Deciphering Your Competitor’s SEO Strategy
Ever wondered how your competition got that number one spot in Google? Well stop wondering and start exploring. Today we’re going to take a look at how your competitors got their number one ranking… and how you can steal it.
Your first destination is to head to the SERP for your chosen keyword. Explore each of the top sites and note how their site is structured. Some basic usability questions you might want to ask yourself include:
- Why does Google think this site is a better choice than mine for this keyword?
- What does this site do for user that mine doesn’t?
- How can my site offer a similar experience?
Once you’ve got an idea of the types of websites Google likes to send its users to, it’s time to take a deeper look at their site. Back at Google’s results, click on the two arrows that appear when you hover over a link to open up its preview. In the preview pane, click on the ‘Cached’ link and you’ll be taken to a version of the site from the last time Google crawled it. In the top bar, click ‘Text-only version’ to get a look at what Google’s bots see.
Things to keep an eye out for in the text-only cache include:
- How far down the main content is
- H1’s and H2’s
- Content that may be hidden by design, but viewable in the text-only version
- Anchor text links
- How high in the page keywords are
- Alt tags for images
Explore the cached text-only versions of the top couple sites and see if you can draw any conclusions about how they cater for the above ranking factors. If you see any particular trends across these pages, compare them against your site and make getting your site in-line with your competitors a priority.
Next we want to copy the cached text-only version of your competitors sites and plug them into a word-frequency analysis tool like TagCrowd. In the example in this week’s video, we took a look at the term ‘credit cards’ and the number one result for that search. When we put that site’s text-only cache into TagCrowd, we get a whopping 40 occurrences in the content of ‘credit’ and a close 28 for ‘card’.
Match up your site’s own TagCrowd results to your competitor and if there’s a big difference, you may want to look for ways to optimise your content to include more occurrences of your keywords and less of repeated words that you’re not targeting.
While you’re at it, getting some historical data about your search terms may be helpful in determining whether it’s a keyword you should be even targeting at all. Bring up Google Trends (which we showed you a few weeks back) and have a poke around the data available for your keywords. Take note of any cyclical or seasonal trends and take note if search traffic for the term is waning. Putting all that effort into a high-competition keyword that won’t be valuable in a year will only cause heartache so take a few minutes to explore your keywords in Google Trends.
Now take what you’ve learnt and work on stealing those rankings. Shoot us an email to [email protected] if you’ve got any more questions and share this post if you found it helpful!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
