SEO Analysis is a thorough analysis of your website, including its performance and rankings in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. We will examine each pages on your site and its content, meta tags and will make recommendations for changes that will enhance your search engine results.

In order to execute a successful SEO strategy, it is very important to know who your competitors are. Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategy, website and their level of penetration in the internet is critical to the success of SEO campaigns. What I am referring to is not just direct competitors, but competitors that rank in search engines for the keywords that you optimize your website.

Executing an SEO competitive analysis

Competitive SEO analysis can reveal many interesting findings about your competitors’ SEO. After you have shortlisted the keywords and the competitors that rank for those keywords, run your competitors’ websites through this checklist:

Content Analysis: Analyzing your competitors’ content will help you set a benchmark on how much you need to optimize your website.

Title and Description Tags: Compare your title and description tags with your competitors’ to assess the number of times the keyword appears, placement of keyword and identify if you can make your tags look more appealing than your competitors can.

Heading Tags: Compare your competitors’ websites to identify if your targeted keywords are used. Analyze the overall density of the keyword present in heading tags. Normally, a top-ranking website will always have the targeted keyword present in the H1, H2 … H6 tags.

Body Text: Analyze the overall keyword density, placement of your targeted term in your competitors’ website to assess how well the content is optimized. Identify if the content is contextually relevant to the keyword being targeted on the page.

Alternate Text: Analyze if the images used on your competitors’ website contain the targeted term.

Domain Names and URLs: Most of the websites that contain keywords in their domains would already have scored a brownie point; they would be ranking for those competitive keywords. If the keyword you are targeting is not present in your domain name, ensure that it is at least present in your URLs.

Strong and Bold Tags: Most of the competing websites would enclose important keywords within strong or bold tags. This highlights the important terms to search engines.

URL Structure: Ensure your websites URL structure is free of any dynamic strings and parameters. This may help you score high rankings in search engines.

Backlinks: Analyze your competitors’ backlinks for relevance and anchor text. Identify the number of websites that contain the targeted keyword as anchor text and measure the page rank of those linking pages. This will help you understand how much time you need to spend in your back linking efforts.