Before starting a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you may improve your return on investment by finding out what SEO tactics your competition used to attain rankings.

Of course, a complete competitor analysis would study in detail all aspects of each competitor’s online marketing strategy. Here I am focusing on SEO, particularly keyphrases used on the webpage itself.

Once you discover tactics that seem to boost your competitor’s rankings, you can implement these tactics on your own site.

Step 1. Find the Ideal Sites to Compare

Type the ideal keyphrase you want to rank for into both Google and Yahoo and take note of the top 10 websites on each; a spreadsheet makes this easy. Next, choose up to three sites that have a top ranking in both search engines. Select websites that provide similar services to yours; avoid Goliath sites, such as Amazon, Wikipedia, and eBay, that tend to achieve rankings by reason of sheer girth.

Step 2. Review Sites and Search for Patterns

With the three sites in hand, review the page that is ranking from each site and pay special attention to locations where the keyphrase is being used. Record your findings and compare the results to see any patterns of keyphrase use across all three competitors. Ultimately your goal will be to find a pattern of successful tactics that you can emulate on your own website.

Pay close attention to the following areas:

1.    Text Links: Observe how many times the keyphrase is found in a text link within the page.
2.    Description Tag and Title Tag: View the source code to determine the structure of both the Description and Title tags. Pay special attention to how often the keyphrase is utilized.
3.    Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3): Search through the ranked page for uses of heading tags. Successful websites often utilize heading tags to emphasize the keyphrases on the page.
4.    Navigation: Does the page navigation use the keyphrase? You can often increase page relevance by adding the keyphrase in the wording of your links.
5.    CSS Layout: If the site was designed using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you may find the competitor placed keyphrase rich content at the top of the source code even though that content actually appears elsewhere on the page when it is viewed in a browser — possibly through the use of “CSS positioning” (sometimes called “absolute positioning”). I have often noticed that optimized CSS sites can have a significant edge over non-CSS websites.

Keep looking. There are too many potential tactics to mention, but if you take note where the keyphrase is utilized on the page, you will catch many of the tactics that can increase your return on investment. However, if you find tactics on competitor websites that you believe may be spam, don’t blindly copy them. Be careful!

Step 3. Apply the Successful Strategies to Your Website

Once you have determined which tactics are working across each of your competitors’ ranking pages, it is time to apply these tactics to your website wherever sensible and possible within your site’s technology, design, and content parameters.