Search engine optimization is all about doing MORE than your competition. More content, more pages, more links, more everything. But how do you know if you are doing more? Today I am going to walk you through how to effectively benchmark your competition and essentially compile a competitive SEO analysis. First and foremost, one important statistic to grab is a websites age. This is a factor that cannot be scammed or faked and is a stat that the search engines hold in a high regard. Much like the saying goes websites ARE like a fine wine as they DO get better with age. Older domains typically have acquired more links and have developed more trust within the web and therefore in general an older domain is the better from an SEO perspective. A few good tools to use in order to determine a web domain age is the SEO Quake browser add on as well as www.webconfs.com or the whois.com website.

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This leads me into my next statistic…the number of links a domain age has. Inbound links to a website are a HUGE factor in not only googles algorithm but the other search engines as well. When many external websites are pointing to a website it is a signal to the search engines that this is a popular hub of the internet. When a site is seen as popular, it gets more clout with the search engines.

Next, a good way to determine the health of a website is the number of pages in the primary index. Often times websites have hundred, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of pages on their site, yet, a small percentage are actually searchable or included in the index. There are several factors that effect this such as unique content, spiderability issues etc. However, the main point is SIZE DOES MAtter, the more pages you have in the index means that you have more opportunity to bring people to your site. To determine the number of pages in googles index you can either once again consult the SEO Quake plugin or manually type this query into a search engine “ Site:yourwebsite.com/*”

So in conclusion it all comes down to site age, number of inbound links, and number of pages in the index. Obviously there are going to be exceptions and anomaly’s out there but overall if you are beating your competition in these 3 areas you most likely are winning the SEO War. And that all folks please make sure you join us tomorrow for PPC Tuesday and another great video from Chris. Also, pleas not that exclusive concepts offer free SEO audits, conversation audits, ppc audits and email audits. So give us a call today to get started attracting, converting and retaining customers.