Yesterday, I made a post about the meaning and importance of Competitive Analysis in SEO. I left some factors that should be considered when performing a competitive analysis unexplained so now, let me expound more the topic for you guys to have a better understanding of it.

1. Page Titles - You must see what kind of page titles your competitors use - whether they use their company name or their targeted keyword. If your competitor is ranking for a certain keyword that you also want to rank for and you see that keyword on their Page Title, it somehow implies that you should also modify your Page Title that will be somehow relevant to what your competitors use. Better yet, include the keyword on your Page title.

2. Meta tags - What are the meta data they use? Do they have a well-optimized meta title or meta description? If yes, you can consider mirroring or making something similar. It is ideal that you include your preferred keywords on the meta tags.

3. Quality of Content - Review your competitor’s web content. Do they have a text of more than 250 words? The recommended number of words to consider a web page search engine friendly is 250 words or more. Try to match or  exceed the length and quality of your competitor’s content.

4. Inbound & Outbound Links - Using a special tool & one of my favorite SEO software - SEO Elite, you’ll be able to gather all your competitor’s inbound links, the anchor text they use and the number of their outbound links. There are other information that will be provided by the tool but these are just the most important ones. Knowing their inbound links is very crucial. You have to acquire the same links as well in order to keep up with them. The anchor text they use for every link represents the keyword phrases that your competitors are optimizing.

5. Keyword density - This refers to the number of your keywords / anchor texts used on a certain web page. When you search the Internet, the recommended keyword density actually varies. But mostly prefer 2 to 6% of the total number of words of your content. More than that, search engine will think that you are keyword stuffing and that’s not a good SEO practice. Compare the keyword density of your competitors over yours.

6. Website structure - Is the website SEO friendly? Does the site rely on static pages or dynamic content? Are there frames or Flash with the familiar “skip intro” button? And compare to what you have.

7. Rankings - What you can actually do is to select atleast 5 to 10 keywords that your competitors are optimizing and find out how well your they’re doing. Determine if they rank well and if you can catch up. Through this process, you will identify which keywords or additional keywords are better to optimize.

Got any questions? Hit me a comment.

You may want to read

• What is Competitive Analysis in SEO?