A few months ago we released our SEO Competitor Analysis checklist. The goal of the checklist was to help you analyze your competitor’s SEO strategies, learn from them and monitor their progress. Raven users can take advantage of many of our internal tools to accomplish the tasks laid out in the checklist. Let’s take a look at how Raven can help.

Identify Targets: Any sites listed above yours

Identifying both broad and niche competitors is more than just asking your client or boss who they think their biggest threats are. What many people forget is that the online market is much more competitive, and there are always players you didn’t normally consider as a threat that are. To help you discover those competitors, we turn to two tools.

Research Assistant: Keyword search

The Research Assistant provides you with three separate search options (domain, keyword and page). In this case, we want to use the keyword search. You don’t need to perform this search for all the keywords you plan on targeting, just the ones you deem most important.

Normally we would go through all of the keyword recommendations provided by this tool. Instead, we’ll scroll down to the bottom where the tool has listed all of the websites ranking for this particular keyword. By default, this table is sorted alphabetically by domain name. You’ll want to instead sort the table by their ranking position by clicking the header for that column.

Write down the top five competitors ranking for this keyword. The next step in this process is to perform the same process for all of the keywords you identified as a priority and look for the competitors that are showing up most frequently for them.

Research Assistant: Domain search

Another way to identify competitors using Raven is to perform a domain search in the Research Assistant. You’ll want to use the domain you’re own domain in the search. This function of the Research Assistant will analyze your domain’s content to determine what keywords the website is most likely targeting. If you scroll down to the bottom of your results you’ll see a list of potential competing domains. This table references the total number of common keywords these competitors are also ranking for. You’ll want to add the domains that are ranking for the most common keywords as your domain.

Operation: Search

Keyword and content analysis

The objective of Operation: Search is analyze your competitors’ on-site optimization. We’re going to start with the keywords they are targeting. Head back to the Research Assistant and perform another domain search. Instead of inputting your domain, however, you’ll want to go through and analyze your competitors’ domains. Add any and all keywords that are relevant to what your site does to the Keyword Manager. Keep in mind that the Research Assistant also tells you where they are currently ranking for each of those keywords.

Technical analysis

We also need to determine how well they’ve optimized the technical aspect of their site. In order to get a quick snapshot of this, we’ll turn to a few of Raven’s tools.

Quality Analyzer

The Quality Analyzer is used to determine how well optimized a website is, based on external factors including the number of pages they have indexed, the types of links they’ve built and their domain age. By running your competitors through the Quality Analyzer, you’ll get a good idea of their perceived value to the search engines. In other words, it’s a snapshot into how hard they’ll be to outrank.

Design Analyzer

The Design Analyzer takes a look at how well your competitors have optimized the structure of their website. It looks at the semantic structure, speed, meta data and more to score how well they’ve optimized each of those components. Without an optimized site structure, competitors may not be indexed as well or as strongly as they could be with one.

CustomRank

Each industry and each internet marketing professional has a different opinion as to what are and aren’t important ranking factors to the search engines. That’s why we created CustomRank. CustomRank allows you to create your own scoring algorithm so you can get a Quality Analyzer score that reflects what you think the search engines value. You can create multiple CustomRank scores to run your competitors through.

Operation: Anchor

Backlink profile and types of links

Now it’s time to take a look at what your competitors’ backlinks look like. We want to determine the types of websites they’re building links from, what keywords are being used as anchor text for those links and the quantity of links that they have. Raven’s Backlink Explorer can do all of the heavy lifting for you for this task. All you need to do is run your competitors through the Backlink Explorer. Raven will then return their backlinks and give you the ability to sort them by domain, ACRank (an algorithm by MajesticSEO that identifies the quality of a link) and anchor text. I recommend grouping domains to clean up the list.

Go through this profile and keep track of the anchor text they are using that you may not be considering. Did you notice that they were ranking really well for a keyword you are targeting? What links do they have that use that keyword as the anchor text? Add links to the Link Manager from this list for your and your link builders to acquire during your SEO campaign.

Link acquisition

The Backlink Explorer is also a great way to keep tabs on how frequently your competitors are building links. Within a Backlink Explorer report, there is a column that shows when the date was created. If you sort the report by this column you can follow the progress at which their site had built these links. Look for patterns and see if you can tell whether or not they are actively building links, or if they are just being created naturally.

Enemy Surveillance Program

Now that we’ve collected all of this data on our competitors, we need to keep tabs on how it changes over the upcoming months.

Competitor Manager

The best way to keep tabs on competitors is to make sure you’ve added them to the Competitor Manager. The Competitor Manager will keep track of their Quality Score, mozRank, Domain Authority, number of inbound links and the number of pages they have indexed in Google and Yahoo!. This is a great way to keep an eye out on how they are building our their SEO strategy.

SERP Tracker

Additionally, I recommend adding your top competitors to the SERP Tracker. Raven will keep track of their rankings for all of the keywords you’re tracking in the SERP Tracker. You have the ability to compare this information side-by-side with your own rankings and include them in reports.

Social Media Monitor

Another good strategy for monitoring your competitors is to set up searches for them in the Social Media Monitor. The Social Media Monitor can track mentions of your competitors across the social web, but it can also be customized to only look for mentions on a specific type of site. For example, if you want to keep track of how often your competitor’s product or service is mentioned on blogs, you can create a custom search to only look for blog posts. This is a great way to find opportunities to have your own product or service reviewed.

Final thoughts

Competitor Analysis can be time intensive, but there is so much value to be had from the process. A good competitor analysis gives you insight into what SEO strategies are and aren’t working. Think of it as free advice that only costs your time.

I recommend revisiting your competitors progress one a quarter, but keeping an eye on major ranking shifts in the SERP Tracker each week.

Good luck!