Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis on websites that rank well for your target key words and phrases is beneficial in aiding your search engine optimization campaign strategy. The best way to identify a small handful of competitor sites is to examine is to see which ones repeatedly appear with top result positioning. After all, if they are ranking well for a gamut of search phrases, they are doing the right things to optimize their website.

Now that the key competitor sites have been identified, it’s time to start doing some competitive intelligence gathering. The items to look into are the same as what would be investigated on your website, both on-site and off-site factors that influence result positioning through the eyes of search engine spiders.

We will begin with analyzing the on-site factors including what is displayed visually through the web browser and behind the scenes by examining the source code. Items to analyze include the physical text content, keyword patterns and inline text links, layout design utilizing CSS, website structure and file hierarchy with URL format, title tags and meta tags descriptive and relative to page content, the use of header tags and more.

Off-site factors to look into for these websites include inbound linking from external sites such as a site of a similar genre, social networking sites, online business listing and directory submission sites, and more. It’s important to take note of the way in which the inbound link is displayed such as using a keyword or key phrase.

The result findings attained through probing will be compared to your websites current status and taken into consideration in our optimization approach. Competitor analysis is just one of the many aspects we take into consideration to aid in website optimization.