Competitor Analysis For Business SEO Campaigns
A decent SEO campaign really begins with keyword research and then comprehensive analysis and research into the activity of your search engine competitors. You can’t begin a campaign effectively without fully comprehending who you’re competing for rankings with and an idea of the strategies they have implemented to get their rankings. The target of a competitor analysis exercise will be to identify strategies you could customise for your own campaign and to devise strategies your competitors are not yet using too.
The process of competitor identification can always be a surprising one. The businesses that you might traditionally consider to be your biggest competitors might not be competing in the search engine optimisation stakes. Do Google searches on your core keywords and take a look at the top ten already ranking. These are the main sites you are competing with.
When you have identified exactly who the competition is, you need to assess their websites. Perhaps you can find a common factor on the sites running on all three of the top performing ones? Take a look to see how they make use of the focus keywords on their pages and how they link the pages of the site to one another. Making any attempt to copy the website is a definite no go. Attempting to copy the content from the site is definitely something to avoid as this could have a detrimental effect on your search engine optimisation campaign. Consider the focus of the competitor website analysis to be that of identifying strategies that could be modified to meet your campaign’s needs and to find ways in which you can go one better than your competitors too.
From there you will need to analyse their back links. You can do so using free of charge tools such as Yahoo Site Explorer. You are not only interested in the quantity of links they have, but also on the number of unique linking domains and the strategies they are using to acquire these links. Actually visit some of the websites that have links to your competitors and see exactly how they are linking – is a contextual link? A blog comment based link?
Of course, the real work starts after the competitor analysis and you should always look to devise strategies that give you something unique that your competitors are not doing, with a long term view of beating them in the rankings stakes with a good, solid and difficult to replicate strategy.
Find out about professional, ROI focussed SEO London services.
