How do I find out how my web page stacks up against its website competition for a specific keyword phrase?
I asked local SEO consultant Miriam Ellis to help me choose the best keyword phrases for the Chicago management consulting page of my nonprofit’s Chicago-focused website, www.SCOREChicago.org.
In this post, the second in a series of four, she shows me how to determine the relative strength of my web page against its competitors.
(In the first post in this series, Miriam helped me evaluate potential keyword phrases for this web page. In the third, she recommends principles to select the best keyword phrase for the page. And in the fourth, she instructs me on how to use local terms, like city names, to tell the search engines that this page relates to a local market.)
MIRIAM: Compare the Authority of Your Competitors’ Websites to Yours.
Starting with the preliminary keyword research for your web page from our earlier post, the keyword phrase that has the least competition in this short list, and for which you would have the easiest time ranking, would be “small business consulting”. But how does the power of your site compare to sites ranking in Google’s top 10 or 20 for this keyword phrase?
A professional SEO would examine the domain age and link profile of each of the competitors for a targeted term to determine if your site has the age, links, and authority to outrank its potential competitors. As you can see, this gets complicated and time-consuming.
PEG: Research to Check Domain Age, Link Profile and More.
Because I don’t have a SEO’s sophisticated software, and to get a rough idea of how this works, Miriam recommended I download Aaron Wall’s free SEO Toolbar. (You must create a free account to do this.) You can see the types of comparative data in the graphic above. Wall also has a SEO application for the Firefox browser, if you prefer.
Using this tool, I learn that SCORE Chicago has a domain age of 9 years and a Google page rank of 5 for our home page. The rank is 0 for our consulting page.
I also looked at our “small business consulting” competitors’ positions.
scorechicago.org domain age 9 years, Google site rank 5
dwassoc.com, 7 years, site rank 4
smallbusinessconsulting.com 5 years, site rank 3
clearviewpublications.com 3 years, site rank 3
passionforbusiness.com 6 years, site rank 5
small-business-consultants.net 8 years, site rank 3
Looking at other comparative website data from the Compare Site graphic above, I see SCORE Chicago’s site as a whole has more educational and government links than competitors for this phrase. Google gives these more weight than regular links. We also have listed our site in more directories. However, while we have more traffic than some, we have less than other competitors.
Using Yahoo Site Explorer, here’s a detailed count of incoming links (“inlinks”) of ours and our competitors:
SCORE Chicago 1,763
dwassoc.com 4,542
smallbusinessconsulting, 5,816
clearviewpublications ? 111
passionforbusiness.com 2,699
small-business-consultants.net 780
Miriam tells me that to assess competition for a keyword phrase, “It’s far better to look at the actual links coming into a given page.” So using the Majestic SEO tool on the SEObook tool, I find that there are 7 incoming links to our consulting page, from our blog posts and from branch websites. To do this analysis properly, I’d have to go back to the allintitle searches (see Part 1) to see what page is coming up for competitors, and check incoming links for those pages compared to our page.
I conclude SCORE Chicago needs to work on building incoming links to improve our search engine rankings generally and for our consulting page in particular. Nonetheless, SCORE Chicago has some chance of being competitive for the keyword phrase “small business consulting.”
In the next post in this series, Miriam advises me on principles to select the best keyword phrase for my particular web page.
RELATED POSTS IN THIS SERIES
Use Keyword Research to Evaluate Keyword Phrases for the Web Page of a Local Business: SEO Advice Part 1
Choose One Best Keyword Phrase for a Web Page: SEO Advice Part 3
Select the Best Local Keywords for a Web Page of a Local Business: SEO Advice Part 4
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }