8 Things to Know About Your Competitors for SEO

As a search engine optimization company, when we perform an analysis for businesses, we often look at the following eight areas of their competitors to determine what’s required to rank them well through SEO.

The eight areas that we look at are keywords, domain authority, domain age, total pages, total links, root domain links, page loading speed, and social media. Let’s take a look at each area and why it’s important for you to know this about your competitors.

Keywords
One of the first things that we look at are the keywords that your competitors are going after. The reason why this is important is because it helps you understand their strategy as well as how difficult it will be to compete for specific keywords. It’s also a great way for you to develop a more complete list of keywords to target.

Domain authority
There are various tools that you can use to show you the domain authority of your competitors, such as Open Site Explorer. Domain authority simply gives you a broad perspective on how the search engines see your competitors in terms of authority. It gives you a general perspective on how credible they are from an SEO perspective.

Domain age
Domain age is one of the factors that Google and other search engines use when ranking sites. The age of the domain is another credibility factor to help you understand who has this competitive advantage.

Total pages
Google and the other search engines want to see that you are contributing to your market. One of the ways that they determine this is by the size of your site. If your competitor has 1000 pages while you have 10, they have the advantage in this area and it means that you want to start adding pages to your site and blog.

Total links
While the volume of links does not hold the weight that it used to, it’s still important to take a look at. It provides a great indication of how aggressive your competitors are from an SEO perspective.

Root domain links
Since the volume of root domains does have an impact on rankings, it’s important to understand if your competitors have a high volume of links from a small number of domains or from several domains. If they have links from several domains, it’s worth reviewing these links to determine which ones are high quality and if you can get a link from these domains as well.

Page Loading speed
Google wants to provide a great experience for users. They want to ensure that you are producing high quality content on a regular basis as well as a good performing Website. One of the ways that they determine performance is by your page loading speed. Take the time to review yours. If it is not good, you want to fix it. It will improve your ranking and the experience for your users.

Social posts and shares Social media continues to have an impact on SEO. The number of shares is a great signal to Google about the quality of your content. If your competitors are producing a lot of content and it’s getting shared, you may want to increase your involvement in social media.