Know Your SEOC – Search Engine Optimization Competition
Knowing your competition is vital to the success of any online or offline business. The first step you need to take to ensure success in your online business is to identify your SEOC or search engine optimization competition.
SEOC for your keyword
To identify your SEOC, first enter your keywords into the Google search box. Below the search box, the number that displays “About 2,580,000 results (0.18 seconds)” is your SEOC number.
The fewer pages that compete, the faster it will be to achieve first page ranking. Try to pick a niche that has between 250,000 and 2,500,000 competing pages. Limiting the number will increase your success because the market is not too saturated for your chosen keywords.
Identify your SEOC page rank
Determining your SEOC page rank will show you the quality of your competition’s pages. Page Rank is a numerical score from 0 to 10 given by Google, with 10 being the highest possible score. Page Rank is Google’s way of measuring the importance of a website.
Identifying your competitor’s page rank will help you determine how long it will take them to get to the top 5 listings in Google. If your top 5 sites are all 4’s and 5’s, you’ll know right away that it’s going to take a lot of work. On the other hand, if the top 5 competitor sites have a page rank of 0 or 1, then the amount of time and effort will not be as great.
Download the Google Toolbar for free, which can help identify the page rank of a site. Here are some guidelines to help you.
PR 0- You can easily get over it.
PR 1– You can easily overcome.
PR 2- You can easily beat it but not as easily as beat PR 0 or PR 1.
PR 3– Can usually outrank, but often requires more work than expected.
PR 4– Hard to beat, but possible with a lot of time and hard work.
PR 5 to PR 10- Extremely difficult to beat, most often requiring years of time.
SEOC Internal Links
The last part of knowing your SEOC is to identify the inlinks or backlinks of your competitors. It’s important to know where the top 5 sites are getting traffic from so you can target that same traffic. You are trying to increase your page rank in Google. So by targeting higher PR sites whose links carry more weight, you can increase your page rank.
SEOC is far from perfect and there are many scenarios that influence how you get to the first page of Google. Let’s look at how to identify the high PR sites that are linking to your competition so you can target them and get links from them.
Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool that offers direct access to Yahoo information in the links on your sites. Enter the first of the top 5 competitor sites into Yahoo Site Explorer to search and see where your backlinks are coming from. It is important to note that you also check the URL with and without www.
To view site links, click the Inlinks button, which will display all site links. Then on the right there is a dropdown, select Show internal links, select Except from this domain. This will display all external internal links to the target.
Once you’ve identified sites that can improve your ranking, try guest posting for them or leaving comments so they have a reason to link to you. Evaluating the competition is vital to the success of any business. Understanding who you are competing with will give you a better understanding of where you stand.