A competitive SEO checklist

Many marketers get tunnel vision when it comes to focusing their SEO efforts. This can result in too much emphasis on links on pages or user experience when this is not necessarily what your site requires to build its SEO strengths. So with that in mind, we’ve compiled a checklist to help keep your site’s SEO on track and up to date with the competition. This will help you to identify your site’s strengths and weaknesses using SEO factors that we know are important.

In many cases, clients obsess about one search term and focus solely on getting to the top of the ranking in this area alone. Firstly, this is not always possible as it may not be feasible to optimise that one specific search term. Secondly, this ignores the wider benefits of SEO possibility. Only by broadening your SEO approach and looking at a more holistic competitive analysis can you fully appreciate the potential of good SEO. Here’s how to do it.

Method

To start, you need to choose suitable competitors. You’ll need around six other suitable brands to compare yourself against and they should be brands who are search competitors. If you don’t know who they are then there are search tools to help you find out.

For each site you should select five URLs as your sample set. These will form the basis of your competitive analysis. Try to include the homepage, product pages, browse pages, and a news hub page. Score each of these pages from one to four based on their SEO capability.

Checklist

To help score each page, you should examine the following:

• Are title tags technically optimised with one per page and correctly placed?
• Does internal linking allow indexing of content?
• Is the schema mark up present and what is the quality like?
• Is there a home for newly published content?
• How is the technical SEO?

In terms of content:

• Are the titles and H1s optimised?
• Do internal links support organic content?
• Is the content informational appropriate?
• What is the quality of the content like?
• Is the content spread out over different media, including images and video, and what is the quality like?

For the audience:

• What is the number of linking root domains?
• What is the quality of linking root domains?
• Are other people talking about the content?
• Are people actively promoting the content?

Conversion

• Are there clear CTAs on the site?
• Are the funnel steps in place to help conversions?

At Doublespark we live and breathe SEO, doing it day in day out. Our team is deeply knowledgeable and up to date with all the current SEO trends, read more about our SEO Services.