How do I analyze my competition

R

russelltw

New member
Feb 2, 2011
6
0
0
Board,

Being a newbie, I am learning as much as I can about this. However, I am asking how can analyze my competition on google? What tools do you recommend to see what my competitors have done to get where they are on page one of google?

Obviously, backlinks are key, website content, and article marketing helps as a variation of backlinking; but are there other things I should look at when evaluating sites?

Any advise is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
R
 


A quick way is just to look at PageRank. PageRank is almost directly relative to a sites backlinks. This means that if you are going up against 5 PR6's it is probably going to be really hard to compete against them without ever having to look at their backlinks.

However, if you want to go further, I would just analyze the Top 10 competitors backlinks. Be realistic yourself, can you beat them in the 4 areas really relative to SEO? I don't think you have to go any further than the top 10 in terms of analyzing. I don't see the point of analyzing the #20 site when even if you beat them and go to #19 you won't receive much traffic (if any). If you can't compete in the top 10 you may as well give up and find another keyword to target.

VAVA - Volume, Authority, Velocity, Anchor Text

Volume - How many backlinks does your competitor have? Can you beat them in how many good backlinks you can get?

Authority - Lets face it, Scrapebox and Xrumer are good tools, but at some point you're going to need more than profiles and blog comments on unrelated sites to compete against good competition. Can you do it?

Velocity - This ones is pretty easily attainable if you outsource some of your backlinking or use any form of software. I don't even really include it, but some do so it is worth mentioning. Besides, throwing out 1000 backlinks when your 5 year old competitor has been #1 for 3 years doesn't mean you're going to outrank them if they only get 10 backlinks next week.

Anchor Text - Like I said, automated software can sometimes do it, but Xrumer will often throw a bunch of images as your backlinking text / image. This means not much link juice for you for your targeted keywords. Try to find good quality backlinks where you put your keywords in as your anchor text. If your competitor has theirs spread out too far, you might be able to beat them by really targeting a few keywords.
 
Phpgator,
Thanks for hte quick reply. What tools do you recommend? I am okay with manually doing some backlinks. In order to make sure I am thinking correctly, I look for sites that discuss keywords I am targeting. THen I comment and use those keywords to link back to my site, is that correct? Or does backlinking entail something else?

I checked some of the page ranks with www.prchecker.info, most were 5 and 6's. It was a fairly popular term. I guess I will need to target some more specific or longer terms. Correct?
 
This is somewhat over-simplified. But simple is what we noobs need.

1) decide what search terms you want to go for based on traffic, commercial intent (ie number of ads and price for ads)
2) for each of the search terms that qualify in step 1 do the following:
--a) gather the PR of the top 5 on page 1 of google for the term
--b) if they have exact term in their title text add +1 to the PR = adjusted PR
3) Go after the low hanging fruit first - those terms where the top 5 all have adjusted PR <= 4
4) Once you have grown big hairy SEO balls then you can go for the more difficult terms.
 
  • Like
Reactions: GoogleBitchSlap
1. Discover why your prospect chose the competition over you
2. Evaluate what sites your competition uses to post articles on
3. What Social Networks do they use?
4. Download their information and subscribe to their RSS
5. How are they running their PPC campaigns?
6. Discover what sites are linking to them

above are what i would be happy to recommend :)
 
There are programs like traffic travis that will show you the backlinks, on-page seo stats and other information about the competition and most of them have a trial/free version. Just make sure you look at the information and NOT the recommendation. No computer program can decide how hard the competition is, only you can based on the facts.

SEO Spyglass is another
 
I use an SEO plugin for firefox that gives all the PR and backlink info in the toolbar. You should also look at "in url" and "in title" factors for your competition. I've seen sites with a lot fewer links and 0 PR rank higher than megasites just because they used the search term in their url and the page title.
 
keithgillaspy said:
I use an SEO plugin for firefox that gives all the PR and backlink info in the toolbar. You should also look at "in url" and "in title" factors for your competition. I've seen sites with a lot fewer links and 0 PR rank higher than megasites just because they used the search term in their url and the page title.
Click to expand...

What kind of plugin is that? Can you PM me the name of the plugin? Or is it just SEO plugin?
 
What happened to the good old...
Tits-OR-GTFO.jpg
 
Good stuff bro +rep

robognome said:
This is somewhat over-simplified. But simple is what we noobs need.

1) decide what search terms you want to go for based on traffic, commercial intent (ie number of ads and price for ads)
2) for each of the search terms that qualify in step 1 do the following:
--a) gather the PR of the top 5 on page 1 of google for the term
--b) if they have exact term in their title text add +1 to the PR = adjusted PR
3) Go after the low hanging fruit first - those terms where the top 5 all have adjusted PR <= 4
4) Once you have grown big hairy SEO balls then you can go for the more difficult terms.
Click to expand...
 
A really good online tool to check your competitors information is "WooRank" and if you curious to see how many backlinks the competitor has and the quality of those, then use "linkdiagnosis"... just my 2 cents
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom