Reviewing your competition part 2

In this article, I continue the process we started in the last article. We reached to a point to get to opensiteexplorer.com. And what’s going to happen here is, Moz is going to find some information about your competitor, or even your site. From our search results, we notice that one of our competitors was Sprinkles. And I want to find some more information about them. I’m going to put “www.sprinkles.com” and choose “Search.” And what we’re getting is a fairly broad overview of Sprinkles and the things that they’re doing in their SEO. Over here on the left, we can see what Moz thinks their domain authority and their page authority are. And the higher these numbers, the harder it’s going to be to compete, or the better they’re doing, with their overall SEO.

We can look at the inbound links. So these are all the articles that were written about Sprinkles that are driving traffic to their website. This is a great place to look if you are trying to find places to list your site, as well. We can also look at their top pages, and see if we notice any patterns or specific pages on their site that we think we would benefit from having as well. I encourage you to explore the rest of these tabs on your own time. Now, we’ll point out that Moz is only going to provide you with so many features for free and then beyond that, they’re going to ask you to become a paying account.

We’ve looked at some ways to kind of discover what our competitors are doing in the landscape. But now, we want to take a minute to look at some of their on-page efforts, what they’re doing on their website. So, we’ve been talking a lot about cupcakes, but I want to switch gears, and instead look at another type of local business. A pet store, or in our case a pet medicine store. So, I’m going to visit wisdompets.com and walk you through some ways that we can evaluate the site in general. Starting out, the first thing I’d like to do is get a sense of their site in general.

How does it look? What’s the overall feel of their content, and is it localized? I’ll start by looking at the navigation and seeing what categories they’ve chosen. Are they relevant? Are there any that I should maybe include on my own website? Next, I’ll look around the site and see if there are any indications of their social interactions. Maybe there’s a Twitter feed or some indicators that suggest that they have strong popularity. I’m also going to scroll all the way to the bottom of the site and look at the footer to see if they’ve included some best practices.That would include their contact information, their address, and also, brands that do a lot of SEO will have a site map.

And I’m not seeing that here, so they’re not giving some strong signals that there’s a lot of local SEO happening, which is good for us. As I browse the site by clicking on the various navigation, I’m going to keep tabs of the URL structure that they’re using. Is it clean? Is it relevant? Are they using best practices? In this case, it’s pretty good. I’m not seeing anything that stands out. But I’m also not seeing anything that’s particularly terrible. Next, I’d like to dig deeper into their technical efforts. We haven’t covered some of this technical information yet, but for now just keep a list of what you find as you’ll use that to build these elements into your own site later.

So to get a look at their technical overview, I’m going to go to the homepage and then I’m going to right-click and choose “View Page Source.” This might be a little overwhelming if you’re not completely familiar with HTML, but I’m going to walk you through the specifics of what we’re looking for. The first thing I’d like to do is look for the “Title” tag. You’ll find it here on line “6.”This title tag is what appears as the heading of their Google search result. In this case, they’ve got “Wisdom Pet Medicine “caring for dogs, cats, birds,” so on and so forth. I’m not seeing a lot of local context here, which is good.

It’s likely that they’re trying to rank for the term “Pet Medicine.” But including all these other keywords, “dogs, “cats, birds,” is likely watering down their effort. Next, you’ll usually find some meta tags close to the title. We’re looking for their description tags, which I don’t see.Now if you don’t see them, you can use “Apple+F” or “Ctrl+F” on a PC and run a keyword search right in the source. I’m going to look for “meta.” Here, I see meta “generator” on line 50and that’s not what I’m interested in. So let’s go to the next result.

Okay, so here I found the meta “description.” And this is sometimes what Google will use to describe the site when the result comes out. And they’ve got almost the same as what I saw on their title along with a little bit more information, and it’s cut off here, “We strive to provide the safest,” they didn’t finish that. So their description isn’t too strong, so that’s a good sign. I’ll make note of that. They’re also using an outdated SEO technique called “meta keywords.” And having those indicates to me that they’re not really all that well versed in SEO. So, I would also make note of that.

Now there’s one other thing I’d like to look for. And that’s if the company is using “schema” tags. We’re going to get into those later, but just keep note if they have them. And you’ll do that just by searching for the word “schema.” I don’t see it on their site, so that’s another good indication. So I would make note that they’re not using “schema” tags. Conduct an in-depth analysis on each of your competitors. The more information you can gain now, the better your strategy will become.