How To Research and Analyze Your Competitors’ SEO Skills with MarketLeap

I was sitting with a new seo client a few weeks ago and we were browsing through some of his competitors’ sites. The site was sloppy and didn’t utilize any SEO best practices, so my client wanted to know why this site ranked so high in Google while his didn’t.

There are a number of sites out there that upon first glance, don’t seem to deserve their rankings. In this case, my client’s competitor happened to have created his website in the late 90s, so he had the benefit of time on his side. Google tends to rank sites that have been around for years better than those that haven’t. (That’s a rule of thumb, but there are exceptions.)

When I’m analyzing competitors’ sites, one of the first sites I go to is MarketLeap.com, which has some of the best free competitive marketing analysis tools out for a snapshot of the competitive landscape. They have three tools that I use:

Link Popularity Check – This tool tells you the total number of links your site has compared with up to 3 competitors’ websites and a list of sites within the industry. This tool also allows you to select your industry and displays popular sites within that industry as benchmarks. You’ll be able to see how many links you have in Google/AOL/HotBot and Yahoo!/FAST/AltaVista compared with your competitors.

Search Engine Saturation – This tool tells you the number of pages of your site that a search engine has indexed compared with up to 5 of your competitors.

Keyword Verification – This tool will show you if your site ranks on the first 3 pages of search results in popular search engines like AOL. Google, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo. If you are ranked, it will tell you which page you show up on.

Each of these tools gives you the option of running a trend/history report feature, so you can check back every few months to see how many links your site is acquiring compared with the competition.

Knowing this information can help you determine whether your competitor has just “gotten lucky” with his search results or if he does know what he’s doing with seo. If the site doesn’t have many back links or pages indexed in search engines, there’s a good chance you can catch up pretty quickly. If your competitor has thousands of back links and indexed pages, it will take hard work on your part to overtake him.

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