What are the best indicators to study your main competitors?

SEO competition comparatuve analysis

[Lilacor]

Hi, again!

I've started doing an online research about my strongest competitors on the WWW and I'm wondering whether you could give me some basic directions in order to keep my analysis as tight and as simple as possible! Here are the few steps that I've completed up to now:

1) I researched my main competition through WEBCEO (the free version of this software) and it turned to be around 100 sites (altogether strong and weak competitors) that are my direct opponents. So far, so good...
2) Next I decided to make a table in Excel where I put the following information about my competitors:
* Website - the site I incuded in the analysis);
* Google PR of the chosen website;
* Google index - the number of pages that they have indexed in Google
* Yahoo! links - the number of pages that they have indexed in Yahoo!;
* Yahoo! linkdomain;
* Internal links number;
* External links number.

Well, that's how far I've gone. Any suggestion how to procede or what other data I should include in my Excel table? What next? :)
10x a lot!

Yours,

Nick

[edited by: Lilacor at 1:57 pm (utc) on May 28, 2008]

[Lilacor]

Again no answers :( You're killing me, people... please :)

[briggidere]

how about adding their rankings for your top 10-25 keywords, the age of the domain and maybe do some research into whether you "think" they are doing aggressive link building/buying

[Lilacor]

Nice piece of advice, thanks! But I've already done that too... And as for the domain age - yes, it'll probably be reasonable to include it in my table. But what about that aggresive link building thing? I didn't understand this part... how could I do such a research?

Yours,
Nick

[edited by: Lilacor at 7:35 am (utc) on May 29, 2008]

[briggidere]

if you start getting into a bit of depth with the links of your competitors, you can normally find out if they are buying links, at what kind of rate and from what kind of sites.

One way is through using Yahoo! site explorer. Check their backlinks and if there are lots of .blogspot sites, it's pretty likely they are using one of the pay per post blogger sites for links. Normally if they are doing this, they will have other paid links coming to the site as well.

[Lilacor]

OK, got it! Thanks. And what about the two columns internal & external links? Are they relevant enough to be included in such a research (as the one I'm doing at the moment), or are they kinda useless? In case they're helpful in some way, what is it? What can a person judge by knowing the number of those links?

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Nick

[edited by: Lilacor at 7:12 am (utc) on May 30, 2008]

[lorax]

Two additional items to be checked (among many more) are the PR of their inbound links compared to your own (and the neighborhood those links are in) and I'd also be scraping their sites for their keyword lists just to get a sense of what their targeting. Oh, and when you do your searches I'd note any ads that show up for these folks as well and what keywords triggered them.

[Lorel]

check the prevelant anchor text in their links.