Jan
SEO specialists know that competitive analysis is one of the basic steps in SEO research. But while these days webmasters may be comfortable with words like PageRank, backlinks, Alexa Rank and so on, many of them are still making a fundamental mistake that almost ensures they don’t get the results they expected.
The problem is that most webmasters underestimate the importance of competition analysis, or simply find it too boring and time consuming. They have heard that all you need is thousands of backlinks, thousands of pages in Google index. Yes… some even do believe that some enterprising guy they found in a “SEO forum” can skyrocket their traffic in just one day!
White hat SEO’s are getting sick of these paradigms. The main goal is not simply getting big numbers in your SEO stats toolbar so that you feel good… it’s all about going viral, showing a search engine that you’re the most delicious cookie in a jar! People who have chosen the wrong SEO strategy, have no chance of feeding Google the signals which will lead their site to the top.
How are you building your SEO strategy? Which parameters are you trying to use? There’s nothing more natural and predictable than looking at your competitors!
Your competitors rankings reflect Google’s precise preferences in your industry. Creating a successful imitation of those signals will give you exactly what Google is looking for! So let’s see how to effectively evaluate your competition and understand what makes these sites appear to Google as the most relevant in your niche.
Finding Who Your Competitors Are
Before you can analyze the competition you need to know who your real competitors are. For example, say you’ve got 6 keywords you want to rank for. Your steps would be as follows:
1. Google each term and copy sites from top 5 into an Excel Table
2. In front of each site specify it’s position
The table will look like this:
After that, you will have to count the overall performance of each competitor’s page and find 5-10 most influential competitors depending on differences between keyword SERPs. In our example finding top 5 competitors is a fairly straightforward goal.
Counting overall performance is really simple: just add up each site’s ranking for all 5 keywords. If it’s out of top5, then you just add 10 and then put them in ascending order.
Here are our sample results:
As we can see, D.com is #1 competitor in this example 
Analyzing The Competition
Once we’ve found who our SEO reference point is, we have to find out which signals were important enough for Google to place this website at the TOP and give it most of the traffic pie:
1. Special features. See if this website has some extra sharable content, amazing design or something else making people spread the page through word of mouth. There are many cases when these techniques are decisive and it’s pointless to try something else. It’s easy really, just ask yourself questions like: “Is my webpage worth sharing?”, “Does it completely correspond to its organic keywords?”, “Are features of my service/product competitive with that of my competitor?”
2. Check their internal parameters like content keyword usage, internal linking, number of pages in Google index, speed of growth, etc.
3. Analyze competitor backlinks. Linkbuilding is often the most time and money consuming part of SEO. First of all, you need to collect information on their backlinks, there are many tools but I’d recommend using Linkdiagnosis free tool, OpenSiteExplorer and Majestic SEO Tools.
Linkdiagnosis gives full information on backlinks: you can organize them by different metrics, download all the info to csv file format, but there’s a minor drawback: its index is really poor as it shows only 10-30% of all backlinks… so, sometimes it’s difficult to evaluate an entire backlink profile. This is why you should complete that list of backlinks with reports from OpenSiteExplorer by SEOMoz. These two tools are really similar, but they don’t give any information on sitewide link distribution. And for that you’ll need to use Majestic SEO Site Explorer, which will arrange linking root domains by the number of linking pages.
In the end, you will get a huge 80-90% complete report on competitors backlink’s with 10-15 metrics. Let me explain, its my opinion that all those metrics are equally important for general analysis. And we will have to evaluate which of those metrics are decisive in our exact case, so we have to find the correlation between those metrics and web site rankings for every keyword. This is a huge statistical work and it can’t be explained in a single article (you will find the answers in a book “Fundamentals of Statistics” by Vijay Basotia).
After completing the statistical analysis, you need to select metrics which on aggregate influence 70-80% of ranking impact and then organize your lindbuilding strategy using those parameters.
Guest Post by Larry Heart
Larry is a SEO analyst from RipTiger rip streaming video software team, where he works for better site visibility. Also he’s a tech blogger and stereoscopy geek. You can easily find him at G+.
