Competitive Analysis: Roadmap to Success Online

Before actually making any changes to your website, it is critical to first understand why search engines rank your top competitors highly for your keywords. Just as you may have performed an analysis on your bricks-and-mortar competition before you started your company, an online competitive analysis provides hard information who your real competitors are for each of your products, what those copetitors are doing to succeed and how best to postision your products to either get your foot in the door or overcome the competition.

The competitive analysis determines the strengths and weaknesses of the competition's sites and gives clues on what to aim for and avoid as the search engine optimization process proceeds. We dig up information such as how many competitors there are, how long have their websites have been up, how many other websites link to to them, how many pages do they contain, and how well each one is it optimized. 

Valuable Insight into  Your Competition's Practices

A lot is gained from all of this information and it is used as a guideline while the optimization progresses.  Some factors we cannot compete against toe-to-toe, for example, the age of the competition's domain.  However, with all of our measurements in place, we can choose which techniques to use on your site that will most effectively overcome advantages the competition has. 

Proper research also helps to minimize the changes made to your site to accomplish an optimization. Rather than throwing every conceivable technique at your project, most often, a few tactfully chosen ones, gets the job done in the quickest amount of time, at the lowest cost.

So, bear in mind that during your project, not all of your optimizer's time is spent working on changes that will be made directly to your site.  The best optimizers perform and utilize a competitive analysis for their own advantage and for yours