Analyzing your competitors can be bit tricky on a lot of occasions, first question you need to ask to yourself before beginning the whole process is who are your competitors? You cannot straight away pick a top site like wikipedia.org or about.com or any such top notch sites and conclude that they are your competitors. Its even absurd to think wikipedia as your competition frankly.

1. How To Know Who Are Your Competitors

You should know the keywords that relates to your site’s niche and most possibly choose a bunch of long tailed keywords. Reason you need to choose long tailed keywords is because its most likely that you will stumble across a wikipedia entry on the first spot in Google for single word keywords. Long tailed keywords is what really counts when you want to convert your visitors in to customers.

Once you have chosen your keywords do a search in all the three major search engines for the keywords and pick out a site that proves to come up in top spots for most terms. So this is the site which you really want to analyze as it proves to rank well for many good terms you are likely to focus on in your site.

2. General Background Information:

Next step on the process would be to analyze the general background information of the site like site age, where it is hosted, where the domain is registered, how many dropout the domain had in the past and similar details which you can find with Who is domain tools

3. Pagerank and Alexa Rank

Checking the pagerank can really give you a rough idea on how much quality backlinks does the site really posses. Just for the sake of information, it seems getting a PR2 is not much of a deal anymore. Sites with PR3 and above should really point to the fact that it really posses some decent quality and relevant inbound links.

Alexa ranking is not a real accurate tool to measure a site’s performance but it proves to be more or less accurate with sites having alexa ranking of less than 100,000. Good quality and traffic driving sites most of the times posses good rankings that is below the mentioned number.

4. Analyze the meta tags

Good place to start with your meta tag analysis is homepage.  Just load up the home page on your firefox browser and look in to the page source.  To do that just right click on some empty space in the homepage and click view page source.

Click here for the image on meta tags

Look for the title tags and meta tags the ones I pointed out in the picture above. They give you a quick idea on what are the keywords your competitor is really trying to focus on and also do a search for those terms and look where he is ranking for those. That should give a pretty good idea on how far he was able to succeed. You can also do the same kind of analysis on single posts and pages.

Although Google no more cares about “meta keywords”, meta descriptions and titles still carry a lot of value. This is one of the key information you can easily grab from your competitor.

5. Estimate Google Indexed Pages And Traffic

Although there can be no accurate data on how much traffic a site receives unless the webmaster of the site is open enough to share it with his visitors, you can how ever get a rough idea with this alexa rankings and graphs it provides. Which is more or less accurate nowadays atleast with sites that ranks above 100,000 mark.

Check the number of indexed pages it has with Google and this can be easily done by searching with site:yourdomainurl on Google. Number of indexed pages roughly gives you an idea of how big the site is.

6. Has Your Competitor Gained Google Trust Rank?

One of the ways you can look for whether your competitor gained Google trust or not is by searching directly with your competitors domain url on Google. If the url has site links underneath it, then it means that the site has gained Google’s trust. If your competitor doesn’t have one it could be fairly easy to knock off your competition without much effort.

7. How Well Is The Site Designed

Apart from off-page factors you also need to give some attention to how well the site is designed and other on-page factors like loading speed, internal linking etc.. On page factors really proved to make a lot of difference in the way site ranks on Google. Just look at wikipedia for example.

8. Analyze Backlinks

So you need to know who are pointing to your competitors site, Although there are number of tools available online to check to back links, one I use most of times and also something I would really recommend is using SEO Elite, this tool is really simple to use and gives complete analysis of the sites that are pointing to the destination url. You can also make use of free online tools available on Google which can be found here.

Some people believe that its good to not to look at your competitors and just mind with your own site and work on it. Well that’s not a bad idea but collecting information about your competitors will just give you some valuable information about which direction you proceed with your projects and how soon you are likely to succeed. Frankly having Information about your competitor doesn’t really hurt. What you think? If you have any questions and need any clarifications on the topic feel free to post your response below and I would be happy to respond to those.

Chakkravarthi owns seoyourblog. Blog dedicated for offering tips on wordpress seo and other tips for running a successful blog online.

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