Now that you’ve learned about the various factors that contribute to your web page’s rankings, it’s time to see what the competition is doing.
Before we begin, we should define exactly what your competition is. Personally, I define competition as: the web pages that outrank mine on the first page of results, for a given keyword.
Why just the first page? Since the number of people that proceed beyond the first page is negligible, as far as SEO is concerned.
That’s not to say that a page at position 1 has no competition, far from it. It’s just that, once you’ve reached the top, your SEO strategy changes slightly.
The astute among you may note that, you only really need to beat the site at number one. Technically this is true, so why are we counting the rest as competition? By all means, when it comes to the actual research, if you already rank for a keyword then just focus on the top spot. If, however, you are looking at a brand new keyword, you really need to analyse the entire top ten to get an indication of how “tough” it will be to break into and whether or not you’d be better off aiming for a different keyword.
Tools of the Trade
Competition analysis can be carried out at no cost to you – apart from time that is. Everything you need is available on the Internet.
You will need:
- Firefox
- Aaron Wall’s excellent SEO toolbar
You can actually conduct the research without any tool, but seriously you’d have to be completely crazy.
(You may also want to open up a spreadsheet so you can record and track the data you uncover.)
The toolbar’s download page contains a basic overview on its use. There is also an advanced usage page. I highly recommend you go through at least the basics, especially if you are serious about SEO. There’s a wealth of information available to you via the toolbar that just won’t get covered in this post.
Starting Your Investigations
The first thing you need to do is to head to Google and type in the keyword you want to rank for. Do this twice. One for broad match (keyword without quotations) and one for phrase match (keyword within quotations).
Note down all the pages you want to investigate. In order for the toolbar to gather data, you’ll need to actually visit each page in turn.
On-Page SEO
The SEO toolbar doesn’t really give you an insight into what on-page factors a website has employed. This is because ultimately, the battle for a rank is going to come down to the factors that occur off-page.
However, if you can spot a weakness in your competition, then you need to exploit it. So this is how to quickly determine whether or not a competing page has made use of the on-page factors:
- Examine the URL. Does the keyword appear somewhere within it?
- Examine the top bar of your browser, the title of the web page is displayed here. Does the keyword appear anywhere within it? Google will also display this title as the link text on the search results page.
- Examine the page’s content. Does the keyword appear in any headings? To be 100% certain you may have to disable CSS and/or view the page’s source (use the button on the SEO toolbar)
- Look for a meta description tag within the source code. If one exists, does it contain the keyword?
Off-Page Factors
Again, it’s worth taking the time to read through the SEO Toolbar’s installation page and advanced usage page, but for the purpose of this post, these are the buttons we’re interested in:
From left to right they are:
- Pagerank – Google’s estimated “authority” of the webpage. Mouse over it to get the exact number.
- Links (domain) – How many links point to the domain of the web page (481 in this example). Click the button to view the results in Yahoo!
- Links (page) – How many links point to the web page directly. Click to take you to the Yahoo! page
- Unique linking domains – How many unique domains link to the page. You guessed it, clickable.
- The next three are directories; DMOZ, Yahoo! and “Best of the Web” respectively. They return the “total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ [,Yahoo! and BotW], and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ [,Yahoo! and BotW]that reference that URL.” All three are clickable.
- Site age – As determined by when it appeared in Archive.org. Clickable, believe it or not.
- Monthly uniques – An estimate of how much unique traffic the web page receives monthly and yes it is clickable.
And if that wasn’t cool enough, click on the little ‘i’ icon next to PageRank (not shown in the image) and you’ll get a nice dropdown of all the information complete with an export button!
So, What do I do with this Information?
Since you’ve analysed the top ranking page for a particular keyword, you essentially know how hard it will be to compete for that keyword. Put another way, the higher the numbers the tool reports back to you, the more difficult it will be to compete against.
Whether or not you proceed is entirely up to you.
There ends our look at researching the competition. Questions? Comments? You know where to put ‘em 
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m putting this straight into my file named techie tools! I hope you’ll compile all of these insanely useful posts into a free ebook when the series is finished.
My competition? Everyone who’s ever shared something or been on a journey
!It was an insane choice of URL from the SEO point of view, but one my heart told me was right for the content and the kind of community I wanted to build.
.-= janice´s last blog ..Rapt Attention,Gifts and Rain =-.
I’ve been going through these last few posts, but have been taking my sweet time. I’m a little SEO challenged, so I have been reading some of the stuff over and over. I’m treating it more like a workbook. Thanks so much Marc, for doing this for us. You have a great talent for explaining things so that a neophyte can understand.
.-= Randi´s last blog ..Are You a Giver or a Taker? =-.
@Janice great minds think alike.
It’s a great domain name. The fact you were able to secure it, already indicates there’s gaps in the competition.
@Randi. Thank you. Take your time and remember you are always welcome to post your questions here. Or if you prefer to wait, I’ll be having an open Q & A after the series is done.