Even though Aristotle Onassis had remarked “I have no friends and no enemies – only competitors” while Bill Gates fitfully asserts “Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us always on our toes”, competition in business is as ubiquitous as the business itself.

But tell me frankly, do you really recognize your competitors’ SEO strategy? Or have you got enough information to outshine their SEO initiatives? Nevertheless, getting to know their strategic direction may prove fairly important in achieving your goal. Incidentally, here is the SEO competitor analysis tool and checklist which may prove useful in ascertaining the strength of your competitor to stay afloat in the murky water of cut throat competition.

Competitor Keyword Analysis

This is required for determining the type of keywords your competition is targeting all through their site. It involves taking a look at the title tags of your competitors’ website pages that include their Home Page, Main Product Pages as also About Us Page.

As soon as this is done for all your competitors, organize a spreadsheet for compiling all the significant keywords that have been used by your competitors. Enjoin a column for Search Volume and Competition (the number of pages in Google for each term), taking help of a tool like Wordtracker (provides free trial) or the much used AdWords Keyword Tool. Incidentally, keywords with high search volume but lower competition are more desirable than those that have low search volume but high competition features. In this connection, you may also try and see if you can locate any keyword your competitor has overlooked in terms of high search volume as this will help you determine the strength of your competitor SEO.

Competitor Content Analysis

This is required for determining the type of content your competitors are posting on their websites as also how often they are updating their content plus how they are branding their website by way of using their content. This will give you an opportunity to improve upon your own content by implementing important features that might have slipped out your composition and thus gain a step above your competitors.

You are also required to visit each of your competitors’ websites and compile references on:

• Level of branding that has been incorporated into content
• Themes and keywords in main heading (H1, H2, H3, etc)
• Internal Linking Structure and Link anchor text
• Call to Action statements within the site
• Styles of new content (if found) that include Product pages, Resource Tools, Blogs, Case Studies, etc.

These references, by the way, will help you develop a new content strategy which will prove more effective than those of your competitors.

Competitor SEO Technical Analysis

This comprises a few ‘technical’ tests that may be performed by you, regardless of your SEO skill level. Anyhow, these are listed below for you to respond individually.

• Search for each competitor (by name) in the Search Engines and note down how their websites are listed. Also see if they have used schema markup data. Check if their blogs have authorship or do they have videos or images that have been indexed.
• Perform a site:url.com search to check if Google has listed their most important pages such as Home, Main Products, etc initially. Also note down whether their major site pages are at the top or minor ones have been treated well.
• To check whether all their pages have been indexed, pick 5-10 of each of the competitors’ main website pages and search for their URL in Google.
• Take a look at the source code to check if they look clean and optimized.
• Open a few pages on your competitors’ websites to check how long each page takes to load. If these take longer time then those of yours, you lead.
• Check for a 404 page by adding a few letters after their domain (ex. www.name.coms/sdfo). Does a custom 404 page come up to redirect visitors to the website when they enter a wrong URL? Does this page look like the rest of the site?
• Check for a sitemap.xml by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of their domain name (ex. www.name.com/sitemap.xml).

These small technical check- ups would help you determine whether your website is adequately optimized as compared to those belonging to your competitors.

Competitor Link Analysis

This, inter alia, would help determine how popular or well liked are your competitors websites ’ among similar online communities vis-à-vis that of yours. However, to draw conclusions in this field, you may need  a few additional tools like www.semrush.com . However, for quick backlink analysis, you are likely to consider the following areas.

(A)   Competitor Backlink Analysis indicates that

• Number of backlinks gives you a very brief overview of their backlink profile.
• Number of unique domains gives you a better picture at how many sites are linking to their site (ex. Are the 4,000 backlinks coming from only one website or from 4,000 different websites?)
• Backlink profile growth rate tells you which competitors are steadily acquiring new backlinks and which competitors acquire a significant number of backlinks at one point in time (which may indicate purchased links).
• Detailed backlink analysis (if you have a detailed tool) gives you the pages on your competitor’s sites that are receiving the most backlinks, type of anchor text that is being used and the percentages of links that are images or no-follow links.

(B)   Backlink checking categories

Even though your competitors are having several types or categories of links forming in their websites, not all of them are equal in value. However, the purpose behind making a mental assessment of these links is to determine how strong or powerful are their backlink profile as compared to those of yours. However, here are these;

• Forums they are participating in
• Associations and organizations they are a member of
• Conferences or events they are sponsoring
• Blogs they are guest posting on (why not ask to write an article as well?)
• Purchased or spam links for determining the status of their backlinks.

(C)   Link acquisition strategy assessment

By assessing the link acquisition strategy that your competitors are a adopting may give you an idea how aggressively your competitors are progressing on you, so that you too can take similar or better steps to increase your ranking. Nevertheless, you may take a look at some of the strategies your competitors are likely to adopt in gaining  a march over you.

• By including Blog posts written by guest bloggers
• By using viral content that includes videos which have potential to be linked to by many websites
• By using free tools or widgets that are shared across multiple websites
• By ushering in interviews with industry leaders that are often promoted across sundry sites.
• By organizing Contests that naturally get shared and thus generate traffic.

Conclusion:   The above description only gives an outline about SEO competitor analysis, a topic as complex and comprehensive as Search engine Optimization process that are adopted by different search engines in as many different ways. Therefore, only a generalized attempt has been made to explore the subject from a beginner’s point of view.