10 Tips For SEO Competitive Intelligence Analysis

While making the SEO Competitive Intelligence report, use an excel sheet to compare the researched metrics with your own website. The following Metrics of the competing website can be analyzed:

1. Page Title and Meta Tags:
These are considered the core metrics while optimizing a website. The Page Title, Keywords & description Meta Tag can either be obtained from Toolbar options: View -> Page Source or from the numerous free Meta Tag analyzer tools on the internet.

2. Internal Linking:
This helps in analyzing how a website is linked to its inner web pages. A well linked website helps in proper distribution of the Page Rank to inner pages along with ease of navigation for the user.

3. URL Structure:
The URL structure of the inner pages of top ranking websites can be analyzed to obtain the most popular and search engine friendly way to structure the URL.

4. Number of Web pages indexed:
This can be calculated by entering ‘Site:www.domainname.com’ in the text field of the Search Engine. A regular updated website is indexed at regular intervals. The main aim of calculating number of indexed pages is to analyze the size of a website.

5. Number of Outbound Links
Keep track of the number of outbound links from the competitor’s website. Regular analysis gives an idea of the frequency with which the competing website links out to other websites.

6. Number of Inbound Links:
Link popularity of a website can be calculated using the backlinks checker tool or Google Webmasters Tool. This gives an estimate of how popular the website is and how many unique websites are linking back to it. More the number of unique inbound links more is the PR of the website.

7. Traffic:
Traffic of the competing website can be calculated by using sites like Alexa and Compete. Quantcast can be used to check the demographics of the website.

8. Blogging:
This answers questions like,
1. How often does the competitor add fresh content to their site?
2. Number of subscribers,
3. Average number of comments on each post to gauge active participation from the readers.

9. Social Media:
Social Media Marketing helps build brands online by reaching out to the consumers. Check which social networking and bookmarking sites is the competing website registered on. Do they use social media for customer support or to give out latest product information to the customers?

10. Search Engine Marketing:
Is the competition using Google AdWords? What keywords are being targeted? How is the quality of the ads served across the search engines? Which websites are being targeted for contextual placement?

The answer to all these questions gives information on the quality and effectiveness of a website. Comparing one or more competing websites based on the above metrics helps in discovering new opportunities and taking appropriate actionable insights.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com

Debbie Everson is the CEO of SearchMar.com, the leading provider of search engine optimization, social media & online marketing solutions to over 2,000 small businesses. Read my SEO Blog. Follow me on Twitter or call 866-885-6263 for a free consultation.

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