Thursday 25 April 2013

Steps on Analysing Your Online Competitors

By Ben E. West


Did you know that you can consistently check out your competitors' website, see the type of content they are posting and comments they're getting, but there are many more advanced ways to dig deep and investigate your competitor's data that will help you produce more outstanding SEO results? Analysing your competition is an important part of the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) process and most business owners would agree to this statement but actually making the time and doing it is quite difficult.

A lot of businessmen are familiar with keyword research and consider as a major component of competitive analysis. However, this process is not as simple as most people think. Luckily, numerous tools are already available to help you learn about your competitor's online activities because search engine optimisation tactics can be used to learn about your competition.

Generally, it is vital to understand a lot of things about your competitors so that you can do more for yourself. The following are the tips intended to give direction for your competitive analysis so you can get the information you can use to improve your website's ranking:

* Classify your competitors

Review your keyword list and corresponding search result for each keyword. Your greatest competitors are that appear most frequently. Never assume that your online competitors are traditionally the same as your competitors that do not operate online.

* Check for their content

You are now ready to start the analysis after you classified your top competitors. Determine what kind of content your competitors give the customers. The number of your content may be important but the quality is what really keeps your website rank on top of search engine result pages (SERP's).

* Check their backlinks

Backlinks are the real story behind your website's authority. The more links your competitors have, the better their ranking will be. However, you have to make sure that the backlinks pointing to you are from high quality sites.

* Study optimisation techniques

While these are considered little things, optimisation techniques really are effective when ranking your site. They are done by analysing your competitors' tags and Meta descriptions; determine what keywords they are using and how they use them.

* Learn the non-organic traffic

The more traditional method of attracting paid traffic are the Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. Because most programs list prohibited keywords that must be avoided, one of the most vital reasons why you should consider paid search results. Knowing what exact keywords your competitors are using can help you with your own SEO methods.

* Visit social media channels

Check at least the top social media platforms (Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and check your competitor's social media account to figure out how famous they are and how several audiences interact with them.

* Test the site structure and navigation of your competitors

In an ordinary user's perspective, visit each of your competitors' website. Determine what techniques they are using to make a good user experience. Figure out what the positives and negatives about each of their websites and apply the information to improve your own site.




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