Analyze Your Competitor SEO

Search engines have been the number one source of traffic for most websites. To rank and being seen, businesses have to have a successful search engine campaign in order to compete among the market where many to countless competitors are aiming for the same goal.

There are times when a business is not successful with search engines. It is quite possible that the business have implemented an incorrect method in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or poorly target its market, or the business competition is tough. If a business is in a competitive niche, then the competition can be really difficult for many entities to gain its market share.

Even if a business niche is not that competitive, the business will only win if it knows how to monitor its competitors' success and failure. Below is a list of some steps to analyze your SEO competition.

Knowing Your Competitors

Before analyzing your competitors, you must first know who they are. In some cases identifying your competitors is very easy, and some can be more difficult.

Your competitors could be sites in your niche, sites that rank well for your major keywords, or direct competitors for your keywords, etc.. As the internet and the World Wide Web grow into a huge network, you might have a pretty long list of competitors which you can not monitor. Performing a search with notable search engines about a targeted keywords can give you a list of websites that rank high in the search results. You can consider these to be your main competitors.

Visit and Analyze

After you have a list of your competitors, the next step is to visit their websites and analyze them. Analyze their design, loading speed, what contents to they have with their quality, whether they use static or dynamic URLs, etc..

This basic website inspection can give you a lot of information about how professional your competition's web presence is, and to determine how likely or unlikely it is for search engines to like them.

The Keywords

Keywords have always been the most important factor for SEO. If your competitors are using their keywords properly, you can expect that their site will rank well in search engines. Some may have some difficulty identifying the keywords their competitors are using because their list of keywords may not be your top keywords for your niche.

You should also check the keyword density of your competitors' keywords on the pages they offer on their websites, and check the location of the keywords.

The Backlinks

Backlinks are considered to be the backbone of good SEO rankings. Knowing the backlinks of your competitors is needed to analyze how good they perform on the internet.

You can examine the number and origin, as well as anchor text, etc.. to have a good information about how your competitors are doing on this front. Having backlinks from high ranked websites can have a huge benefit for websites. This have been one of the most targeted method for SEO to rank websites higher on their niche.

Evaluate Social Media Presence

Today, people are connected socially on the internet by social media networks that ease communication and shareing. Social media tend to drive a huge amount of traffic to a site. It is important to check whether your competitors are getting the most benefit from social media presence in their marketing efforts or not.

Huge amount of traffic comes notably from the social network giant like Facebook, and microblogging sites like Twitter. Many businesses are already into social media as it can give them benefits both from traffic and how to approach targeted customers in a manner where both can feel comfortable. Social media has been one of the most common and widely used network for businesses and entities alike to conduct communication and exchanging information communication.

Monitoring social media can give you information to make a good strategy for your business decisions.

Analyze PPC Ads

Many businesses use PPC to drive more quality traffic than implementing organic SEO for a cheaper and more efficient method. Google AdWords is one of the most preferred choice for PPC, as well as some others.

By using PPC and targeted ads, businesses can perform well in reaching their customers, ranking them higher in their niche on their specific keywords. Although PPC is getting benefit from searches made and not from customers' choice of popularity, PPC has been used more than often by businesses that need an alternative from organic SEO that have a longer time to implement.

Other SEO Factors

In order to get a thorough idea of how your competition is ranking, you need to check your competitors' Page Ranks in Google and how they perform in Yahoo! and Bing. You can also look at the number of indexed pages the sites of your competitors have with search engines.

Conclusion

Monitoring your competition is a never ending task, can be time consuming and quite difficult to follow. By understanding how the competition is, and how your competitors are doing, can give you enough information, making you steps away from clueless about the business you are into.

Even if a business can compete well in the competition at least yet, information about how your competitors are doing will help you build your own efficient campaign in your SEO efforts.