You cannot make your competitors disappear. Yet, you can fight potential customers from them by analyzing their websites and taking relevant actions. Whether you analyze your competitors manually or with a competitive analysis tool, you should consider the following data:
- First of all, pay attention to the Page Rank. It is obvious that you have to look it up. Google ranks websites relying on their PR, as well as some other factors, of course. Therefore, competitor’s PR is one of the most crucial details you must consider while analyzing your niche competition.
To check the PR of any website, either install Google Taskbar (it’s free and easily downloaded from the official site) or use any competitive analysis tool available in the Internet. - Second the most important thing in analyzing your competitors is a number of their backward links. And it is widely known, the more backward links you have, the higher position you get in SERP.
- You shouldn’t forget about analyzing competitors’ backward links quality either. If the backward links are from authoritative websites with high PR, you should make great efforts to beat your competitors.
- Never forget to check whether the needed keywords are present in the URLs and meta titles of your competitors’ sites. What is important for Google must be important for you as well.
- Analyze competitor’s traffic details to identify his marketing strategies. There are several ways of gathering traffic approximations that your competitors get:
- Alexa, Compete, or Netcraft are free and can be used both by amateur or professional webmaster.
- Hitwise and ComScore are paid services and provide more comprehensive traffic information.
It is important to keep tabs of what your competitors are doing, but do not dwell too much on their traffic: think more on what you are doing with yours.
Tip: There are many ways how to gather the data mentioned above, the only rule of thumb is to do it in the most cost and time effective way. Competitive Analysis Tool designed by EasySeoTracking meets these requirements. It is a FREE powerful online service to analyze a necessary niche in the market.
This Competitive Analysis Tool delivers the following SEO parameters: Page Rank, number of backward web links, presence of keywords in a URL and title, number of unique visitors, analyzes competitors’ backward links. Give it a try and make sure analyzing a niche has never been so easy.
If you like this post, subscribe to Scope For Money feed via RSS or via EMAIL for latest updates…!
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Really informative post .For comparing our competitor blogs I prefer to use Web CEO.They have free as well as paid options.Free options we will get most of the things we needed.
my strategy for checking my competitors are their alexa rank and the number of comments on their site….
Hi,
Great information on SEO.
I would add that “the more backward links you have, the higher position you get in SERP.” is not always true. As it is “the more quality backlinks you have”. They carry more weigh.
Example in some cases 1000 blog comments can be equal to one or two high quality backlink form a high PR Site.
Kindest,
Nabeel
I would also add that you should check out their whois info, and check out some of their stats, like their domain age, as well as when their domain will expire, you never know, you might catch your competitor sleeping on the domain renewal.
Till then,
Jean
All very useful tips! Thanks! I always forget to worry about Alexa Rank.
How about the age of their domains? Any analysis for that it may help us determine if our competitors are really hard to beat ?
Nice post!!
I generally check pagerank and alexa rank.
I think u have given most useful information, which will be helpful to many others.including me.
Very well said, I agree with your top 5 things to consider in analyzing Competitors, yeah I’m using those factors too including semrush rank. Thanks
I can’t agree with you more. I have no problems getting my alexa ranking up but gaining page rank is much harder for me.
I just read an article on this at quicksprout about a great program that can really help with the leg work of analyzing your competitors.