In Search of Optimization

Know your competition is one of the wisdoms that my grandfather taught me when I was young. He was an airforce pilot. He would always say, “Mike, know your competition. Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.” What he said is true. In order to succeed in any battle, it is imperative that one should know everything about his competition.

This remains true in the world of SEO. Now that you already know what keywords you want and what the people are searching, then it’s time for you to know who your competitors are and what best place to learn about them than the search engines themselves. To simplify things, we would only be taking a look at Google but it’s basically the same for all the other search engines.

Let’s say your target keyword is cosmetic surgeons. What you would want to do is to go to www.google.com and type cosmetic surgeons. Google will then give you enough information to know your competition.

The first information I want you take a look at is the number of websites Google found for that cosmetic surgeons. This can be found near the upper right portion of the page. Here’s a screenshot:

This shows that Google found 20,800,000 websites for the keywords cosmetic surgeon. 20,800,000 is pretty tough. Usually, you would want a keyphrase with fewer competing webpages than this but for example’s sake, we’ll stick with this keyphrase for the meantime.

Now, you want to know the first 10 websites that Google returned. To do this, all you need to do is type the URLs of the first 10 websites that Google listed for cosmetic surgeons in a spreadsheet (Excel or OpenOffice Calc). Name this column “URL”.
Next step is to find out how many other websites are linking to each of the top 10 websites. To do this, all you need to do is type link:http://competitor-url in Google’s search bar. Google will now return all the websites that link to your competitor’s URL.

Again, near the upper right corner of the page, Google will show how many websites link to our competitor’s website. In the above screenshot, we see that www.cosmeticsurgery.org has 140 websites linking to it. You now add this info next to the URL in your spreadsheet file. Name this column “Links”.
Typically, you would want to get more links than your competitor.

Last thing you need to do is to actually visit your competitor’s website, view the webpage’s source code and take note of the following:

1. Are the keyphrases included in the webpage’s title?
2. How many times are the keyphrases mentioned in the actual body of their webpage?
3. How many times are the keyphrases included in header tags - H1, H2, H3?

Note that I am assuming that you know HTML. If you don’t then you may want to ask someone who knows HTML for help to determine the three items mentioned above.

You now add this info to your spreadsheet so that you will now have the following info:

Now, we have competitor data, it’s time to take action in Step 4 - Keyword Placement.

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