A Comprehensive Competitor Analysis Check-list
SEO is the art and science of creating an online presence that satisfies a practices 
business needs (new patients, brand awareness etc). It includes ranking well/high or top of the SERPS using all available tools. Often it’s easy to get side-lined into focusing all your efforts on the latest and greatest SEO quick win when, as with most things in life, it’s the bigger picture that should have the lion’s share of attention.
For any business that bigger picture features your competitors. Competitive analysis should always be at the forefront of any decision making and conducted regularly.
Keeping an eye on the competitors means your dental business can make adjustments to any offerings to your patients, services and unique aspects that mean you stand out among the crowd.
This includes your online competition.
Read our online competitor analysis check-list below;
Keyword analysis
1) Work out your most important keywords and review in the search.
2) Who comes up most consistently? (Your online competitors may be quite different to your offline competitors).
3) Ascertain the top 3-5 regular appearing sites and review their results to understand if they have a good grasp on title tags, meta descriptions and URL naming convention best practices. Are they obviously targeting the terms they are showing up for?
4) Using tools such as SEMRUSH, assess what other terms they rank for and that drive traffic. Are these terms also on your targeted keyword list?
Content analysis
1) Take a deeper look at their online presence as there is much more than just the organic SERP.
2) Do they use PPC?
3) Use site:www.competitorname.com to see what online content is being indexed.
4) Have they optimised all their online content to take advantage of universal search?
5) Check out social channels too.. Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin and check out content, engagement and fan base.
Authority analysis
1) Good content is what counts – so check for links and shares and if it has authority via inbound links
2) Open Site Explorer lets you review several competitors across multiple trust/authority factors.
3) Us it to compare domain authority as well as page authority of top pages.
4) Check out the amount and the relevance of links coming to the site and the number of unique linking domains.
Judging the above metrics well, enables you to decide what types of content you may need , how much you need to push your content and where you need to make up any ground between you and your competitors.
Opportunities
1) Look at the structure of your competitor’s website. Do improvements need to be made?
2) Look at on-page keyword targeting. Do titles, copy, heading, alt tags and internal link anchor text exists in a best practice format?
3) Does the sites architecture make sense?
4) Do they use sitemaps to deliver content to search engine?
5) Do they use the latest up-to-date techniques such as HTML5 and Schema mark-up?
You can get a feel for your competitors SEO savviness by investigating all the above. You can also review their robots.txt to see if they are withholding any certain content accidentally, or are making any other mistakes such as duplicate content.
Depending on how deep you want to investigate your competitors, a top line review is useful and necessary in order to inform any marketing decision. Look for gaps that you can fill. Maybe they haven’t produced any video content? You could retaliate by going all out and creating testimonial videos and a nice practice tour, aiding SEO and then user engagement as your site offers something different from the rest.
A strapped-for-time technique is to simply set up a Google alert for your competitor’s name. If you find that Google is noticing them more than you think, you may need to react more acutely.
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