In today’s online search market it really has become a dog eat dog world with millions upon millions of websites all competing for that place in the search engine limelight. With a billion strong index, search engines have to choose very carefully which websites will get a page 1 listing for relative keywords, and which websites don’t cut the mustard.

In a fierce market place, there should be one rule that is always followed, and thats, do what your competitors do, only better. When we say competitors, we don’t mean competitors that you know of directly, we mean competitors from the perspective of search. If a website outranks your website in Google then that is classed as a competitor because it is a benchmark to beat.

But what exactly do you need to do to beat your competitors SEO profile? Well establish who your competitors are across major search engines by searching for keywords relative to your website, making sure that they are the primary keywords. Once you have done this, you need to take a handful of the best performing websites, these will be your benchmarks for an SEO project.

Competitors are a good place to start, if they have held a consistent page 1 placement for your keyword selection, then it means that their websites are of some value. Break apart your competitors website to find out what really makes those gears work together.

An SEO effort is a single process used to enhance a websites value, so a combination of these efforts must be used to gain a good search engine placement, however competitor analysis is a good way to break these utilised factors apart to identify potential for improvement. If you find your competitor is missing out in certain areas, this gives you the opportunity to do what your competitor is doing, only better.

Remember, a competitor is someone who outranks your website for important keywords, we don’t mean long tail keywords that are 4, 5 or 6 keywords long, we mean important keywords that are between 1-3 words long.

Long tail keywords will generally have a far lower level of competiton because of the specific value of the search. Generalised searches, such as “Mortgages” for example is completely unspecific, because you are not specifying any variables, where as “Mortgages in London” or “Getting a Mortgage” is a specific search as you are highlighting a purpose for the search.

Using competitor analysis data, you can breakdown all the different factors that have come together to give the website its prominent position. So what kind of things can you identify from your competitor, well, there are lots of things, infact, there are hundreds of things that could be observed, such as

How old is your competitors website?
How many pages does your competitors website have?
Do they have keywords in the domain?
What technology is the website built on?
How much content does the competitors website have?
How well are the title tags written on the competitor website?
How do the pages interlink on the competitors website?

And many more…………

Using general SEO knowledge, you will be aware of the things you need to look for, for example, good websites will have a good internal linking structure, and will use good anchor text when linking between pages. A bad website will not use good anchor text, or will duplicate anchor text between different pages.

Here you need to be observing everything you can in order to build up a profile of what it is that your competitor does. Using these factors, you can make amendments to your website in order to enhance its profile to a better state then competitors, thus boosting potential for the website to achieve higher placements.

Remember though, not all websites that rank well are built well, or even SEO compliant, some websites are automatically trusted by Google because of it being a well known brand or because it has a very large link profile.

Backlinks are a cruical part of search engine optimisation, some websites rank purely on those merits, which is why its important to assess both on and off site SEO elements when looking at competitors. Doing this will allow you to see who links to the competitors website, and to even identify links that you could also achieve by approaching the webmaster.

So, when it comes to beating your competitor, remember to profile, identify and then resolve/implement. Doing this has brought substantial improvements to hundreds of thousands of websites worldwide.