Benchmark Your Competitors for Successful SEO Campaign

2011 can be called as Panda Year for webmasters, SEO Experts, SMO experts and affiliate marketers. I can imagine about serious webmasters, SEO Experts and SMO experts discussing problems in webmaster forums, SEO forums, and Programming forums after panda updates.

What are the changes made by Google in these panda updates? What are necessary steps one should follow to implement successful SEO campaign? Should we promote SMO for successful SEO campaign?

These are the only questions now days revolving all around. Even there are lot of things you should take care of when you are doing search engine optimization, but I have a positive and result oriented guess for you to launch a successful SEO campaign and that is benchmarking of competitors.

The term benchmarking is a management term, which is used to follow the competitor like the way he is implementing the business. If you are an SEO Expert offering affordable SEO services I will recommend you to benchmark your competitor. I have some steps for you to benchmark your competitor for a successful SEO campaign.

Find Your Competitors

You need to find your competitors before you can start benchmarking them. One of the best ways to find your competitors is to sort out the list of your keywords. Open Google and search with your first keyword. Save top 10 results into excel file. I can think that you have got my idea. In the same passion search all your keywords and pick the list of your competitors.

Analyze Your Competitors

Once you are finished with sorting the list, next step is to analyze them. Visit each and every site and see their contents, Meta tags, title tag, navigation structure, URL structure etc. You need to take care of all the onsite optimization rules your competitors are implementing. Once you are finished analyzing them, list down all of the difference you feel to your website and implement them step by step. Certainly I can understand it will take time but you should also understand that nothing can be gained without real hard work.

Keywords of Your Competitors

Keywords play an important role to drive more traffic for your website. It is not an easy job to find what keywords are used by your competitors but you can do this with little effort. Open each and every website you have in your list and see the source code of the website by pressing the CTRL+U if you are using Firefox or F4 if you are using internet explorer. You have to check the Meta keyword tag of your competitor; most of the webmasters implement important keywords there. You can now easily sort the important keywords from your competitor now.

Competitor Back Links

Since you have already a list of your competitors, it is a good time to see their inbound links and to analyze them. I have personally experienced this and have found that most of the competitors implement guest blogging strategy to have juicy inbound links. There are many online tools you can use to see their back links and backlinkwatch is one of them. Once you are finished with analyzing the inbound links for your competitors, sort the techniques implemented by them in excel file for your future plan.

Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization plays an important role to drive traffic for your website. Analyze your competitors whether they are implementing social media strategy or not? If they are really implementing this strategy then you should not forget to implement the same for your website. I can personally say that if you are offering affordable SEO services, you should not forget that social media optimization can be really beneficial for you to drive traffic for your website. Push your keywords up with social media optimization.

PPC

PPC stands for pay per click, and you need to take care of this as well. Try to analyze whether your competitors are using PPC ads or not. One thing to remember that you need to compete your competitors and you need to follow all the steps they are following to have the same business leads they are having. If your competitors are implementing PPC ads, you should not forget you need to as well.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Tags: , ,