8 Steps to a Successful SEO Campaign: Competition Research

Sun Tzu once said “Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient.”

In the ever-changing world of internet marketing, analyzing your competitors can give you a distinct advantage. Knowing what they do well and what they lack will help you target key areas of the market that you think you can dominate.

Having knowledge of what the competition does, what they charge for their services, what they are about, how they are perceived, and where they are predicted to go in the future can give you a significant boost. Competition research should be split up into three different segments - content structure, data analysis and quantify your metrics.

Content Structure

Analyzing your competition should involve lots of data gathering. First, you should manually gather information by becoming familiar with the competition's website. Doing this will let you know how seriously they take their online presence and whether they are a significant threat to your search engine visibility.

There are several questions you should ask yourself when evaluating a competitor's website:

• Does their website meet web standards?
• Is it built with tables, CSS/HTML or Flash?
• Are they keyword stuffing?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Are the URLs Search Engine friendly?
• Is their blog updated regularly with decent content?

It may be wise at this point to create a list of all the positives and negatives about the sites you evaluate. After you've collected a certain amount of data, there should be some correlation in the sites that rank well and those that do things right (such as an updated content-rich blog, search engine-friendly URLs, and a CSS/HTML-driven website).

Data Analysis

Otherwise known as a plan of attack, this can be the most crucial part of your competition research. Don't simply plan on submitting links to social networking sites at random. Each one has its own use and should be selected carefully, based upon your targeted niche and chosen outcome. Some sites should be used for seeding links, while others should be used for generating traffic and gaining exposure.

You need to take advantage of some of the search operators used by Google:

• link:[inserturlhere]: This operator will list webpages that have links to the specified website. This can be useful to determine which websites are linking to your competitors and which content on their site has the most inbound links.
• site:[insertdomainhere]: When the 'site' operator is used, it will restrict all returned results to pages in the domain specified. You could do this when you need the results to be more specific than a generic search.
• allintitle:[keywordshere]: Queries that include the 'allintitle' operator will limit the results to pages that include all of the specified words in the title. For instance, if I searched for 'allintitle: seo tools,' I would get pages that only had "seo" and "tools" in the title.
• intitle:[keywordshere]: When the 'intitle' operator is used, Google will return the pages that include the words specified in the query. For instance if I searched for [intitle:soccer nashville], the results would return the word "soccer" and include the word "nashville" anywhere in the document (even if it's not in the title).
• info:[insertdomainhere]: By typing in the 'info' operator, Google will return the information it has about that web page.

Quantify Your Metrics

Establish your competitors based on their SERPs, not their PageRank or a metric that doesn't have a quantifiable meaning. Those that are ranked well should be your target goal but not your priority. Your priority should be to establish the site as an authority in a niche and continue to build up a user base.

Commenting is closed for this article.