Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is an integral part of search engine optimization in determining the most appropriate keywords your site should be targeting. There are three primary aspects to competitive analysis in search engine optimization.

First, we determine if the keywords we've plotted are also those of your competitors. It is important to go the major search engines and type in the keywords for which you think you, and your competitors, would like to be found. Which sites come up in the search engine results? Are these your competitors?

If the sites listed don't seem to be your competitors, this doesn't mean that you don't want to optimize for these keywords. This is, of course, case-specific, however sometimes "casting a wider net" in a highly competitive space is a good strategy. At this point, you'll want to move those keywords over to a secondary column.

Once we've determined which keywords your competitors are coming up for in the search engines, we'll want to see what kind of ranking your competitors are getting for those keyword phrases.

Next, we'll want to determine the link popularity of your competitors. Link popularity is an important part of the algorithm for many major search engines.

All of these factors combined will begin to develop the strategy by which we will attack search engine optimization and thereby out-rank the competition!