It is common for Web sites to rank very well for certain
keywords but not very well for others. This makes sense since
the competitive landscape changes from one keyword phrase to the
next. There may be 300,000 search results for keyword A and
1,000,000 search results for keyword B. Presumably, it would be
harder to outrank a million results than three hundred thousand,
but this is not always the case. There may be a greater number
of optimized pages in the smaller results set, making it more
competitive than the larger set.

While it is nice to know why a certain keyword phrase is more
competitive than another phrase, it does not really help us
formulate an SEO strategy to rank well for that keyword.

In order to come up with a successful SEO game plan it is
necessary to gather a significant amount of data about the top
ranking sites for whatever keyword phrase you are trying to
optimize.(You can use software like SEO Elite to get this data with one click)

Gathering the Data

As we all have heard, there are two main factors that contribute
to rankings: content and links. Generally speaking, the more
optimized content you have on your site targeting a specific
keyword, the more likely it is that you will be viewed as
relevant by the search engines for that keyword. Similarly, the
more inbound links you have going into your site, the more
likely it is that your site will rank well. Search engines
consider an inbound link to be a “vote” for your site. The more
votes your site has, the more relevant it must be.

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So how do we gather the data to compare your site to the top
ranking sites for your desired keyword? The search engines are
surprisingly helpful in this regard. Google and Yahoo! together
give you nearly all of the information that you need in order to
do an effective competitive evaluation.

Let us assume you want to rank for [sample keyword phrase]. The
first thing we would do is search for that phrase in Google and
look at the top 10 results. Once you have that list of sites, we
recommend that you gather the following information for each
site:

1. # of pages on the site that use all the words from the
phrase.
2. # of pages on the site that use the exact keyword phrase.
3. # of pages on the site that use all the words from the
phrase in the page Title.
4. # of pages on the site that use the exact keyword phrase
in the page Title.
5. # of inbound links to the site’s home page, not including
internal links.
6. # of inbound links to the most relevant landing page on
your site for the keyword phrase (assuming it is not the
home page). You should make note of how many internal and
external inbound links there are to the landing page.

Items 1-4 can be obtained if you have software that can crawl a
Web site and compile statistics on word usage throughout the
site (Like SEO Elite). For SEO purposes, it is much more useful to query Google
to gather the data above. After all, does it really matter if
you have ten pages of content about a particular keyword phrase
if none of them have been indexed?

Here are the queries you would use to get the data for items 1-4
in Google:

1. site:www.domain.com sample keyword phrase
2. site:www.domain.com “sample keyword phrase”
3. site:www.domain.com intitle:sample intitle:keyword intitle:phrase
4. site:www.domain.com intitle:”sample keyword phrase”

The inbound link data (items 5-6) can easily be obtained from
Yahoo! Site Explorer. You can also gather the link data for your
own site in the Google Webmaster tools. If you are not familiar
with Yahoo! Site Explorer, you can simply copy and paste the URL
below into your Web browser, replacing the domain name that we
have highlighted with the name of the site you are researching:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

Copying and pasting the URL above will give you the number of
inbound links to your home page (minus internal links) according
to Yahoo! Site Explorer. In other words, the results of this
query will give you item 5 from above. From this page you can
get item 6 by pasting the URL of your most relevant landing page
into the Yahoo! Site Explorer search box. Make note of the
initial number of results. It tells you how many inbound links
you have to that specific page from external sites. Now change
the option selected in the Show Inlinks pull down menu from
“Except from this domain” to “From All Pages”. You now have the
total number of inbound links to that page.

Once you have all of the data gathered for every site we
recommend putting all of the numbers together in a spreadsheet.
You can organize it in whatever way is easiest for you to
understand, but you want to be able to easily compare all of the
sites to each other.

Data Analysis - Where Should You Focus Your Efforts?

So now that you have all of this data, what do you do with it?
The answer is - it depends. If your site appears to have a better
than average amount of link popularity but fewer optimized pages
than your competition, then you will probably want to spend some
time creating new pages. On the other hand, you may want to
focus all of your initial efforts on link building if you have
far fewer links than your top performing competitors. You can
have all the relevant content in the world, but without any
inbound links your site has very little chance of ranking well.

Not every competitive analysis is going to be as simple as the
two examples given above. Sometimes you do have enough link
popularity and plenty of content. What is the problem then?
Well, the reason we feel that items 3 and 4 are important is
that using a keyword phrase in a page Title usually reflects
that the phrase you are researching is the main theme (or one of
the main themes) of the page. There are obviously many other
factors in optimizing a Web page. However, using the intitle:
command is one of the only ways you can query the search engines
to find pages that are somewhat optimized without having to view
every page on your site.

Your content optimization should begin with the pages that are
already somewhat optimized. In this case, we are talking about
the pages that use the keyword phrase in their Title tags. Make
sure that all of these pages are as optimized as they can be
without overusing or “stuffing” keywords. We recommend using the
Single Page Keyword Density Analyzer in the SEOToolset (you can
try a free version of the Single Page KDA
(http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html) here) to
evaluate each page.

Once you have gone through the pages that already use the
keyword phrase in their Title tags, you should then focus on the
pages that use the phrase in the page body but not the Title
tag. You can find these pages with the following command in
Google:

site:www.domain.com “sample keyword phrase” –intitle:”sample keyword phrase”

One good thing about Google is that they almost always rank
results in order of relevance. That appears to be the case with
the above command based on what we have seen. For that reason
you should start with result 1 and go down from there. You might
as well start with the pages that are closest to being optimized
for your keyword already. Optimize these pages using the Single
Page KDA exactly as you did with the others.

After you have optimized your pages it may also be necessary to
create a silo for this keyword phrase and all other similarly
themed keywords. If your most relevant landing page was not
ranking well due to a lack of internal links, then creating a
siloing structure should help. Be sure to add the index page of
any newly created silo into main navigational elements so that
it has plenty of inbound links.

Let us suppose that you have created a well-optimized silo to
target your keyword and your site is still not ranking well.
Assuming that your site is not being filtered and/or penalized
in some way and that all of your pages have been indexed, then
you will have to either create more content or develop more
inbound links to get over the hump. When it comes to developing
links you will want to focus on getting links to both your home
page and to the most relevant landing page for the keyword you
are optimizing.

The analysis that we have discussed in this article is for one
keyword phrase. It is a good exercise, but you will likely be
optimizing a much larger set of keywords on your site. The SEO
process becomes more and more complicated as your site grows and
you try to optimize more keywords. However, the same fundamental
principles still apply. Good rankings will come if you have a
well-organized (i.e. siloed) site with a significant amount of
optimized content and inbound links. You will not have the time
to go through this evaluation for every possible keyword you
want to optimize, but it is valuable to go through the process
for high priority keywords. Otherwise, you will have no idea
where you should focus your SEO efforts.

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About The Author
Fernando Chavez is a writer with Bruce Clay Inc.