There is an old English adage that says, “If you want to know who your friends are, you need to know who your enemies are”. The same theory somewhat applies here, too. If you are keen on analyzing your competitors, you must, first of all, know who they are.
How to Identify Your Enemies
Well, there are two ways by which you can know who your competitors are – a simple straightforward way and a rather circuitous way. As for the former, when you are running a business that deals in any particular product or services, search the web with keywords representing your trading items and then check the SERPs. Needless to say, the websites will let you know who your competitors are.
However, the other method is a bit roundabout. For instance, you may have to search sites within your niche, sites that rank high for your top keywords, sites with long tail keywords, etc. But in these cases you would obviously end up with a labyrinthine list which could be mind boggling for most. However, the answer lies in performing a Google search with your target keywords and then making a comprehensive list of the sites or companies that are ready to screw you up.
Visit the Enemy Camp
After you have made out a list of your probable competitors, your next step would be visiting their sites and analyzing their potentialities as also their pitfalls. This may involve checking their website designs – do they have Responsive Web designs or regular ones. Also, their quality of content, their landing pages, whether they use static or dynamic URLs and many more. This kind of in-depth site inspection, to be sure, will provide you with a lot of information about how professional your competitors’ web presence is as also whether they are search engine friendly or not, so that you can draw your own conclusions.
Analyze the Keywords Mostly Used by Your Competitors
Despite being undermined by Google about the importance of keywords, it is still considered to be an important factor for SEO success. And that’s precisely why you should analyze their keywords to see if they have been properly used in the right context. Of course, you might experience some difficulty in identifying the keywords, because of the old phrase ‘whatever is good for the gander may not be good for the geese’. Which in other words means that keywords that are deemed fit by you may not seem so with your competitors and so they may have chosen some other keyword unknown to you.
Alternatively, you can also take the help of Website Keyword Suggestion tool to see which keywords are befitting for their websites. Incidentally, this process will reward you with many hitherto unknown keywords that you can use later. You should also check the keyword density of your competitors’ keywords. The Keyword Density Cloud tool will help you get an idea about it. Also, don’t forget to check the location of the keywords – i.e. where they occur –in the headings, metatags, image tags, the URLs, etc.
Take a Look at Your Competitors’ Backlinks, Too
No matter what other people may say, backlinks are the pseudo-backbones of any promising SEO ranking. And that’s precisely why you need to scrutinize all the backlinks of your competitors persistently and even pluckily. In the process, do not forget to look for their origin, occurring, anchor text, etc which in turn will provide you with the right clue as to how your competitors are fighting on this front. More often than not, this exercise will pamper you with new ideas about having backlinks for your own website. If necessary, you may use tools such as Backlink Anchor Text Analysis and Backlink Summary.
Do not Ignore Other SEO Factors
True, keywords and backlinks are important SEO factors, but so are many others. For instance, you need to check your competitors’ Page Ranks in Google as well as their performance in Yahoo and Bing panorama. You may also need to check the number of indexed pages the websites of your competitors have with search engines.
Try to Assess the Extent of Your Competitors’ Presence on Social Media
Though difficult, you need to check the extent of your competitors’ involvement with the social media because it drives lots of traffic to websites through a roundabout way. Since Social Bookmarking sites, incidentally, fall under the social media you may start from there. Take a look at some of the major social bookmarking sites to see if your competitors have posts there and how effective these posts are. Twitter and Facebooks are two other mammoth sources of traffic. You can browse to see if some of your competitors have profiles at these sites. But this is a difficult proposition unless you are friendly with them. Nevertheless, if their profiles do not fall under special privacy guidelines, you may get an idea about how they are doing on these two media giants.
Conclusion
Monitoring online competition is as tiresome as time consuming by any standard. However, efforts have been made to ease the task as much as possible. In any event, evaluating competition for online business persons seems as relevant as doing periodical SEO. Apart from learning what other people are doing in respective fields, it often opens up new avenues for conducting business that proves fruitful for many.