Off-page factors are as important as the on-page factors while analyzing competition to enable a successful SEO campaign. Off-page factor can be termed as external factors that affect SEO and these factors include incoming links, page rank etc.
The first place to start the process of analyzing the links on your competitor’s website is at competitorsdomain.com. You can run a link here and will find some of the links but not all. You will probably find only 5% to 6% of real links for your primary competitors. In fact a better option than Google is Yahoo, which displays a higher percentage of real links to your competitor’s website. But finding the number of links is not the only way of analyzing the competition.
If you are wondering why the off-page factors like finding real links are integral to a successful SEO campaign in the face of competition then the answer is that the factors will determine the value of the link. The number of links at your competitor’s website is the least important factor because a particular site can have 5000 incoming links and all of them can be from a single source/site with a low page ranking. In such a scenario, the number of links will hold no value.
If you have the information regarding the number of links that your competitor’s site has and the different or single sites from where these are links are generated then you will be able to isolate their weakness as far as link counts are concerned. In SEO, if you have multiple links from one particular website then it doesn’t have much value in the face of multiple links from multiple websites.
Relevancy of incoming links is very important and has been gaining a lot of importance lately. The unfortunate part is that it is one of the toughest factors to gauge and hence you might end face to face with the question of what really constitutes relevancy.
If you visit a content development firm and find a link to an SEO website then the link makes sense being there on the website and this is one way of gauging relevancy. If you feel that visitors will actually click a particular link then its existence is relevant. If your competitor website has 5000 links then it doesn’t mean that you check each one of them to find out how relevant they are. Instead, you can check only a few important links, which will basically be the ones that have a higher page rank.
You can find or identify such links by using the external analysis features of the Total Optimizer Pro. Ofcourse, there are other SEO tools available online, which have the same capabilities of being able to break down the various keyword density elements. The only advantage is that Total Optimizer Pro offers a detailed analysis of the various external SEO factors involved in competition analysis.
Your first step will be to isolate the various domains from where the links are being sent. If there are a huge number of links coming from fewer domains then it means that the competition is lower. The next aspect to look at is the PageRank breakdown for these links. If the number of links with high PageRank is higher then it will mean that the competition is difficult.
Once you have all information on various links on your competitor’s site, the next step is to duplicate the information on your website so that you can get ahead of your competition. The important thing to remember here is that your competition might do the same with you and hence you need to do much more than duplicate their links to make your SEO campaign effective.