8 Steps to Follow While Doing Competitors Analysis in SEO

Step1: Analyze your own website:

• Go through the website carefully and thoroughly and check all services which the company offers
• Select the primary keywords from the website according to website category. For E.g. Internet Marketing, SEO or Web Design.
• Analyze the site based on the location and keep your search close to targeted location
• Also check the design and development structure platforms of the site.
• Find out whether your site full fills the SEO standards.

Step2: Search and Find who all our competitors are:

• Search on Google your target keywords and make a list of the sites/companies which are shown in top search results.
•  Consider these to be your main competitors.  
•   Note down what all your competitors activities are and services they are offering.
•  Research you direct or indirect competitors.
•  Create a spread sheet and include sales, market share, pricing, profitability, debt, management effectiveness, technological development, productivity levels, growth capacity and marketing tactics.

Step3: Now analyze your competitor’s site:

•  Check and study their websites according to design and development perspective. Either the site is developed professionally keeping in mind the design, development and SEO standards.

•  Is content on site is sufficient and what is the quality and relevancy of the content according the page requirement.

• Check whether the site is static or dynamic.

• Basic site inspection can give full overview of your competitor’s website presence online.

Step4: Analyze what type of keyword they using: 

•  Keywords are the most important factor for SEO success
•  Check what type of keywords they are using and also compare these keywords with your sites keywords.
• Use the keyword suggestion tools to analyse which keywords are best for their sites and also check which keywords you have skipped.
• Also check the keyword density on your competitor’s site: we can use keyword density tool to get an idea.
•  The major step is to check the location of the keyword meaning - headings, Meta tags, image tags, the URLs etc.

Step5: Analyse Index Pages and Citations in search engines:

• A citation is any mention of your business out on the web, with or without a link.
• A complete citation should include the company name, address, and phone number. A citation that does not include all three of these is sometimes referred to as a partial citation 
•  Citations are a key factor in local search engine rankings like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

There are two types of Citations

Structured Citations: The most common citations are found on business listing sites like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, superpages.com, etc. These are referred to as structured citations.

Unstructured Citations: Citations can also often be found on blogs, newspaper websites, event listing websites, job websites, government sites, etc. These are referred to as unstructured citations and can be extremely valuable to your local rankings.

Step6:  Importance Domain Age Search:

• Age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity and therefore a higher relevancy score in Google.
• Two things that are considered in the age of a domain name are:

-The age of the website

-The length of time a domain has been registered

•  The age of the website is built up of how long the content has been actually on the web, how long the site has been in promotion 

Step7: Competitors Back link Watch:

•  Backlinks of the site are the most important to judge your competitors presence online.
•  Search and find out the popular sites where your competitor’s sites backlinks are present.

Step8: Social Media Integration:

• Determine how your competitors are using social media and integrating it into their website marketing.
• Find your competitors be found on these major social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and YouTube. 
•  Check what activities they are doing on these social platforms for e.g.

-What info they are posting?

-Do they ever post?

-Are people following them?

-Do they have cover photos and profile photos?

Above mentioned steps can be implemented for comprehensive Competitor Analysis for any websites.