Competitive Analysis

Competitive or Competitor analysis plays a big role in analyzing and overseeing market competition for website owners. In order to stay ahead in competition and to maintain monopoly over a segment of your products, it is necessary that you do not look back or slow down w. r. t your website or ignore how another competitor does so well over the web. This calls for an understanding of the techniques and strategies employed by big names in your business segment. One of the best ways to do this is through competitive analysis.

The competitive analysis technique is similar to the corporate management terminology called SWOT or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis. In other words, through this technique, a website owner can understand offensive and defensive strategic circumstances thereby allowing you to identify the opportunities and threats in your business segment. Based on this analysis, you can chart out a plan of action in order to establish your forte in your specific market segment. Since such an in-depth analysis of competitors is not an easy job, it is essential to know the right people who can do it for you. This is where the importance of an SEO or Search Engine Optimization company comes into picture.

First look at Competitive Analysis:

Some of the main revelations of competitive sites can be the following:

• a. The URL or link address of a competitor can provide valuable information after some digging-in, as to whether the owner actually owned the websites he/she was promoting for his/her market. In all cases, the credibility of a website is provided by the domains owned by these market bigwigs.
• b. Another useful pointer that shows the differentiating factor between a successful competitor and your website, is the optimization of the former website structure. This plays an important role in determining the success of any website.
• c. The number of clicks per keyword on a website also makes you realize the difference in promotional offers on a competitor’s website and your own.

While these are some of the leads that one can generate w. r. t competitor analysis, there are some basics that need to be understood in order to do well. Among those basics, here is a small checklist that would help web content owners to analyze their competition:

• Check for the title tag and also see that it is well written. There should also be a common syntax used across the website for the same.
• On the home page of the competitor’s website, make it a point to view the source code. Specifically search for the heading tags, h1, h2 or h3. These tags would show up and this means that the competitor is using these header tags within the web page. If you look for the text used in the heading, then you will find the key phrases used within the tag on the competitor’s website.
• Another thing to check is whether the links for navigation on the website are search engine friendly. If it is a drop-down menu, it should be search engine friendly. Also, the footer of the page should be checked to see if it contains a text menu.
• The pattern of keywords used for links should be tracked too. This would show that there would be a couple of words that appear quite often and these might be the phrases that the competitor wants to focus on.
• Another checkpoint is to view the XML sitemap which would be inside the root of the website. An easy way to see if this exists is to type the website address and then add /sitemap.xml in the address to see if there is one.
• An essential part of analyzing a competitor’s website is to find out if there are no follow tags used. These help in channeling page ranks and in the long run, have immense ranking benefits.
• Quality content of the website is an important indicator of how highly ranked the pages or the website is by Google Page Rank standards. Often times, if this is the case, the pages on that particular website would have information that has been linked by visitors.

Tips for Search Engine friendly websites:

The way a website has been designed matters in competitive analysis. The following points should be considered for this:

a. It is not advisable to create an entire website in Flash, because chances are that the website might not be caught by the web spiders and search engines. This is because search engines and crawlers index content in HTML format. Hence, it is a good idea to design your website with either an option for users to choose between HTML and Flash or have the website have a mix of both the technologies. b. In the age of AJAX and lighter, user-friendly versions of websites and services, it is advised not to use age-old components on your website such as iframes or frames. Most of the tools for competitive analysis, while comparing your and your competitor’s website SEO content would also look for frames. This is because search engines do not go through frame content on websites and the only way out of this is to redesign your website in such a way that a noframes tag is used and all content searchable by crawlers is placed in a noframes section on the website. c. Another trick with SEO indexing is to allow simpler URLs instead of complex and dynamic links. Search engines do not usually go beyond four subdirectories for a website and the website’s address should be such that it accommodates this requirement. d. It might be surprising how the layout of a website is critical to search engine indexing success. The reason for this is that web crawlers the page source of a website in a top-down manner and look for keywords in the source code. These engines also look for relevant content even if it has to do with the source code of text menus, paragraphs pertaining to navigation steps. e. Several sites use glamorous content such as splash, JavaScript jump-start menus and Flash. The problem with these is that search engines index none of them. A better choice for menus that are both search engine happy and user friendly is to use DHTML menus. f. In order to increase visibility to the websites you maintain, it is better to provide site maps and links to all pages inside your website. This way search engines can view all pages whether or not they access all your website content or not.

Tools for Competitive Analysis:

There are free and costly tools available on the Internet to perform competitive analysis of websites. It is but evident that these tools would cater to the needs for better competitor analysis as discussed above.

Some of these tools are listed below:

• a. Google Tools ~ Trends for Websites, Insights for Search and Google Alerts: The ‘trends’ tool allows web content owners to see the topics or keywords searched most often and over a period of time. It also shows how many times a topic has appeared in news items and the search percentage by geographic location. The Insights tool gives you a rough comparison of search patterns and the related statistics across categories, time zones and geographic regions Google Alerts is a cool way of setting up search terms for your competitors and keywords to keep an eye on what is being searched frequently.
• b. Microsoft tools: One of these tools is a keyword forecast tool that forecasts the distribution of keywords by geographic location. Another is a search funnel tool, which allows you to create query chains thereby searching on the basis of typing related keywords in specific sequences.
• c. Xinu: This tool allows web content owners to analyze how well your site is doing against your competitors by pulling up a report from multiple sites w.r.t search engines, networking sites etc.