COMPETITION ANALYSIS

The first step to analyzing competition is to identify competitors. For an offline business, this is quite simple. All one needs to do is make a list of their competitors and track them online. In situations where businesses are unaware about their competitors, there are various methods that could be used to track them down.

• Track the competition for long tail keywords
• All the major players in that niche
• Websites those have high rankings on Google with similar keywords.

All the above helps create a list of main competitors.

Once the competitors have been identified, we visit their websites separately. We monitor the quality of content that they are providing, the website design, the kind of URLs they are using, etc. All of this gives us a clear idea as to what kind of work has to be put into building a website that Google loves.

Keywords are the tools that help in optimizing a website to the fullest. It may happen that a keyword is considered important whereas the main competitors do not have it in their list at all. We use different tools such as the keyword suggestions tool and keyword cloud and density in order to create a keyword list of high quality.

Backlink is another factor that plays a crucial role in SEO. While checking competitors’ websites, it is imperative that a note is made of the backlinks used by them. Tracking their origin, number, anchor text, etc. helps to analyze their status on this front. In case competitors are using backlinks from websites that are popular, the webmaster for that website can be contacted in order to get the same backlinks for the website that needs to be optimized.

Along with keywords and backlinks, a thorough examination of competitors’ websites needs to be conducted. Using different keywords in the search engines can check their rankings on Google and other search engines.