Competitor Benchmarking
A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO
So far all of the stages in this guide have covered the various processes that need to be given consideration before a new internet start-up business launches. One of the final most important things you need to do before you brief a web designer or begin the process of building your website is competitor benchmarking (carrying out analysis on your major competitors). This is another important process that will help you to define your key-phrase integration strategy as discussed in Part Five: Web Design and SEO and in Part Nine: Key-phrase Research. This article follows on from Part Ten: Targeting Local Search. To go back to the start of my guide click here.
SEO Competition Tools
In the previous two chapters I identified the long-tail and local search as ideal starting strategies for small business SEO. I discussed how tools such as Wordtracker can help you to identify high and low competition key-phrases. However, small business internet start-ups need to be aware of the multitude of factors that can give your competitors the edge in the SERPS (search engine results pages). There are in fact, at least a hundred different factors that influence search positioning, however, the following areas are of the most importance. Most of the SEO competition tools referenced here are free unless otherwise stated.
Domain & Website Age
Small business start-ups should consider buying an aged domain as established domains and websites generally perform much better in the search engines. This should also be a consideration when examining your competition. If, for example, you have identified certain key-phrases that you wish to appear high in the SERPS for, you should also check the age of the websites that also appear highly for these particular key-phrases. There are a number of ways to do this. I would advise downloading the SEO Toolbar for Firefox (you will need to install the Firefox browser to do this). This tool is loaded with an array of features including quick menu options to look-up WHOIS information and check internet web-page archives. This information will allow you to assess the history of your competitors’ sites. This can help you to make a judgement on the likelihood of securing a result for your target terms when compared against other factors such as the specific use of your target key-phrases in your competitors’ META title tags.
Volume of Pages
The depth and quality of content on a site is a very important factor in SEO and content development should be central to most small business SEO strategies. So, again, one of the steps you should take is to analyse how many of your competitors’ pages have been indexed by Google. You can do this by using the syntax “site:” To carry out an analysis of my site, for example, you would enter the following into Google or Yahoo:
site:www.jameshubbardmarketing.co.uk
The above search delivers the best performing indexed pages. This is very useful for both analysing the volume of pages indexed and the content across a site itself. Should you discover that your competitor site is extremely well-optimised on a specific key-phrase, with a large volume of quality web pages devoted to your particular key-phrase topic, you might consider either making changes to your key-phrase strategy or altering your planning to include more content development and link building.
Backlinks
Backlinks are undoubtedly the most important SEO factor of all (more detail on this in future posts). However, a starting point for competitor benchmarking is to analyse the volume, quality and trust of your competitors’ backlinks. Two excellent, free tools to assist you with this are Link Diagnosis and Open Site Explorer. These tools are especially useful as they do not just give a snapshot of the volume of links but also give an indication of crucial context values such link strength and trust. This will help you to determine the most important and relevant links that you will need to chase in order to compete in the SERPS.
PageRank & Quality of Content
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Google’s Larry Page. If you have installed the SEO Toolbar for Firefox, you can view the PageRank score for a web page simply by visting that page (the score is out of 10, with 10 indicating the strongest score). However, PageRank is no longer very reliable (with Google having admitted that they sometimes attribute random PageRank to websites to confuse the process of SEO!) As an alternative, I would recommend downloading the SEOmoz Toolbar for Firefox. The free version offers a snapshot of values such as Root Domain and Page Authority. This is extremely useful information for evaluating your competitors’ sites and assessing the possibility of competing with them on your target terms. I would highly recommend becoming a fully paid up member of the SEOmoz community as their paid for tools offer greater detail and analysis (at $99.99 or about £60 per month).
META Data
Finally and, as mentioned in previous chapters, you should look at the META data of your competitors’ sites. Wordtracker is, again, an excellent tool for comparing search volumes against sites that feature specific key-phrases in their META title tags. You can also use the syntax “intitle:” to discover the best performing sites that integrate your particular target key-phrases.
Part Twelve
In part twelve I will cover one of the final processes that small business owners need to consider before launching a new website which is the installation of web analytics software. Click here to go to part twelve.
