There is no question that SEO is important unless you’re just going to spend all your time on paying for traffic. And even then, you want your pages to be as optimized as possible so that they are relevant enough to keep your PPC costs down. But how many people know if they’re up to their level of competition in the niche that they’re tackling? How do you find out? Well, this article is going to provide some simple, but effective tips for sizing up the competition to see if you can battle with the big boys.

Probably the first thing you want to look at is the site itself. What better way to know what you’re up against than to look it straight in the face? Take a look at how many indexed pages they have. See what keywords they’re tackling. Take a look at their site design. Naturally, you want to see what all this work has done for their ranking. If you want to beat them, you’re going to have to be better than them.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have seen some God awful looking sites at the top of the SERPs. You’d really have to wonder how they got there. Well, there is more to a ranking than just looks and content. Unfortunately, and until Google starts to give this less weight, backlinks play a big part in the ranking picture. A sight with a lot of backlinks, in Google’s mind, is a site that is popular with other sites online. As a marketer, you know that this isn’t really true. But that’s the flaw in Google’s algorithm. Hopefully, one day, they’ll change it. But until they do, backlinks are important.

Another thing you have to look at is how much they’re actually paying for advertising. By paying for advertising, they’re getting more visitors to their site. In turn, as time goes on, those visitors bring their pages up the ranks. If they’re spending a lot of money, can you compete with them? I’ve seen sites spending thousands of dollars a day in PPC costs. Most beginning Internet marketers simply cannot compete with them.

Point is, sometimes you have to pick your battles. If you find you’re looking to get into a niche that is dominated by sites with high PR, tons of backlinks and an ad spend that would make the US debt look tiny in comparison, you might want to reconsider and get into something else. I’m not saying that they can’t be beaten. What I am saying is that it’s going to take a lot of work.

So take a look at your competition and figure out what YOU have to do in order to give THEM a run for their money.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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