subject: How To Analyse Your Competitor's Activity In The Search Engine Results Pages? [print this page] When performing Search Engine Optimisation, its just as important to keep an eye on your competition as it is to concentrate on how well your own website is performing. Most webmasters know that Google looks for links when evaluating where a website should be positioned in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) Google is, after all, and off-site search engines and any links pointing into your site essentially act as votes in favour of your site. Because of this its important to keep an eye on your competitors on-page, on-site and off-site activity to get a better gauge on how they are performing and whether you are doing enough on your SEO Campaign to be able to outperform them in the SERPs.
One of the first things most webmasters neglect to do is to take a look at the Search Engine Results Pages to determine exactly how competitive a keyword is. If you competitors have been linkbuilding for in excess of two years, and youve only just started now, then youve clearly got a lot of catching up to do. Type you main target keyword into Google and try and identify exactly how many of your competitors have your main target keywords in their page titles and included within the content on their pages. This will give you an indication on how difficult it will likely be to pursue a particular strategy. Its also wise to check the backlink profile of your competitors and look for instances of where they have used the exact-match anchor text this again will give you an idea on whether its worth pursuing a particular keyword in the short term.
One further way to keep an eye on your competitors is to use a competitive analysis tool like Google Ad Planner or Quantcast. These tools give you a very good indication on exactly how well your competitors are performing in terms of visits, these tools also report on demographic data like the average age of visitors to your competitors websites. Needless to say, this information could be very valuable in determining the future direction of your online strategies. Its important when looking at this data to remember that its estimated these are not exact figures. Competitive Analysis tools also dont take into account the particular channels through which your competitors have managed to acquire traffic and sales.
