Tiny Action Mighty Payoff: Basic SEO Competitive Research

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Basic SEO Competitive Research

Search Engine Optimization is about ranking better than the competition for the money keywords and “long tail” keywords that drive sales in your industry.

This means you need to know what kind of SEO your competition is packing.

Notice that there are a ton of links to other posts in this article, if you don’t know what something is — click on the link for further investigation.

How To Do Basic SEO Competitive Research

1. Do some keyword research — find the money keywords and “long-tail” keywords in your industry
2. Enter these keywords into Google
3. Make a list of the competitors that are consistently ranking in the Top 10 search results for these keywords in a spreadsheet.
4. Enter the following into the spreadsheet for each competitor
   1. Approximate number of words (html text) on the home page
   2. Are they making proper use of title tags?
   3. Are they making proper use of meta description tags?
   4. Are they making proper use of alt text on images?
   5. Are their URL’s optimized?
   6. Are they making proper use of cross linking?
   7. Number of pages indexed by Google
   8. Number (and quality) of inbound links on Yahoo or use a stronger tool like Linkscape if you are feeling saucy.
5. Now enter your own website’s data on the spreadsheet. Be honest. 
6. Determine where your SEO is lacking.
7. Get to work.

What are your questions about basic SEO competitive research?  What would you add to this list?

Tagged as: seo