8 Tips for Studying Your Competitors to Improve Your SEO

There are so many different aspects to a solid SEO campaign. Changes you can make to your site. Tweaks on keywords. Tags. Links. Titles. Content….and the list goes on. But one thing that may be over looked quite often is what your competition can tell you about your own business.

Studying your competitors and what they do online can help improve your own site and SEO. Here are some things that you can study, research and use the results to tweak your own site.

• What are their strengths online? Solid content? In depth, well optimized website?
• What are their weaknesses? Bad PR? Slow to respond? No interaction?
• Are they active on Social Media? How do that interact? How do they use social media? How do they use images?
• Research and study their site by using tools such as Open Site Explorer to determine their Page Authority, Domain Authority, Page links, and so much more.
• Monitor their Keyword usage. There are tools on the web that will allow you to see what keywords they are using. Keyword Planner in Google Adwords works great by inserting their name, if they are pretty active online, or use ones like KeywordSpy and SEMRush.
• Set up Google Alerts for your competitor so you know what is happening in their business at all times.
• Use site comparison tools to monitor title usage.
• Monitor their adwords usage with tools like Alexa and alerts.

Once you have a reasonable list of information on your competitor and their online habits, compare it to what you are doing with your business. Identify areas of improvement and make a tracking strategy on how you are going to address and make the improvements to your own site. Capitalize on what they are doing right and wrong vs. what you are doing right and wrong.

Improvements can be made in many different areas of your website, blog, social media, and more. Taking the time to research and study your competition can bring clarity to your own issues, fresh ideas, even identifying a job well done.