Competitive Intelligence & SEO – Outrank Your Competition

<<< >>> Published on: December 16, 2009 <<< >>> Last Modified on: December 16, 2009 <<< >>>

Competitor research and analysis may seem like a copycat activity, but it is not (at least not entirely). It is about understanding what your competitors are doing. It is about examining their keyword and linking strategies while realizing their current strengths and weaknesses. The bottom line is that you are trying to understand what is making your competitors rank.

This activity may comprise elements of emulation, but what you are really trying to do is be better than your competition. Being better (in a general sense) means providing a site with more value and better perception. In an SEO sense, it means understanding all the things that make your competitors rank.

When learning about your competition, it is good to examine their past and present activities, as well as implement ways to track their future activities. Although many tools are available for you to use to learn about your competition, for most of your work you can get by with the free tools that are available. This chapter emphasizes the free tools and research that you can use in your work.

To be the best, you’ve to beat the bests. Top ranking sites all have something in common, and that’s the fact that they have better SEO work than all the other sites. Not only did they do better with on-site optimization, they are dominating the search engines with their both on-site and off-site optimization works.

Here I’m going to show you how to outrank those sites!

The Art of War:

In order to get a top ranking in the search engines, you need not to have a perfect page, but instead, you need to have a page that is better than your competition. This may sounds innocent, but it’s a very important concept for you to understand when it comes to SEO. To outrank your competition, you need to be able to do better than them on 2 levels:

• On-site optimization
• Off-site optimization

Now, what I’m going to say may sounds over simplistic, but way to many of you overlook the importance of the following fact:

“If you don’t know what your competitor is doing, how are you going to beat them?”

You need information to be able to gauge their current level and where you stand in comparison. In general, having a very well optimized site when it comes to onsite optimization alone, will get you all the way to the top 30 results and maybe even to the top 10 depending of the difficulty of your keyword. That step was previously accomplished by following the recommendation we got from the IBP report yesterday. What is left for us to do now is off-site optimization.

When you make it to the top 30, outranking your competition is all about your inbound links. The only way you can increase your ranking position is by building more and better quality inbound links than your competition. Your very first goal should not be to compare yourself to the top ranking page yet, but rather the lowest ranking page of the top 10 results.

The reason is clear; this is the page you need to beat in order to make it to the first page of results. Being on the first page and being on the second page are worlds apart when it comes to SEO results!

Competitive Intelligence:

In order for us to outrank this page, we must absolutely know the following information:

1. How many backlinks do they have with our keyword in their anchor text?

The real ranking strength of a page comes from the amount of backlinks it got with the keyword in the anchor text; this is a number you must beat in order to outrank this page.

2. What is the status of those pages that link back?

All pages linking back don’t have the same level and amount of popularity and authority, evaluate how many authority backlinks they are getting and get more and better ones than them.

3. What are those pages URLs?

Those people are linking towards this page that means if you were to get links too from those same pages, you could at least match that page, which is a first step to outrank them.

4. How many different domains are they coming from?

Remember that even more important than the number of links is also the number of different domains, the more domains is linking toward a page, the more authority and popularity it will acquire.

5. What is the keyword density of their anchor text?

Anchor text is very important but you don’t want to fall into the Google Link Trap box where you over-optimize your anchor text and end up being penalized for it. Make sure to match the density used by your competitor.

6. What anchor text variation are they using?

Your competitor is likely to be using different anchor text variations, found out which one they are using, and leverage on this knowledge. Not only do you need to know this information about your competitor, you also need to know this information about your own page in order to make a proper comparison.

Get the Right Tool for the Right Job:

I wish there was a free way to do this, but honestly it’s just not realistic to go through the tens of thousands of backlinks a site has, look on each of those pages what is the anchor text, page rank and other info your need from each of those page, all by yourself manually.

You must get professional SEO software for this, and if you have any bit of understanding about ROI, you’ll quickly realize that using such tool actually save you money, not only for the results you’ll obtain, but for the time you’ll save.

Here I am listing some useful tools for competitor backlinks analysis:

• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Spyfu
• Link Diagnosis
• Online Utility – Domain Backlink Analyzer

Some useful Firefox add-ons for quick link analysis:

• SearchStatus – SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that gives extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
• Yexplore – Adds quick access to Yahoo Site Explorer. Just right click; select Yexplore and the URL will be passed to Yahoo Site Explorer in a new tab.
• SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension – This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening such pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.

Finally, spy on your competitors and pulverize them with your ethical white hat SEO methodologies and try to stay ahead of them to win the real competitive SEO Race!

Thanks for reading!