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Unlike other forms of advertising, the Internet allows you to gather an interesting depth of information to compare your online strategy to competitors' strategies and to find new ideas to improve your site. When researching the competition, you may find yourself saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Identify your competition
As with any other competitive research project, you need to first decide what competitors you’ll track online. Limiting your list to five competitors will keep the results focused and easier to analyze. Make sure you record your findings, then repeat the process every month or so to see how the rankings compare. Since search engine optimization (SEO) is an organic process, the results will vary over time. Your goal is to keep rising higher in search engine results.
Your most serious competition may be an entire company or specific products or services competitive companies offer. The first step is to do a search for your competition and record the organic results for each as well as what web page or pages are ranking highest. How does your organic ranking compare to the competition?
We’re not looking at paid placements right now, but if you see a competitor has a paid listing, make a note of it.
Find the riches revealed in source code
Looking through a competitor’s source code feels devilishly fun the first time. Here in plain sight, you’ll peek into bits of your competitors’ online strategies. To reveal code, follow these steps:
- Find a competitive website and go to the home page.
- Right click on the page and then click on View Source or click on View on your toolbar and click Source. A box of HTML code will pop up and in there you can find the meta description and meta tags for the page. It’s a bit difficult to decipher at first, but if the page has this information, it will be near the top of the code. Meta description is generally a quick overview of the web page and meta keyword tags are words and phrases the competitor has chosen as clues to help search engines appropriately determine web page relevance and rank when a prospect conducts a keyword search.
- Do the same for one or two other pages, particularly those with a high search rank, to determine if your competition is optimizing individual pages and make note of the meta tags and descriptions used on each page.
Did any of your competitors use keywords that you surprised you? Were there keywords you hadn’t thought of that make sense for your site? How do they use the keywords in page content? Can you get a sense of how their online strategy differs from your strategy?
Review your own source code to see what improvements you can make to influence your organic ranking.
Compare page rank
In addition to how well a competitor ranks in search engine results, you can also find other website data from Google, Alexa or SearchStatus. For quick access, add one or more of the following toolbars on your computer to compare your page rank information with your competitors.
- Install the Google toolbar. Once installed, you can modify the tools you want to view on the toolbar. The one you’re interested in for this exercise is PageRank.
- Install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa provides a wealth of information for sites including traffic trend data, inbound links, keywords, and related links.
- Install SearchStatus for Firefox and Mozilla. SearchStatus is a one-stop shopping toolbar allowing you to view Google PageRank, Alex data, indexed pages and more.
The information gathered from these toolbars is for comparative purposes, not as absolute data. Alexa traffic data accuracy is often questioned and Google PageRank is only an estimation of page value based on several variables. It is conceivable to have a high PageRank, yet still have low traffic to your site. For your competitive research, the absolute numbers are not as important as trending information over time and the discrepancy between your figures and those from competitive sites.
If you get hung up on the absolute numbers, you’ll lose site of your goals. Your ultimate goal is a high search engine results page (SERP), meaning your site appears high on organic results based on keyword searches used by prospects.
Piece together competitive strategies
From your research, start piecing together competitive strategies and determine the weaknesses and strengths of your site. Prioritize the changes you can make right away to improve your SERP status. Just as important is to keep improving the strengths you already have to make sure your organic rankings don’t slip.
Take what you’ve learned in this competitive exercise and start applying it today. Although it takes time to see improvement in search engine results, your continued efforts will pay off.
Have a question about Internet marketing? Send me an email or visit www.strategywriter.com.
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