Competitive SEO Analysis
A METHOD AND CHECKLIST
Revised November 1, 2011
3. Operation: Anchor
There are two goals to external site analysis: determine what your competitors’ strategies are and capitalize on them. This aspect of competitor analysis is never complete. Your competitors will always be generating new links (intentionally or not), and as the line between SEO and social media marketing continues to blur, it will become more important.
Backlink Profile
We’ll start by getting an idea of what kinds of links they’ve built in the past and the frequency at which they build them. Take note of links that appear to hold the most value so you can plan on targeting them later on when you execute your own SEO strategy.
Here are a few things to look at:
- How many backlinks does each of your competitors have?
- From how many unique domains do they have backlinks?
- Can you identify any backlink growth patterns based on when the links were created?
- What keywords are they focusing on the most with the anchor text of these links?
- Are there any pages that receive more links than others (on which they may be focusing their SEO efforts)?
Look past your competitor’s onsite strategies to what’s happening outside of their website. What kind of backlinks do they have? How do they get them? (iStockphoto)
Types of Links
It’s not just the quantity of links that a site has—it’s the quality of those links. You want to find the right sites they have links from that you can reach out to, too. Answer these questions:
- What forums are they participating in?
- What associations/organizations are they a member of?
- What conferences are they sponsoring?
- What blogs are they guest posting on?
Link Acquisition
Finally, we need to figure out what their strategy is for acquiring these links. Are they creating viral content in order to attract these links? Are they pushing their content heavily on certain social media channels that appear to generate the most links for them? Basically you need to think as if you were optimizing their site. What would you be doing to attract these links?
How Raven Can Help
Raven is known for its strong platform of link building tools. With Raven, you can do everything from researching links to managing them to reporting on your progress.
Here are two that can especially help you with competitor SEO link analysis:
Backlink Explorer
You can use the Backlink Explorer to research your competitors’ backlink profiles. Simply run your competitors’ domains through the tool and Raven will provide you with a quality score for each link, the anchor text of that link and the date it was created. You can even group domains to get insight into the total number of domains they have links from
Link Manager
As you dive deeper into the types of links your competitors are building, you can quickly add them to Raven’s Link Manager to be targeted when you’re ready. You can assign them to team members, even ask Raven to automatically check on the status of those links for you.
Helpful Resources
Guide to Competitive Backlink Analysis
SEOmoz
Competitive Backlink Analysis by Jane Copland
Ayima
How To: Performing a Competitive Link Analysis
Search News Central
Competitor Link Analysis & Acquisition
Practical SEO