Looking at your Competitors – a first step
A strong competitive analysis can take your SEO efforts a long way toward success. If you are chasing a goal that is in-part determined by your competitors, then you have to measure their success also. In the case that sucsess is partially determined by standings of competitors, then at least a brief SEO competitive analysis is essential before any resources are allocated to any SEO activities. Even before you initiate on page SEO driven changes, you have to know if what you are doing is needed or a waste of resources based on the goals you’ve defined.
The best solution is ongoing analysis; make it part of the business process. The SEO landscape is constantly changing because search engines change the way the rank and competitors change their efforts. Plan to spend at least a couple hours a week at analysis. It gives you a good way to gauge your efforts, and to let you know if you have achieved your goals. Best of all, a good competitive analysis report can help set expectations by making the process a bit more transparent in your organization.
When you do your analysis, make sure that you look at the right metrics:
• Site ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
• How many pages are indexed?
• Measure the page titles on a scoring index, or individual metrics (keyword, character count)
• Measure the meta data for relevance
• Look at the information architecture, and rank that metric
• How effective does your competition use the robots.txt file or a sitemap.xml fie
• How do you rate their content
• What does their link structure look like?
Once you have a template set up based on the SEO goals, you can use that as an effective communications tool. Your stakeholders will come to expect the report, and become a part of the process.