Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors, in particular, their strategy, tactics and level of success is vital in order for your SEO initiatives to succeed. Within the SEO landscape, competitors extend beyond a business's traditional competition and now also include 'keyword competitors', those other sites occupying places within the search engine result pages for keywords you are targeting.

You should undertake a serious competitor analysis at the beginning of your SEO development and in order to ensure on-going success you will need to ensure you track your competitor sites frequently to keep abreast of any changes they are making and to identify any newcomers.

Step 1 - Locate the Ideal Sites to Compare. Type the principal keywords you want to rank for into Google. Identify the number of competitors you wish to monitor, this should be a mix of traditional and online competition. We recommend you keep the number of competitors you monitor manageable to ensure costs of analysis don't outweigh return, anything between 3-5 will benefit.

Step 2 - Competitor Site Evaluation. Create a matrix listing different aspects of your competitors website you will to evaluate against your own, this should include design, ease-of use and visitor engagement.

Review pages that are ranked from each site and compare the results to determine any patterns of keywords use across all competitor sites. Pay close attention to the following areas;

• Text Links - How many times is the keywords found in text link within the page.


• Heading Tags - Successful sites frequently utilise heading tags to emphasise keywords.


• Description and Title Tags - View source code to determine the structure of these tags and how keywords is used.


• Navigation - You can often increase the page relevance of your site by adding the keywords within the wording of your links.

Secondly create a matrix to evaluate products and services offered by your competitors. Monitor differences in products and services, price comparison, target audience variants and quality. Have you identified any gaps in the marketplace?

Step 3 - Monitor Competitor Statistics.

Keep abreast of your competitions website traffic, demographics and visitor behaviours. There are many useful sites out there whom provide invaluable statistics, including; Alexa, Keyword Ranking Tool, and QuantCast.

Step 4 - Apply the Successful Strategies to Your Website.

The benefits of competitor analysis are endless and necessary if you want to ensure you beat the competition on a consistent basis. It provides guidance and tactics for on-going improvement to your website and business model and allows you to spot and seize on opportunities your competition has not yet spotted.