Keeping an eye on your competition is good practice in any market. To fully understand how your competition works, is to better understand how to improve upon your own business. The same practice can be used when exploring how your competition functions on the internet. So how does one go about monitoring the competitions search engine optimization efforts online?
1.) Social Media strategy is a great place to start!
Review what your competition is doing on their social media accounts and which social media accounts they are currently using. This will help you determine areas where your competition may be thriving and also areas where they may be missing out.
Are you a B to B business? – Linkedin may be a better avenue for your social media efforts than facebook.
Is your competition using offers? – You may be able to promote different aspects of your business using special offers for your social media followers. Check to see if your competition is using such tactics. Their ideas can help you identify areas where you can provide potential customers a better offer.
Facebook provides followers with statistics on how many people: liked, shared or commented on a post. Review your competitions statistics to see which posts are working best for them. You can then generate a stronger social media campaign off of posts that work best in your given field.
2.) Review your competitions blog!
Does your competition currently have a blog? If so, read the articles that they have posted. Reading your competitions blogs will provide you with a good foundation as to what to post on your blog. Well written engaging articles will help boost your SEO placement for a given keyword and help reach new customers. This blogs will also let you know what areas and keywords your competition is looking to target. Knowing this information can help you decide if you want to target that area or if there are toher areas that you can target first.
3.) Review your competitions keywords and meta descriptions!
Did you know that you can review your competitions meta descriptions and page titles to see what they are optimizing for?
- Visit your competitions home page and right click on the screen.
- On the drop down menu select “View Page Source”
- This will open another window with the coding of their website
- On this screen you will look for <title> ( the title of the page you are on)
- Also look for <meta name=”description” content=” (the meta description of the page you are on)
- These two sections will contain sentences that are filled with keywords that your competition is looking to optimize for.
Using the information that you have just gained you can better understand if you are targeting the same areas. This will help you adjust your page titles and meta descriptions to better compete with the competition.
These suggestions are a good place to start analyzing your competitions SEO strategies. A full strategic analysis of your competition will review a host of other tactics and SEO factors such as : content, keyword density and link building strategy to name a few.
Remember to keep up to date on the competition so as not to lose ground on them. Keeping your SEO strategies fresh will help you dominate the competition!
By Matthew Wilkos