Competitor analysis is an age old marketing and business technique. The theory is a simple one – take all of the good points from your major competitors and combine them with your own business ideas in order to generate a single business that provides everything and does everything well. In terms of marketing this results in the use of the most proven effective marketing techniques and it also identifies very precise information for each of the components of a marketing mix. In SEO, too, competitor analysis has a valid and valuable part to play.

Competitor Analysis

When entering an industry, whether you will be competing online or offline, you should have a good understanding of the industry in which you will operate. Part of this knowledge will be a list of the businesses or websites that you will be directly competing with. When embarking on an SEO campaign this gives you many benefits. You can use these sites to help identify SEO keywords, look for invaluable linking partners, and identify new methods of building traffic to your website using organic search results.

SEO Keyword Research

Keyword research identifies those terms that your potential visitors use when search on the Internet. Look at your competitor’s to identify the keywords that they are targeting. For further research purposes, it can pay dividends to consider all of their keywords and not just those that you believe relevant. One keyword can further lead to the identification of many others, some of which will prove beneficial while others will not. In a similar vein, you can use these keywords to identify other competitors and new niches to approach.

SEO Factors

Consider the most successful of your competitors and try to determine what has driven their SEO success. In most cases, it will be the provision of keyword optimised website content combined with a powerful and relevant link profile. It is the latter of these considerations where competitor analysis can really pay dividends for your SEO efforts. Finding high quality links can prove difficult. By all means try to gain links from your competitors but this will inevitably prove very difficult because they do not wish to pass on their own traffic.

Identifying Link Sources

SEO competitor analysis can identify the pages that have provided links to your main competitors. By researching this information you can also determine how your competitors gained these links and you can then follow the same steps while also pursuing your own methods of building high quality, targeted links for each of your web pages.

Improving Your SEO Results

Competitor analysis is not only a viable form of SEO research, but can prove an extremely efficient and effective method of highlighting profitable keywords and identifying link building techniques and link sources. It can also give you a clear indication of how much work will be required in order to rank highly in the search engine results and start to generate your own search engine traffic. Competitor analysis may also throw up other SEO facts to assist in the generation of targeted traffic.

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