SEO Competitor Analysis | Competitor Research

Competitor analysis

By carrying our research into your competitors' sites as part of the SEO process, opportunities to out-perform them can be identified. Here is a description of the main activities that are needed to help you compete for high search engine rankings.

What can be learned through competitor research?

The internet is a fiercely competitive place, with millions of websites all aiming to achieve high search engine rankings. By looking at your competitors' websites you can gather information that plays a valuable role in your own SEO strategy.

Here's some of the information that we look for when carrying out competitor research:

1. What keywords or phrases are they targeting?

This will involve a review of your competitors' sites content, link names, page titles, meta data etc. This task is part of the keyword research and analysis process.

2. What other 'search engine friendly' techniques are they using?

The methods and competence with which competitor sites title their pages, create meta data, write and format their content, accommodate search engine spiders, build links from other sites and so on are all examined.

This is in fact quite a complex process in itself. For example, in terms of assessing competitors' link building we don't just look at how many links they have. In fact, the number of links is relatively unimportant compared to where these links come from, the relevance of the links and so on.

By looking at these factors, and ultimately how well sites rank on the major search engines, we can carry out the most important step of all:

3. What are the challenges or opportunities that your site faces as a result of your competitors' websites.

These issues are taken on board as we work through steps three to six covered in our SEO explained page. The important point is that without doing the competitor analysis first, it is almost impossible to effectively optimise a site to out-perform others in your sector.

When should competitive analysis be carried out?

This work is not something that can be done once and forgotten about: once your competitors realise that you are competing in terms of SEO they will no doubt fight back. That's why Doublespark prefers to provide a medium to long-term service for clients so we can keep revisiting this activity for you.

Find out more...

Competitor analysis has played a vital role in all of the work we have done to help our clients achieve improved search engine rankings, and the resulting increases in site traffic and ROI. Please contact us to discuss what we could do for you, or get some additional useful information through these links:

Full list of SEO resources within the knowledge centre:

1. SEO explained
2. Social Media
3. SEO keyword research and analysis
4. Competitor research and analysis
5. Reporting and analysis
6. SEO Scorecard