Assessing Your Competitor’s On-Site SEO

April 27, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 129 views // View Comments

Assessing your competition's on-site optimization can help you understand key metrics and opportunities in your campaign.

Now that you’ve successfully learned how to spy on your search competition, it’s time to analyze their on-page SEO. Basically, this means that it’s time to assess which on-page tactics they are using and analyzing how succesful those tactics have been for them.

If they are having great success in the search engines, then it’s safe to say that you should probably try to mimic them. If they aren’t so successful, well then you know what NOT to do. Either way, you learn a lot about your competition, and a lot about what SEO tactics may make or break you.

3 Things to Look For

Here is a short-list of 3 important factors to look at when determining how well or poorly your competitor’s sites are SEO’d:

Targeted Keywords
Basic Optimization
General Site Characteristics

Targeted Keywords

Here we will try to determine what keywords (if any) your competition might be targeting. Get out your list of competitors and go ahead and browse through their site. It’s a safe bet that their target keywords will be fairly similar to the terms you may be considering for your site.

Although a simple text review should help you get at least a basic read on their targeted keywords, it will be advantageous to delve a bit farther. Delve into the source code to review their title & meta tags.

If you’re not familiar with how to view a site’s source code, it’s easy. In IE, click ‘View’ and then ‘Source’, and in Firefox it’s ‘View’ then ‘Page Source’. Also, if you’re having trouble finding something, you can utilize the browser’s find function (usually Control + F-key). Search for the words “meta” or “title”.

Assessing Your Competitor's On-Site SEO

Inside the title and meta tags, you may see a wide variety of different techniques being used. From large lists of unoptimized and unfocused keywords to short but highly-targeted lists, people are willing to try almost anything. Many people even try to spam keywords here, which is a reason that search engines de-emphasized the use of meta tags a long time ago.

Task: Look at the homepage of each of your competitors, recorded the keywords being used in the titles, meta tags, and in the HTML-text. I wouldn’t recommend going hog-wild here, but if you can narrow it down to 10-15 words here, I’d call it a success!

Basic Optimization

Assessing Your Competitor's On-Site SEO When looking at your competitor’s site optimization, you will be posing some of the same questions that you posed to yourself regarding your own site’s optimization. You should review your competitor’s homepage. and a few of their interior pages.

Ask yourself a few questions:

Are they using targeted keywords in their page title(s)?
Are they using targeted keywords within the page’s HTML text?
Can the interior pages be found from the homepage?

See if your competitor scores a “yes” or “no” in any of these categories. I’d say that it would be fair to give them a good score on Basic Optimization if you get 2 “yes” answers here. Also, you should take notes to record areas that you thought they did well/poorly.

General Site Characteristics

Now it’s time to take a look at your competitor’s site from an overall SEO perspective. This may take a bit more time, but it’s worth it.

Ask yourself these questions:

Do they have unique titles for every page on their site?
Do they have unique meta tags for every page on their site?
Is there at least 200 words of scanable text on every relevant page on their site?
Are all HTML-based images using alt tags?
Do the alt tags contain targeting keywords?
Are they utilizing link titles for hyperlinks?
If it is a Flash site, are they using <noscript> tags?
If it is a large site, are they using a sitemap?
Are there any design flaws that may limit a spider’s ability to crawl the page?

Again leave yourself room for notes. If your competitor got a “yes” for:

7-9 (good)
3-5 (average)
0-3 (poor)

This is a fairly safe way to grade out your competition. Now that you’ve spied on their on-site SEO, we will need to take a look at their off-site SEO factors.

Photo Credit: dcassaa on Flickr