Getting The Right Website Structure
Image via CrunchBase
And Analysing The Site Structure of the Competition
Website structure is of paramount importance when it comes to competitive intelligence . . . knowing how any particular website behaves for the search engines is crucial, including the analysis of what happens both on-page and off-page. You need to figure out why particular websites are ranked very competitively, whilst others are not (yours maybe), particularly when it comes to specific keywords.
So, what are you particularly looking for when you are comparing website structures for competiitive intelligence purposes? Let’s take a look;
- On-page analysis – there are plenty of toolkits around to help you with on page analysis and compare your site with those of your competitors.
- Indexed pages – there are plenty of ways to do this, try using the “site operator” command at yoursite.com in either Google or in Bing. You need to find out what pages are being indexed on your site, do the same for the competition and compare the two. You’ll be able to determine the absolute depth of the coverage of content, even if it might not be entirely accurate.
- Technical analysis of your website – and those of your competitors is a great asset for competitive intelligence. You can simply download an analysis tool which will allow you to review the site metrics of your competitors websites including loads of different things, server type, density of keywords, age of the domain (these things take time you know), Alexa rank etc. You also need to check out the speed in which your website loads, if your competitors site loads faster than yours then it’s time to do something about it.
- Looking at Links – and their structure. How are the pages of your competitors website set up? Do they have high ranking pages which are linked directly from the home page of their website? Do they share any other internal links? Do they use URL structures which are strongly linked to their keywords?
