Keeping Tabs on the Competition to Stay Ahead

Even if you are busy accomplishing your goals as a marketer or SEO expert, you must always take time to check what your competition is doing. You can never be ahead of the competition if you do not know what they are up to. There is an art to keeping tabs in monitoring what the competition is doing and to help you with your endeavours, we have come up with techniques which will help you go about it with finesse.

The best way to start is to take a look at your current SEO landscape and determine what your top ten keywords are. These are the keywords which are very critical and they will vie for the top tanking positions. There is a very big chance that you will not get the top ranking position for each keyword. In cases where your keywords do not rank first, it is a must to take a look at the competition’s site, so you can get a clear picture of what you are doing wrong and what they are doing right. There is always something to learn.

There are many ways to spy on the competition and one of the easiest and least expensive is to manually look at the site, review their content and check the links. However, this process is time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a simpler way to go about it and one of the tools you can install to help you with this task is SEOQuake.  All you need to do is install it, turn it on via your browser and search for your keywords. For each ranking site, you will be able to see the important factors for ranking. Some of the things you will be able to see are:

• Links pointing to the competitor’s page
• Links which use the target keyword
• Links owned by the competitor’s brand
• Origin of the page

Once you determine all the factors which are giving your competition the edge, you can compare to your site, what you are doing and what you are not doing. It is best to create a matrix of the competitor site for each keyword. You would be very surprised just how useful this can be in your bid for top ranking.

If there is a need to do so, do not be afraid to modify content so that your site will be better optimized for your targeted keyword. However, you must always keep in mind that your content needs to be informative, interesting and of course, relevant to the keywords you are targeting. If your content is not engaging, nobody will care to read it or pay any attention to it.

Analysis of the things listed above will help you make your site better or make the necessary changes to your plan so that you can finally get top ranking with all your keywords. Evaluation must be done at least once a month if you want to be a mile ahead of the competition.