Below I will cover a simple process that one can commonly use for undertaking competition or competitor analysis for your website and your online competitors.

 

Let's get started. Before any journey it is always good to know how far one has to go, to pay, and the amount of discomfort that one can expect on the journey, the same with any organic seo campaign. What is the GAP between where I am and where I want to be and what stands between me and that position.

 

 

Regardless of whether you work for a company or were hired as an outside contractor or consultant to help with your client's Organic SEO campaign, you probably have some idea of who the real competition is in your particular web space. Companies may have good off line marketing but poor online marketing. If you're looking to be the best at what you do, it is a good idea to do your own research to see exactly who you're up against.

 

My experience has shown that it is always good to locate and verify around 5-10 online competitors in your space from a variety of sources, this should in some part be based on your keywords and phrases and another part based upon physical competitors that you are aware of, online and off line competitors may vary tremendously on occasion. You can choose to use online tools for this or take the manual approach. Data accuracy here is very important, so make sure that you "Cut and paste" the results.

 

 

Make sure to capture the ALL the basic information for each competitor including their company name, location, and the full website URL that was returned on the search criteria. These results will be useful at a later time. Record these as "competitor research" on a spreadsheet.

If you have a set of keywords for which you want to rank for, you can look on Google trends and see the volume of these searches and who is already ranking where you want to be. Don't limit this to just one or two keywords, use the singular and plural of these keywords as well as 2, 3 4, and 5 long tail keywords, and get a broader picture and list of the competitors out there in your web space.

Note* Make sure your Geographic preference is set correctly in your browser so you get accurate data when doing your research.

•     Collate a list of keywords that you will be using.
•     Search Google to see which results and companies are ranking in the local search results or returned results.
•     Record a list of the companies' names and exact website URLs and add them in the spreadsheet under a competitor research tab.
•     Look very closely at what the search engine returns in the company details i.e. are the keywords returned in the results.
•     Select the company URL, look very closely at the url in terms of what happens after the domain name, once again is the keyword in the URL.
•     Looking at the page, are the keywords found in the title, H1-H6 headers, sub headings, starting and ending sentence, keyword density on the page, what is  coloured, has been made bold, italicized etc.
•     Also on the page, are there any internal or external links,  and how deep do they go, are there any images and what do the alt tags say.
•     View the page "Source" and look at the meta data if it is present.

There are a number of webmaster plugins for browsers available that can help with this, another tool that I personally use is screaming frog.
Now you repeat that same process over all the websites that you have noted.

Outside of the basics of the exercise , I always find it's a great solution to see who else is out there in your market / web space. Since the organic and local rankings are more closely tied together than ever due to location services. It's a good idea to use 3rd party tools sometimes to get some insight as to what else your website and content could be considered related to.

 

Once again, getting back links is not quite as easy as getting good content, you can use Google and using the search facility type in Link:www.yoururl.com to see the number of links to a domain,  there are also a number of tools both free and commercial available to do this for you.
Some of the data is a little more obscure so the use of a commercial tool is more beneficial for the following reasons.
Google last page rank update was in 2013 so there is no real way for the viewer to determine the site or domain "Authority" of the urls that are returned. The higher the PR ranking or Domain authority, the more value that is added, so a domain with no back links has a hard job of ranking, it is also far easier to add good content than it is to find high quality back links in relevant industries, not spammy back links or ones of low quality, nor high volume low quality links.

 

Once you have all this you will at least have some idea of the amount of effort that will be required to get you into the same venue as the big boys and girls.

 

Once again, we have all the tools, experience and can analyse the results and give you an accurate report on the findings and can assist you in getting there.