In Depth Competitive Analysis for SEO

10% of competitive analysis includes keyword placement and website structure. 90% is based on link analysis. Here are some tips for both approaches:

How keyword rich is your competitor’s website?

• View the text-only cached version of a competing website. It will highlight where and how they use their keywords, including the title. More keyword dense everywhere, the better.

What is their overall SEO sophistication?

• Unnecessary metatags, too much Flash, and long URLs allude to amateur SEO. Seasoned SEO experts make websites is easily indexable, which means homing in on just the necessary keywords and eliminating unnecessary codings.

Seoinsites.com/tools/websitequalityindicator is a paid tool that displays a report on a competing website. Enter the URL of your competitor and you will find the following information:

What is the quality of their links?

• The Deep Link ratio shows the percentage website’s inlinks that are pointing to a page other than the homepage. A low ratio means the competitor has plenty of low quality inlinks. For example, if the competitor pays for run-of-site advertising on a news website, all inlinks will be pointing to the homepage only. (Compare Total Incoming Links to Home Page and Total Incoming Links to a domain.) For ranking purposes, search engines will actually count all the links coming from that one domain as only one link.

Are they practicing black hat SEO?

• It is always better to have a small number of backlinks that are of high quality and credible than having a large number of backlinks that are irrelevant and coming from single or multiple domains.

Use a combination of going directly to the competitor’s website and using analytic tools to get the whole breadth of your competitor’s linkbuilding strategy. Do more than just copy; rather, understand their weaknesses to improve your own performance. Place most of your emphasis on making your website keyword rich, indexible, and credible by practicing ethical and natural means of link-building.