Location: SMB SEO Guide > Preparation and Planning > Competitive Research

Competitive Research

In the search engines, your competitors are every website listed between you and #1. The goal of your competitive research is to look at the top ranked competitors, compare various data points that indicate why they may rank highly and determine what you can do to replicate those data points and exploit other ranking factors that they have yet to optimize for.

There are many ways to research your competitors and you could spend ages trying to isolate every little detail. What I will introduce here is a quick and easy way to get a lot of pertinent data quickly.

Research Competitors

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For each of your target keyword phrases, do the following:

Unpersonalized Google Search

To make a Google search unpersonalized, just add the parameter &pws=0 to the end of the SERP’s URL string.

If you don’t want to do this manually every time you search (trust me, you don’t!), then use Joost de Valk’s Firefox Plugin.

  1. Search for your keyword (I usually use Google unpersonalized search for this) and make a spreadsheet listing the website in each position on the first page.
  2. If your website isn’t in the list, add it at the end so you can compare your site to the others
  3. Make two columns and indicate if the keyword phrase you searched for is partially or wholly included in the title of each result (leave both blank if it doesn’t appear at all)
  4. SEO for FirefoxDownload the FireFox browser (if you don’t already have it) and then install Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox plug-in.
  5. Enter each website into SEO for Firefox’s “Compare Sites” utility (you can do five sites at a time), including your own site – add this information to your spreadsheet.
  6. Compare and contrast each site and get a sense for what helps sites rank highly. Pay special attention to the Site stats and Site Links stats. Also notice directories and social indicators.
  7. Look to replicate signals of strength. In other words, look at the data you just collected and determine what your competitors did to get rankings that you could do too.
  8. Look for opportunities where competitors aren’t doing much. You can’t outrank them just by doing the same thing. You need to do more than them, or do the same things better. Find the channels that they neglected and make them a competitive advantage for your business.
  9. Run the competitors’ URLs through Yahoo Site Explorer and/or Open Site Explorer and look at the sites linking to each one. Make a note of the anchor text used to link to the site, what types of links they’re getting and what type of websites are linking to them. Can you acquire links from the same sites? Are there any links you think aren’t worth trying to get?
  10. Search for your keywords again and notice the PPC ads. What are people offering in their ads (remember, this is what people are willing to pay for)? What are they offering on their landing pages? Can you do it better or offer more or differentiate in some other way?

Analyze the Data

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Now that you have the basics of the methodology down, let’s look at some of those factors we put in our spreadsheet and see how they can help us make decisions.

Keywords in the Title Tag

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The title tag is one of the main on-page ranking factors. Look at your competitors and see if they have the target keyword phrase in their title tag. Is the complete phrase included or just part of it? Do you see any correlation between the presence of the keyword phrase and higher rankings?

Page and Site Page Rank

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The “toolbar Page Rank” – i.e. the Page Rank score that Google lets you see but isn’t necessarily a real time PR score – is not the end-all-be-all of important ranking factors for a given keyword phrase, but often shows correlation to higher rankings.

For long tail keywords, you will often see lower PR scores and a higher variance in scores between websites. This is a good indication that PR won’t be a barrier for you – you can look to other ranking factors to get to the top.

For highly competitive head phrases, you’ll often find that all the sites in the top 10 have high PR scores. If that’s the case, then you might find it difficult to rank a new website for that keyword phrase, so you might have better luck focusing on the long tail first.

Site Age

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Older domains tend to rank better than new ones. This isn’t always the case, of course, but if your competitors’ websites all originated in 1996 and you just bought your domain name last week, chances are you have a lot of work ahead of you.

The actual age of your site may not be a huge direct factor in the ranking algorithms, but older sites have had a lot more time to collect links and be seen by the search engines.

So how do you compete with an old site? Well, one method is to overcome the age issue by optimizing all the other factors you can, getting a lot of press and making the search engines notice you. Another option is to purchase an existing domain that has been around for a long time.

Cache Date

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If you track this stat over time, you may notice that websites who get cached more frequently tend to rank higher. You can get the search engines to cache your site more often by publishing new content frequently, e.g. via a blog or articles.

If all your competitors have old cache dates that rarely change, then you don’t have to worry as much about constant content updates.

Pages Indexed

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If you see strong correlation between the number of pages indexed and high rankings, than you may need to consider a more aggressive content strategy.

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Yahoo! tends to have the most accurate record of how many external links are pointing to your website. If there is a strong correlation between the number of links to a site or page and high rankings, this is a good indicator of the range you need to be in to compete.

Other Factors

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Other factors such as links from important directories and social networking sites will also give you a good idea of where your competition is showing up. If all your competitors are getting a lot of social bookmarking links, for instance, you may want to develop a social media strategy of your own.

The bottom line is that you can glean a lot of data from your competitors that will tell you what it’s going to take to get ranked for your target keywords. You don’t have to precisely mimic all their strategies, but make sure you are competitive on all the important factors, look for opportunities to optimize factors they’re ignoring and outdo them wherever possible.

Resources

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Next: Choose a Domain Name →
Previous: ← Keyword Research
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