Analyzing the competition

Analyzing your competition should always be the first step in tackling a new keyword phrase. And it’s important to remember that your competition is anybody with a top 10 listing in the search engine(s) you’re targeting. You may not consider BillsTravel.com to be a real competitor to your business, but if they have a top 10 placement for a good keyword phrase and you don’t – he’s getting customers that you’re not. So always consider anyone you see on that first page as a real competitor.

So, again, the first step is to analyze those pages. The logic here is simple. No one knows quite what the algorithms are that determine where your page is going to rank, so we want to determine what is working well so that we can “one-up” them. Sometimes you’ll find that your competition is savvy and that taking over a top spot will be a challenge, but many times you’ll find that outdoing them is fairly easy.

You’ll want to look at each of your competitor’s pages with an eye out for page elements that they have in common. Some of those things are Title tags, header tags with keywords, proximity of the words in your keyword phrase to each other, keywords in linking text, bolded text, long or short pages, etc. Then you’ll want to view the source of the page and look at things like the meta tags, image ALT tags, html code. You might find a page format that works especially well – maybe pages with left-hand sidebars, or pages without complex table layouts.

Cloaking – cloaking is when the page that the site is serving up is different from the page that the search engine sees when it crawls the site. This is done by software that serves up an optimized page to the SE when it is visited by the SE’s IP address, but serves up the regular pages when viewed by any other IP address. I don’t recommend using this technique, but you need to be aware of it when analyzing your competitor’s pages, because you may not be looking at what the search engine is looking at. So, what I do when analyzing competitor’s pages for Google and Yahoo is I always look at the search engine’s “cached” copy of the page if available. You can be assured, then, that you are always looking at the same page that the SE is.


Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips