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Be competitive with your online marketing efforts; even chess players harbor a little animosity for their opponents. You should know who you are up against, what makes them strong, and then work to be even less imperfect than them. In the second part of my Competitive Smackdown Series, I will show you how gauge the amount of content your competitors have indexed and how to analyze their backlinks.

This will help guide your own SEO, since making sure all of your valuable site content is indexed and then increasing the number of quality links to valuable pages on your site should account for most of your search engine optimization efforts. I suggest tracking the data you uncover for each competitor you investigate; a tracking spreadsheet works very nicely for this.

Note: If you need help building a list of competitors to analyze, see my first post in this series on competitor analysis. Or, feel free to contact us for help with a full interactive marketing strategy.

How to Find Your Competitor’s Number of Pages Indexed:

Finding the number of pages a competitor has indexed in the search engines gives you a rough estimate of how much content they have and how aware the search engines are of them. It will also help us identify, by comparing your pages indexed to their pages indexed, which competitors are going to be the more immediate adversaries.

To find a rough number of pages a site has indexed, use the search query, “site:domainname.com” in most search engines. In the last post I started my research into the home brewing industry, so I will continue where I left off. A Google search for “site:midwestsupplies.com” currently provides about 7,860 results.

Use this data you find on your competitors to set some basic goals for the number of pages you want the search engines to index from your own site.  if you haven’t started building your site, this might also give you an idea of how many content pages you may need.  There are several tactics to help get your content indexed in the search engines which I won’t get into at this point, but it’s something that should be a part of your SEO strategy.

How to Find the Number and Quality of Inbound Links to Your Competitors:

The number of inbound links is the biggest factor of how well you will rank in the search engines. It’s also crucial that you know it’s not only the number of links your site has to it, but also the quality of the links and the “anchor text” that actually links to your site.

To find the number of sites and which sites are linking to your competitors, count on Yahoo for the time being. Yahoo Site Explorer functionality will be transitioning to Bing soon, but this should work fine from there as well.  Yahoo seems to report backlink amounts much closer to the actual number than doing your search in Google.

Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and input the website you want to check. Press the top button for “Inlinks”, then select “Except for this domain” in the “Show Inlinks” drop-down field, and then choose “Entire Site” in the “To” drop-down field.:

In this case we see that midwestsupplies.com has somewhere in the neighborhood of 33,000 links from elsewhere. If you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-100 links to your own site, midwestsupplies.com is probably not the best competitor to compare yourself to. However, they can still provide you with great information; just keep their weight class in mind when you set objectives for link building.

Google’s “allinachor:”, “link:”, and “related:” commands can also assist in finding who is linking to your competitor as well, along with sites that are related (which gives you other indirect or direct competitors to research).

Now that you know how to get information on your competitor’s inbound links, you should capture that data, compare it other competitors, look for trends and learn from it. A quick search for ”link:www.midwestsupplies.com” in Google provides the results below and quickly provides several ideas on who I can make connections with and seek links from. Also, since it’s data from a top ranking competitor whose model is working, the information is more valuable.

There are several tools that help with this online marketing research so it doesn’t have to be all manual. Here are just a few SEO tools to help:

• SEO for Firefox
• Open Site Explorer
• SEO Elite also offers a nice paid tool
• UPDATE FROM USER COMMENTS – SEOMoz Linkscape is another paid tool I originally left out that rates the value of links

So our takeaways from this post should be:

• Find the number pages your competitors’ have indexed, and the value of that information to set content goals.
• Identify how many links your competitors have and, more importantly, trends of where you should be getting links.

How do you analyze your competitors’ content and backlinks? I would love to know your tips and feedback in the comments!

Related posts:

Competitive Smackdown Part 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Smackdown Part 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitive Research

About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist who specializes in online marketing strategy, SEO, St. Louis‘ competitive dart scene and brewing for The Loud Few.  You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.