Interested in online marketing? Do you have a website? Do you have any search engine optimization (SEO) strategies in place to get good solid rankings on Google? If you do, did you do a competitor analysis before you started with SEO? One of the first steps for any effective SEO campaign to get good rankings is to do a proper competitor analysis to see what you are up against.
How well must you optimize your website and campaign to beat your competitors? Sure it’s easy if there are no competitors to battle against, but what if you are in a competitive market? It’s important that you understand which SEO strategies your competitors are currently implementing and how far you must go to get good rankings. How do you do a competitor analysis? Find a couple of tips below.
Competitor analysis
Who’s your competition? Look at your top competitors and list them down on a spreadsheet. Are they targeting any of the keywords you are looking to get good rankings for? Which websites are displayed on the search engine result pages for those keywords? List these websites on your spreadsheet as well.
Website age: Newer domains are usually devalued by Google. Domain age plays a big role as the age of the domain shows if the domain is serious about business or not. A new website can be devalued from a couple of months up to a year by Google depending on specific keyword phrases.
Alexa rankings: This platform can give you a very good indication of the traffic a specific domain is getting. A low Alexa ranking means better. There are many 3rd party browser plugins that can measure this automatically for you.
Number of pages indexed: How many pages of your competitors are indexed by the search engines? The easiest way to see this is to type in the command “site:competitordomain.co.za” in Google. Replace with the competitor domain name you would like to view.
Backlinks: Check the number of backlinks of your competitors. There are many tools online such as opensiteexplorer.org that can give you this data.
Domain authority: What is the ranking of the domain you are reviewing? You can also view this data on opensiteexplorer.org. The higher the number, the better.
The simple methods above can give you a clear indication on how big you must take your SEO campaign.
