10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About SEO

If you are starting a new website or you are wondering why your established website is getting small number of visitors, it is time to do a little research. The best thing to do is learn from your competitors.

As you probably already know SEO has several elements and you should mostly focus on link building, social media marketing and onsite search engine optimization. By analyzing what your competitors do in order to have better SEO, you will be able to implement those things on your website and make it more visible to the public. Of course this doesn’t mean copying their work; you can use that data as a simple guide to improve your SEO.

Before you start your research make sure you are looking at your real competitors. This means that you are looking for websites that are aiming for the same keywords as you do (both regular keywords and longtail keywords). Don’t forget to use

keyword search tool to see which keywords related to your niche are ranking high and have lower competition. Once you have found your real competitors let’s try to learn something from them. The things you can learn can be divided in two groups – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO

1. Take a look at the page titles and META titles reviews that they use. This is easy to spot and it is very useful. Try to learn how you can implement the knowledge you get from those websites that use a chosen title construction.
2. Perform a link check using some of the free online checkers, to see if you can find any broken links on your site and on your rivals’ sites. Analyze the percentage of broken links and make a conclusion.
3. Try to find out how content impacts your competitor’s SEO. There are several free websites that show rankings of websites by period. Check if adding extra content in some time period has raised the number of visitors on your competitors’ sites.
4. URL structure of the site is also very important. Analyze the file naming structure and the URL structure of your rivals and apply them to your website.
5. Although nowadays they are not that relevant, check out their META descriptions. Meta descriptions are what will show to users in the search results. By analyzing your competitor’s site, you will be able to see how your page descriptions will compare in the SERPs.

Off-Page SEO

1. Thanks to sites like Yahoo Site Explorer you can see the quantity of inbound links for every site. Although it is usually good to have more inbound links, analyze the number of inbound links with competitor’s rankings and make a conclusion.
2. Local listings are another thing that can influence SEO. Find out how your rivals use local search engine optimization by visiting sites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, MSN and check their local profiles.
3. With recent Hummingbird changes from Google, successful off-page SEO is impossible without using the help of social media sites. This is especially important if you are small business trying to compete with search engine optimization. There is no better way to attract and communicate with visitors/buyers other than social media. So make sure you check how your competitors use their social media profiles.
4. If the top ranked rivals use blogs, try to see what topics are causing comments and interaction.
5. Try to find out if your competitors are using advertising campaigns on some websites (like Facebook or some news websites).