiators)? What do they identify as their top 5 competitor websites? What do they perceive as their most important search terms? There is often a difference between business competition and online competition, so the actual keyword phrase competitors may vary from their perceived competitors. After compiling some keyword phrases from research and client input, it is easy to use available tools to gather detailed information about how competitive those terms are.
Once you have found the top-ranking websites for the keyword phrase you are interested in targeting, you want to know all of the permutations each site is targeting, how difficult it would be to surpass them, and what links and link types each site has. If you had all of your competitors data, you would know exactly what it would take to achieve their current ranking. By examining their links, you may even discover some resources that will be new to you.

Market Samurai – Compare data about your top 10 competitors in one view

Market Samurai - SEO Competition Module
Market Samurai is a great tool to begin investigating the competitive landscape for a particular keyword phrase. Its SEO competition module allows you to see data from the top 10 sites for the keyword phrase you have chosen in an easy to understand grid. You are able to customize the statistics you see by using check boxes above the grid. Your options include: Domain Age, Page Rank, Index Count, Page Backlinks, Domain Backlinks, several On-page Optimization factors, as well as a few other handy things. Color coding (red, yellow, green) gives you a simple view of how competitive each site is. You are also able to add custom URLs – allowing you to compare your site directly to the sites on the first page of the results. Market Samurai gives you a quick overview of how competitive a given keyword phrase is and what you will need to do to get your site on the first page.

SEMRush.com – Take a quick look at what keywords your competitor is ranking for

SEMRush.com is a web-based tool that allows you to type in a domain and see a list of organic keywords that a site ranks for. It also gives you an estimate of the percentage of search traffic and volume that those keyword phrases deliver. This is a great way to discover permutations and long tail possibilities for the keyword phrases you intend to target. You can also enter a keyword phrase and see a list of related keywords as well as its top ranking sites. Understanding the keyword universe of the sites you are competing with is necessary if you want to receive any long tail traffic.

SpyGlass – Gather and Sort Data on All of Your Competitor’s Backlinks

SpyGlass is a utility that pulls information about the backlinks to a site or for a specific keyword phrase. You are able to analyze a site’s links to get data about anchor text, page rank of the linking page, page rank of the linking domain, IP addresses, geography, etc. It provides you with many different filtering options and the ability to create and save custom reports. SpyGlass is a great tool to assemble and sort detailed information about your competitor’s backlinks. This will give you insight into how  to structure your linking strategy and many ideas of where to look for links.
Competitive analysis requires understanding a methodology, not just following a formula – learning to analyze your competition so you know how to beat them. Whether you are starting from scratch or adding content to an existing site, knowing who is ranking in the top 10 for the keyword phrases you are targeting and how they are doing it should dictate your strategy for surpassing them. Collecting the data that allows you to do that is fun and easy. It is also the best way to learn about search engine optimization – there is no “one” answer for how to get your website to rank in the top 10.

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