Research Your Competitors’ Content Before Doing Anything SEO Work

In order to overtake your competitors in the search engines you need to do what they do first, and then do it slightly better. When it comes competitive research most people tend to focus only on keywords and back links. They are important but there is one more thing that needs paying attention to, and that is the content.

You need to find out the number pages they have, the number of words on the homepage (if that’s the page you’re competing with) and the internal link structure of their website. For instance, if you see their homepage has 500+ words you now know how much content you should put on your homepage. On the other hand, they have more back links to their websites then you need to change your focus that area – you can either try contact the website owner that already linked your competitor and ask for a link exchange or you can buy links from link networks.

By looking at the contents of a website that is ranking well for your chosen can not only give clues of how they got their website there, but also ideas of what to include on your own website. Having said that, you need to look at least 5 – 10 highly established websites before making decisions of what to include and exclude.

Pay close attention to the number of QUALITY pages they have, and by that I mean pages that are highly user-focused, not search engine focused. If they have 10 articles on how to play golf for beginners, then you need to make a note of this because you’re going to do the same for your website. Write your content and make each article just slightly longer than theirs. When writing the articles try to focus on the users, not search engines. Sooner or later your visitors will notice the quality of your contents and you will start receiving hundreds of new visitors and “natural” back links.

You have to keep your eyes on what your competitors are doing and try to do just enough to stay ahead in the search engines. The key to success in the search marketing game is knowing which areas you should spend your time on and the order of doing each one of them. And you don’t need to do anything out of ordinary to achieve good results, you just need to do a little better than the person that’s ranking number one right now. In fact you don’t even need to be number one to get good results. Personally I think as long as you’re in the top 3, and you have a compelling title, your ad will get more clicks than the person above you!

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation