Conducting Competitor analysis will help get higher search engine rankings for your website.

Before we make the final decision on what keywords to use we need to look at who the competition are, and why they are raking so well for the keyword.

There can be several reasons for a site to rank well for a keyword and these can range from the accidental to the professionally optimised.

Obviously if we can find keywords that have little or no professionally managed sites then we can dominate these keywords with little effort.

If however we find keywords with professional optimisation we need to make a decision on how valuable that work is to us.

If it is going to take a lot of resources to get a word that will deliver us only 1% more sales then it might not be worth it, if however we could expect 20% more sales from that keyword then it might be worth putting in the extra effort.

Remember sometimes it is easier and more efficient to rank for 2 or 3 keywords that combined bring you 500 visitors than it is to take on Amazon for the one keyword to bring you the same visitors.

Ranking well for many keywords rather than just a few also has an effect on how the search engines react to your site, they think you know your subject and give you more credit for new terms you are attempting to rank for, this is how sites like Amazon, eBay and the BBC all rank so well for so many words.

Using this approach you can take a longer term view on some keywords and rank for them without spending the intense resources some newer sites might have too.

Wordtracker is an online tool that can be used to grow the seed words into a keyword list, it is a powerful tool and can give us a lot of information including suggesting words related to our own, looking for keywords on a competitors site, showing us how many times a keyword is used in the past month.

Using all this information we can build a comprehensive list of keywords that are targeted to our market.

Full details of how to log into and use wordtracker can be found in the technical manual.

If you have the chance to talk with the sites owner about the goals of the site and who the competition are then this stage is much easier, but even if you do not have access to the sites owner you can still work out the nature of the site with a little more work.

Get a pen and paper and look through the site, jot down what you think the site is about, what the site is trying to get you to do, make a purchase, give you information , get you to interact with it etc.

Write down words that are related to the sites subject, if it is about share trading on line, then you might include words like;

Shares
Share dealing
Buy shares
Share trading

These are just base words to work from, they are far from a final list and can be just 2 words related the topic or a list of 50, at this stage they are just to get us thinking along the right lines.

So to recap we have established

a) What the site is about
b) What the site owners need the visitor to do
c) We have a broad list of words related to that site’s subject (not the action – just the topic)

This list of words is your seed list, the list you are going to grow your keywords from.