SEO: Checking out the online competition
This is a follow up from a previous post: How to select the best keywords for SEO.
Once you have a list of keywords it’s important to make sure your campaign is going to be worth while, there are some keywords that you aren’t going to be able to rank well for I’ll show you how to find out what those keywords are.
NOTE: I’ll be using waste equipment as an example throughout as it’s what I started with on the previous post.
Here are some of my keywords:
Excel spreadsheet showing some of the keyword selection process.
The highest KOI here is “cardboard balers” at 103.68 which is high, now to see how much work it will take to get it to the top spot.
NOTE: These based on are Google UK results.
Let’s first of all see who’s number one for the search.
1st in the SERPs for "Cardboard Balers"
As you can see rock side recycling are number one. The first thing to note is that none of our keywords are in the domain name and the site doesn’t solely sell cardboard balers, they sell a wide range of products. This is important, generally if the keywords are in the domain name and it’s a sole purpose site they have been optimised for search engines thoroughly. Let’s now click on to the website and quickly see how much information there is and have a look around.
Here is the competitor site:
Click on the link for a bigger view, it doesn't look too professional does it.
What we’re looking for:
- Notice the page name is “balers_RR40.asp” as opposed to random characters, this will help with SEO and maybe shows that some work has gone in.
- The whole page doesn’t show too much text which tells me they aren’t shooting for the top spot too much, but the information is there.
- The website isn’t the best design in the world, there isn’t much wrong but generally a fancy professional site sometimes means SEO pros are working their magic too.
NOTE: You could also look at the HTML Meta information, this is what the search engine crawlers see when looking at the website. It is thought that this information doesn’t have much weight on SEO but does show if an SEO campaign has been executed.
Yahoo Site Explorer & Inbound Links.
An inbound link is just a link to your website from another, search engines see these links as votes for your website thinking “if the information is so good that other websites link to it, it must deserve a higher position”.
Yahoo site explorer checks to see how many links go to a website, amongst other things.
So we’ll be going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and putting our competitors URL in the relevant box at the top and clicking “explore URL”. This will at first show the number of pages on the website which is important but isn’t what we’re looking for, so we’ll click the “inlinks” button then drop down the “show links” box clicking “except from this domain”.
Using the site explorer to see the amount of inbound links.
As we can see there are 15 inbound links from other websites, which first of all isn’t a high number (which is good!).
The next thing to do is check the relevancy of the links, 15 inbound links are all very good but if they are all from business websites they aren’t half as helpful as links from similar websites. A quick look through shows around half of them are relevant, not too many at all.
So in summary, how difficult is it to get to the top spot!?
You should also check other websites near the top as some could be just about to move up but generally that’s all you need to do, this particular website isn’t very strong at all but it’s expected looking at the number of search results and the number of monthly searches it recieves.
But still, a number one spot could be and is a big thing…720 people search for the term each month meaning plenty of potential.
I’d say this would take a few months but it shouldn’t be too difficult with the right technique which is something we will be looking at next.
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