How to Analyze Your Competition

One of the essential things you can do to enhance your search engine marketing is to study your competitors. Analyzing the competition will open new avenues of success in the industry. The strategy is similar in the web world. The following are the ways to analyze the competition: 

URL Structure: Look at the way your competitor constructed their URL. Is it static or dynamic? Does in use words to describe the business or services is provided? What makes their URL different from the rest?

Meta Data: Look at the competitor’s website and take notice of the Meta Data. What keywords are given emphasis and incorporated in the Meta data of the webpage’s? Are the keywords located in the title and description of the page? Which ones stand out to you? In addition, which ones are brining in the traffic?

Site Map: Convenient internal navigation plays an important role for boosting ranks. The search engines can crawl the website easily if text based links are provided to navigate to the internal pages.

Link Popularity: To have a successful website link popularity is the key to success. Look at how many quality links link back to the sites of your competitors. The more legitimate and quality links that lead back to a site, the higher the ranking with specific keywords will be. Search engines weigh sites with link popularity better than those without, in turn, boosting ranking of course. By using this method, you can find which keywords will help you gain the most visibility.

Site Age –A website’s age is a major factor that influences its rank it in the search engines.

Pages Indexed:  This is the amount of webpage’s listed in a search engine's index. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN can easily index top ranking websites.

Home Page PR – It is the Google Page Rank. Google gives a 0-10 score for assessing the value of the webpage. This is generally dependent on the quality and quantity of incoming links. It is the most popular metric for all the webmasters to check. It can be checked by the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.

Strongest Pages: There are a few online SEO tools that provide strongest pages tools, which show important pages on a domain. One of these being SEOmoz. The number of links that point to the website and the pages current rankings is what it goes by. By using this method, you can see which pages are causing high rankings. It can give you a better idea of the type of content you need to produce similar results.

Now that you have the methods in which to analyze your competitors, do some research and put in some person-hours. Tell your web desinger to explore your top competition and combine each of their best efforts to give you the step up.