What do you look at when conducting Top 10 Competitor Analysis?

[Sonny Am]

Hi,

I would really like to know what other fellow warriors look at when conducting top 10 or top 20 competitor analysis for a keyword (s) and which tools they use to do this.

I am currently using traffic travis, and look at things such as PR, backlinks to page and backlinks to domain as well as domain age. However the biggest problem I have is knowing what weight to give which elements.

Which is the most elements to look out if thinking of outranking sites on the top ten.

traffic travis provides a difficulty rating, however i find this to be quite unreliable as it sometimes provides a rating of "very easy" for a keyword that appears a lot easier to rank for, and provides "difficult" for a related keyword that seems easier to rank for.

The main thing I am asking really is, what do you look for when seeing if you can rank in the top ten of google for a keyword.

Thank you immensely in advance for anyone who can give me a little insight into this.

Sonny.

[Karim1234]

Im no expert by any means but this is what I do. As a rough, and I stress rough guide, I check out the average PR of the top 10. So add up all the prs of the top 10 pages for a particular keyword and divide by ten.

Less than 3 suggests low competition. Then I look at each individual website:

You want to know:

1. Is the page specifically targeting that keyword (Keyword is in title, domain, or featured heavily throughout the page.
2. Look at the age of the page. An old page with high rankings suggest authority. Also check out the number of indexed pages in the domain this also suggests authority.
3. Then I check out the number of back links and PR of the links. Also if you can check out the Velocity of the links. Slow accelerated growth in the number of links suggests authority.
4. Then do a quick second level analysis of the top PR domains. Take a high PR backlink, and find all backlinks pointing to that backlink and check out the PR of those.

Based on all these factors and a bit of experience you can determine if you want to compete. Hope that helped!

[colinph970]

I use Market Samurai and concentrate on domain backlinks and site backlinks. Also of importance to me is the strength of those backlinks.

[tomewer]

I think people can overcomplicate competition analysis far too much. I think it is a skill that is learnt over time - there is no such thing as a perfect formula.

Having said that, I look at the following (using Market Samurai), weighted roughly as follows:

1. PageRank (low importance)
2. Domain Age (medium importance)
3. Referring domains to page (high importance) and to site (low/medium importance)
4. Referring links to page (high importance) and to site (low/medium importance)
5. Meta tag and URL optimization (high importance)
6. Index count (medium importance)

You should also check out the strength of the top competition's backlinks. A lot of backlinks can seem imposing, until you realise that 80% of them are from the same, low-influence site.

A lot of what I do is based upon 'feel'. Is it a commercial market? Is it a market I want to be involved in? Is it a market where I can build up a lot of content with related long tail keywords? And so on.

In my opinion, keyword research is more of an art than a science.

[JohnMcCabe]

The only tools I use are a web browser and my brain.

The first thing I'm looking for are the entrenched authority sites. If too many of the top ten are hardcore authorities, I'm a bit skittish.

Next, I look to see if the pages in the SERP are home pages or internal pages. Too many home pages with exact match domains means I'm competing with other marketers. Not a deal breaker, but warrants more research.

Now it's time to start visiting the actual pages. Are they relevant, or simply the best the algorithm could find? Do they appear to be well-optimized? Does the site look like it has a good internal linking structure?

As Tom said above, after awhile you start to lean on feelings and impressions more than what some piece of software spits out. In my case, I'm aware that a piece of software is going to spit out the same results for any user, so in any given niche, the users of that program will be embracing or eliminating many of the same keywords.

One last thing I check for is the presence of outside content. Do they use content produced by outside writers? Guest posters? Active, useful commenting? If so, that site might be tough competition. But it might also be a valuable ally...

[BenSalez]

Here is my method for checking competition;

Once I find a keyword I am interested in I look at the top 10 results on google.

With SEOQuake (firefox plugin) you can view all pertinent site statistics. You are looking for domain age, page rank and number of backlinks.

Once you check these stats and everything appears reasonable it is time to check quality of backlinks for PR.

After you check the PR of the first 10-20 backlinks (with seoquake and YSE) you can now go to backlinkwatch. com to check for anchor text.

Simplest way to see if you can compete in a market/niche with free tools.

Ben

[nicoledeal]

tomewer and JohnMcCabe summed it up very well above. So much relevance is given to backlinks alone, and I think this is a common mistake. You are using good tools and doing your due dilligence, and that is half the battle. After a while you get a "feel' for where you should be, and what battle you want to fight. You've heard the saying "pick you battles carefully". In the IM world this is very relevant, as your success depends on the outcome, true?

[DarrenHaynes]

I think it has all been pretty much said here!

I remember a few years ago when I was completely fresh to IM (so fresh in fact that I had no idea what a backlink or a hyperlink was, I just new I needed to make money online and was ready to do whatever it took), I was lucky enough in that I came across a system for making websites for newbies that worked well for me.

The system for picking a keyword was finding one that got at least 10,000 exact matches a month with the google keywords tool (i think, my memory a bit foggy) and the competition analysis was to check just the PR of just the first four results in google. If they were all PR3 or less it was a go, and a PR4 was ok provided that the keyword wasn't in the title of the article. Backlinks were not analysed.

Of course, there are holes in that system, I can see that now, but it got me up and running into a full time income online. Although I was lucky that I didn't pick any heavily spammed niches! A few did, to find out later it was a tough choice.

Anyhows, starting off I needed something 100% scientific because I knew nothing, but as already mentioned above, it is now more a 'feel' when I pick a niche, and feel only comes with experience and understanding all aspects of the competition in the top 10.

Also - this is my first post!

[tomewer]

Welcome Darren

[DarrenHaynes]

Thanks Tom :-)

[MikeFriedman]

The biggest thing I do is analyze the links of the top 3 with SEO SpyGlass. I want to see the PR of the incoming links, how many outbound links those pages have, the age of those pages, and the anchor text used.

I don't care about anything other than the first page, and really don't care much about anything outside the top 3.

[John Moore]

A quick look at page 1 gives me the best insight, typically i like to see results that don't contain large companies, e.g.....amazon, wikipedia, large authority sites, etc.......also you know your onto a winner when you see irrelevant content in the top10.

[guzpra]

Originally Posted by tomewer

I think people can overcomplicate competition analysis far too much. I think it is a skill that is learnt over time - there is no such thing as a perfect formula.

Having said that, I look at the following (using Market Samurai), weighted roughly as follows:

1. PageRank (low importance)
2. Domain Age (medium importance)
3. Referring domains to page (high importance) and to site (low/medium importance)
4. Referring links to page (high importance) and to site (low/medium importance)
5. Meta tag and URL optimization (high importance)
6. Index count (medium importance)

You should also check out the strength of the top competition's backlinks. A lot of backlinks can seem imposing, until you realise that 80% of them are from the same, low-influence site.

A lot of what I do is based upon 'feel'. Is it a commercial market? Is it a market I want to be involved in? Is it a market where I can build up a lot of content with related long tail keywords? And so on.

In my opinion, keyword research is more of an art than a science.

Thanks, this is the list I've been analyzing and looking for these times!

[eurekapsycrille]

What I do is I don't go straight to how many backlinks does a particular site have. I will check first how the website's pages were constructed.

I usually check the anchor texts in the content of a web page and how they are connected with each other. Ex., when you look at the wikipedia, you will see there are many words that are used as anchor texts pointing on different pages of wikipedia itself.

For me, it is a very big factor because you will see the flow of the value of the those anchor texts in a page. After that, I will now check the links that are connected to that particular page and I will check the PR of those links. I have concluded that the value of the links that are connected with that particular page were not getting stocked, in this way, your other pages will also share the value from that page.

This is just my observation and I think I found it effective. Hope it will help you too.