Learn More about Your Rivals with Competition Analysis
If your website doesn’t rank in the search engines as high as you would like it to, the first thing you should do is see what your more successful competitors have done to their websites. Competition analysis is a critical component of every successful search engine optimization campaign. You can’t defeat your rivals unless you know them well. That doesn’t mean that you should go and copy everything you see at the top ranking websites, but there may be a couple of things that you can successfully apply to your website.
You can’t come in Number 1 if you know nothing about #2
Competition analysis has two major goals. First of all you need to evaluate your potential and see if you can win the competition with the resources you have. Another important thing is to find out if there’s a vacant niche relevant to your business that you can take up. Evading competition may turn out to be even more efficient and beneficial than fighting it. This is especially important for keyword selection. Most popular keywords featuring millions of searches are usually also the most competitive ones. If you target these top search phrases it may take too much time and money before you can actually benefit from the results of your efforts. There’s a better way. Having analyzed the competition you can come up with a list of keywords that are quite popular but less competitive. Winning high rankings will be much easier if you manage to find a middle ground between popularity and competition.
Apart from the keyword strategy there are also a number of other factors to take into account when doing competition analysis. Website design is certainly critical for search engine optimization. The design and navigation of a website should be both search engine- and user-friendly. There’s always a lot you can learn from your competitors and there’s always room for improvement. If you have an idea that you would like to implement to your website’s design but you don’t know if it will work well you can see if your competitors have done this and how it worked for them.
Content is another element of the competition analysis. You can see what kind of content receives feedback from the visitors and get a better idea as to what kind of information interests your potential clients. This is important since SEO is not just about getting people to your website, it is also about making people want to stay at your website and come back again.
In order to get to the top of search engine results pages you need to know how those who are already there have done it. Therefore a successful search engine optimization campaign is impossible without thorough competition analysis.