Analyzing Your Online Competition
Establish a benchmark for your search engine optimization plan.
Part of organic search engine optimization is to analyze your online competition. These are the web site currently ranking on the first page of the search engine results pages for your keyword phrases. We take your refined list of keywords and do a search for each of these. We then make notes of what web sites consistently show up for these keywords. These web sites may be your direct competitors in the offline world or they may be small players. However, if they are well positioned online, you’ll want to know why.
We take some time to visit each of your online competitor’s web sites look at the source code for the pages. Questions to ask include are the page titles and META tags optimized? Do the keywords show up in the page content? Is there a detailed site map linked to from all pages? If these web sites have been optimized, it will be apparent from the use of unique page titles and search engine friendly page designs. If they don’t appear to be optimized, we may have a good chance of moving your site higher.
After we’ve reviewed the on page factors, we take a look at how many inbound links are pointing to your competitor’s web site. This can give a good indication as to why a certain web site ranks well, especially if the on page optimization looks weak. It also provides a good benchmark for how many additional links will be needed for your web site to be on an equal footing.
When analyzing each competitors web site, we want to look at a few inside pages (non home pages) and see how they rank. Many web sites have optimized home pages with inbound links but don’t have well optimized inside pages.
One final action when sizing up your online competition is to take a look at if any of these sides show up in pay per click ads. Many sites that are professionally optimized are also running PPC campaigns as well.
Windhill Design will help you size up competing web sites and work with you to determine the best approach to compete with these sites through search engine optimization.
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