SEO Secrets – On-Page Competition Analysis

SEO Competition Analysis–in order to be complete, must always be undertaken in two equally important steps. Step One, is the Off-Page Competition Analysis. Step Two, is the On-Page Competition Analysis. This article will cover the the second step–in the context of assessing your competitors’ websites.

On-Page Elements
As evident from the term, these are the website qualities that can be found within the web pages of your competitors site.

The best way to explain these is to relate them to HTML; the acronym for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the most dominant computer language used for web pages. Its system relies in the use of component portions of text that are structured into headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, and other items. HTML pages come with a hierarchical structure with elements called as “tags”–surrounded by angle brackets within the files and web pages they occur in.

Below is a short sample HTML code from a strong (hypothetical) competitor’s website on Rabbit Care–myrabbitcare.com; where the keyword “rabbit care” is used. To illustrate an ideal scenario–where three tags and the domain name all contain the keyword. Note that in HTML, left and right angle brackets (which cannot be shown faithfully here) are used. Substitute accordingly for each occurrence of the left and right parentheses on all of the 12 numbered lines that follow.
01 (!doctype html)
02 (html)
03 (head)
04 (title)Rabbit Care at its Best!(/title)
05 (meta name=”Description” content=”Rabbit Care at its Best”)
06 (/head)
07 (body)
08 (h1)Rabbit Care Basics(/h1)
09 (p)Lorem ipsum Rabbit Care dolor sit emet…(/p)
10 (p)Rabbit Care consecteteur adipiscing elit…(/p)
11 (/body)
12 (/html)

The Five On-Page Elements

Title – Keyword in Title Tags–see line 04 in our example
Whether your competitor’s web page Title tag contains the keyword.

URL – Keyword in URL–contained in “myrabbitcare.com”
Whether your competitor’s URL contains the keyword.

Desc – Keyword in META Description–see line 05 in our example
Whether the keyword appears in your competitor’s web page meta description tag.

Head – Keyword in Header Tags–see line 08 in our example
Whether the keyword appears in your competitor’s web page h1, h2, h3, etc. tags.

CA – Google Cache Age
The number of days since Google last indexed the page listed.

When done with your SEO Competition analysis, you must objectively look at your chances in making it in the niche you are considering. If your competitors are too strong–because they have gained a major dominance over your niche–your best option will actually be to find another one which is not “ruled over” by competitors.

A thorough analysis of both Off-page and On-Page elements can be difficult or almost impossible to do without the proper tools. One of the easiest and fastest way for this is to use the SEO Competition Module of the Market Samurai software.

With it, a complete and authoritative analysis of your niche’s top competitors can be available for your study after one mouse click.