Competitive Analysis & SEO - Spy & Pulverize Your Competitors Ethically

Competitive analysis plays vital role in SEO which helps you to beat your competitors in SERP. Competitive link analysis is essential since it gives you the idea of how link building is done. You will come to understand how link building is done in the established sites in your niche. By properly analyzing the pages linking of your competitor, you will get more ideas for link building for your own site. It helps to identify where your sites are talked about and helps to find out your partners. You can keep up-to-date by participating in the threads discussing your site and return favor to your partners. The competitive link analysis helps to find out the links your competition is using to rank well.

General points need to be noted while doing competitor analysis!

  • Domain Age
  • WhoIs Information
  • Yahoo and DMOZ listing details
  • Number of Pages
  • Number of Indexed Pages
  • Index Status
  • PageRank

Check whether your competitors have involved in any black hat techniques. If so, then report them to Google.

How to find competitors for your website?

The top ranked three websites for the targeted keywords will be your competitors. You may not able to find a competitor who is offering all services (or keywords) same as yours. In this case you can have different competitor for your keywords.

What all we need to consider while doing competitor analysis?

Keyword Research:

We are not aware of our competitors while doing keyword research. How can you do competitor analysis with out knowing your competitor? Find the exact service provider same as yours and analyze their keywords. Compare your keywords with theirs and choose the right ones.

On-Page Optimization:

You have the power to change anything within your site from the content (keyword density), internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself. Analyze all the above said points in your competitor’s website and make yours better.

Off-Page Optimization:

Here competitor analysis plays vital role. Use the syntax ”linkdomain:www.competitordomainname.com” in Yahoo Site Explorer to find the back links of your competitors. Analyze and find the method of link building followed by your competitor. Follow the same method to get links and also request for link to the pages where the competitor’s links present. Work to increase the links count more than your competitor. Find your competitor’s deep links (back links for inner pages) so that you can get clear idea about their SEO strength. Following is the syntax for finding the deep links in yahoo.

“linkdomain:www.competitor.com -site:www.competitor.com -link:www.competitor.com -link:competitor.com”

The following are the major competitive link searches that will help to analyze the backlinks of your competitor.

Direct Link Searches:

Search engines will tend to list important links first. Let we see the various methods of using link operator in yahoo site explorer.

linkdomain:http://www.competitor.com/ -site:competitor.com

The above command will list the links pointing at competitor’s site. The most powerful links to that site will be listed between 1-200 in the list. Also there is another important thing we can find out in the searches is that the newer link will appear before the older links.

Keyword Embedded Searches - Shared from [Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks]

To find out pages that use this text (keyword) and link to the competition:

link:http://www.competitor.com/ -site:competitor.com inurl:keyword

To find out in forums and discussion boards:

link:http://www.competitor.com -site:competitor.com inurl:keyword inurl:forum OR inurl:forums

To find pages containing your keyword in the page title:

link:http://www.competitor.com -site:competitor.com intitle:keyword

To find .edu or .gov sites linking to the page

link:http://www.competitor.com site:.edu OR site:.gov

To find pages of various file types:

link:http://www.competitor.com originurlextension:txt

To find pages of different geographic location:

link:http://www.competitor.com region:europe

Some useful Firefox add-ons for quick link analysis:

  • SearchStatus: SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that gives extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
  • Yexplore: Adds quick access to Yahoo Site Explorer. Just right click, select yExplore and the URL will be passed to Yahoo Site Explorer in a new tab.
  • SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension: This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening such pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.

Some useful tools for competitor backlinks analysis:

These competitive backlink analysis helps us reach out to the most valuable sites. Although we get the list of backlinks of the competitor by various methods discussed above, there is a need of filtering out links that will pass very low or nil link value to the sites.. Examples of links that we should avoid are sitewide links, links that are no-followed, links coming from same domain and IP blocked.

Analyze / Spy on your competitors and try to stay ahead of them to win in the highly competitive SEO Race!

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128 Responses to “Competitive Analysis & SEO - Spy & Pulverize Your Competitors Ethically”

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