Evaluating Your Online Competition

When beginning your SEO campaign, it’s important to get a good idea of the playing field you are about to walk onto. If you don’t have a good idea of what your competition is doing or how they are going about their own SEO you might miss the opportunity to beat them at their own game.

Here are 4 things you can look at when evaluating your online competition to see how your SEO campaign measure up:

Backlinks
If the top three ranking sites for your most important keywords have 10,000 links a piece and your site only has 6, well, you’ve got a long link building road ahead of you. Generally, the more links a site has pointing to it the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. This also includes social signals (links from social sharing and social networking sites). To the search engine algorithm, a site with a lot of backlinks is more valuable because more people are linking to it.

However, when looking at a competitor’s backlinks it’s important that you take quality into account and not just quantity. If one of your top competitors has a link portfolio that consists mostly of spam blogs, foreign directory links and link exchanges, some white hat link building on your part might be powerful enough to chip away at their SERP dominance.

Age of site
This is one of those ranking factors that is completely out of your control. The older a site is the more trusted it is by the search engines—it’s as simple as that. If you just launched your site in the last six months and your competitors have all been online for 10 years, even the best onsite optimization and offsite link building campaign isn’t going to have much of an effect. You might be able to win some niche keywords and carve out your own online space, but don’t expect to be unsetting any industry heavyweights for highly competitive keywords any time soon.

Content
It all comes down to quality content. How many pages of great content does your website have? How many pages are so-so and how many are a waste of online space? How easy is it for a visitor to your site to find the information they need? Are you keeping your content behind a login (meaning the search engine spiders can’t read or index it)? Do your competitors have a blog that is updated daily with fresh content? Are they active in social media and video marketing? Are they creating white papers, industry-related articles and other pieces of thought leadership content? A great SEO campaign thrives on content and if your competitors are producing volumes of great, engaging and targeted content that you are going to have to step up your own content marketing game in order to compete. Contrarily, if your top competitors aren’t heavily invested in content marketing than that is a huge opportunity for your brand to dominate the online market space.

Keywords
How does your target audience search for your products/services? What is the user intent behind certain search phrases? What keywords are your top competitors targeting? A better question is what keyword variations are they NOT targeting? What long tail keywords can you go after on your site to help build your online brand presence? Keep in mind that the more search volume a keyword has the more competition there is for it. This means you’ll have to work that much harder and longer before you see the rank increase and visitor growth you might be hoping for.