How to do Competitor Analysis

Competitor Analysis is one of the most crucial factors in planning out the best search engine optimization strategy for your website. Competitor Analysis gives you an idea about the sites which are ranking high with your targeted keywords and what have they done right to get the love and trust of search engines. Many Seo’s neglect this most important part and start optimizing their website by applying the off page optimization strategies and correcting the title and meta tags. You must not neglect ‘Competitor Analysis’ as this helps in answering some key questions related to the proper optimization of the website.

What is Competitor Analysis?

As the name suggests itself, Competitor Analysis means analyzing the on page as well as off page factors of your competitors website and finding out why it ranks high on the search engines with the chosen keywords.

Steps for doing Competitor Analysis

1- Visit the search engine where you want to rank your website and enter your chosen query.
2- Note down the first three results that the search engine returns.
3- Visit each of these websites one by one and analyze the factors given below:-

 a- The url of the website with respect to the presence of keywords in  it.
 b- The age of the domain.
 c- The title and the meta tags of the web page.
 d- The use of the heading and the bold tags.
 e- The relevancy of the content.
 f- The authority of the domain.
 g- The page rank of the web page.
 h- The number of times the keyword is present on the webpage with respect to the content i.e. the content to keyword ratio.
 i- The presence of the website on dmoz or yahoo directory.
 j- The number of backlinks to the website or to the webpage.
 k- The number of authority links pointing to the website or to the webpage.
 l- The site’s local presence and citations.
 m- The use of anchor text on the backlinks.
 n- The inner links of the site and the number of OBL’s (Out Bound Links).
 o- Use of breadcrumb.
 p- Use of contextual links and footer links.
 q- The number of indexed pages of the website on search engines.
  r- The social media presence of the website.
  s- The Alexa rank of the site.
  t- The loading time of the site.

Please Note:- While doing the competitor analysis, try to find out why the site is helpful to the users, what kind of useful information the site is providing and prepare your strategy accordingly keeping the user in mind.

Tools for doing Competitor Analysis

Domain tools
Website Grader
Backlink Watch
Alexa

Benefits of Competitor Analysis

1- It helps you to understand the relevancy algorithm of search engines.
2- It helps you to prepare your Seo strategy well.
3- It helps you to find out relevant sources of backlinks for your website.
4- It gives you an idea about the taste of the user.
5- It helps you to find out what you can achieve with Seo.