Competitor Website Analysis

Serious internet marketers who want to rank higher in the search engines do competitor website analysis to understand what is involved to take those higher positions from their competitors for the keywords that they want to target. There are two fundamental questions about a competitor website analysis, as follows:

Why is a competitor website analysis important?
How do you do a competitor website analysis?

If you are like most internet marketers, you are trying to get on the first page of Google and more than likely, trying to get into the top 3-4 positions for your targeted keywords. To accomplish this feat, you need to understand why the websites ahead of you are ranking so high and what can you do to claim those higher positions.

There are many factors why other websites may be ranking high, and the following is a guideline of what you need to understand when doing a competitor website analysis:

domain age – there is no doubt that aged domains have an advantage in the search engines; that just means you have to do a better job than the competitive websites do in other areas, such as doing a better job of optimizing every page of your website
page rank – similar to domain age, the page rank is a differentiator for high search engine rankings, and when everything else is equal, aged domains with high page rank are going to win; again, you have do a better job in other areas of website optimization
keyword relevance – the on page factors are still very important; make sure your target page is keyword relevant with the keyword in the page title, meta description and keyword tags, header tags and content; help the search engines understand that this particular page is all about the specific keyword you are targeting; out optimize your competition for the keyword you want to target
backlinks – this is another area you can influence, by building as many backlinks as possible to the target page; the back links should come from a variety of websites with different ages and page ranks; do not forget the golden rule of backlinks – it’s not just about high quality back links, and it’s not just about the quantity of backlinks – work on getting both quality and quantity

Now the question many of you will have is how do you get this information? The fact is, to manually assemble all of this data for the top 10 ranking websites would be very time and labor intensive. We use use two particular tools when doing a competitor website analysis:

Market Samurai – this product provides a ton of functionality for internet marketers; best known as a leading keyword research tool, Market Samurai provides s significant functionality to help analyze the top 10 ranking websites in Google; so at a glimpse, Market Samurai provides a summary analysis that highlight why these websites have better Google positioning and where there are opportunities to improve your own search engine positions
SEMRush – this product is also commonly know as a keyword tool which it does very well; I love SEMRush because it provides a glimpse inside the competitors’ websites and provides key information such as: keyword phrases they have organic search positions, the monthly traffic those keywords provide, competing websites for those ranking keywords, and much more

Using these two tools, you will be able to do a deep drill analysis to understand how easy or difficult it will be to rank high for your targeted keywords. This is not a one-time exercise because there are others that are also looking to take those same ranking positions that you are working so hard to capture.

That is why it is so important to invest in the tools you need to run your online business – in this case doing a competitor website analysis – or to use our resources to provide those services for you.

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