Here is a recent email we got…
"Your website says that I shouldn't bother too much about the search result counts and that I should instead check the the quality of the competing sites. How do I know if the competing sites are good? How can one measure it?"
This was in response to an article about a popular keyword myth posted at one of our sites.
Yes, it may not be possible to accurately measure the quality of a site, but you can surely get a good idea by just checking a few things.
Here are 5 things you should look for…
1. The age of the site.
You can do this by checking the domain whois and finding the date the domain was registered. This will not be accurate all the time because the domain may have been registered a long time ago and parked. Another method is to look it up in the way-back machine. This will not only give you an idea about when the site was launched, it will also show you how the site looked when it was first launched. You can also see how the site progressed over the years.
2. Web Page Ratings
Check the Alexa, Compete, Quantcast ranks and ratings for the site. These provide approximate information about the possible traffic to the site. You can even compare multiple sites. Quantcast also predicts the demographics of the site visitors.
3. Search Engine Visibility
Check the number of incoming links to these sites. You can check this on Google, Yahoo, Live, etc. Also check the number of pages on the site that are indexed by Google. You can also check the Google PageRank of the web page. Use the free Good Keywords v2.1 or SEOLab Professional for this.
4. Web Page Content
Visit the website and check the content. Do they have third party advertisements / Google Adsense on their sites? Are the sites selling their own products? Are their headings appropriate? Do they have a good web page structure?
5. Advertising Efforts
Are they doing PPC advertisements? You can use the Google Ad Preview Tool to check this. Type in the keywords you think they might be advertising for, select the region and language. See if you can find their advertisements in the preview tool results.
Try SEO Lab Professional
You may also want to check SEO Lab Professional. You can type in a keyword phrase and quickly find all the top competing sites, competing web page titles and more. You can also easily check the search engine visibility of any competing site with a single click. You can even create branded SEO reports (in pdf) that contain information about related semantic keywords, competition, etc.
