How to Conduct Competitive Research - Navigation, Site Structure, PageRank
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Navigation and Site Structure – While it’s very time consuming to visit a website and to click on all of the pages in order to determine structure and navigation, it’s going to be necessary to find out the way these sites are structured and how that affects their position in the SERPs. The best way to do this is with a tool that can crawl the site similarly to the way a search engine spider can. A good tool for this is GSiteCrawler, which crawls a site to extract links for developing Google Sitemaps, or Xenu, which crawls a site to check for broken links.
PageRank – Since PageRank is nothing more than a reflection of relevancy factors, which includes mostly backlink quality, you honestly don’t need to pay too much attention to this as far as SERPs go. A site with a PR of 5 can easily rank higher than a site with a PR of 7 or 8. It’s inconsequential what your PR is in regards to your competition, unless of course you are sitting at a PR of 0. Frankly, I don’t pay much attention to PageRank anymore.
Walk Away - Once you’ve been able to incorporate the elements that you need to beat out your competition, you should sit back and relax a bit and just watch and wait. The best advice I can give you here is to walk away for now. What?! Yes, you heard me. You need to walk away. If you sit and continually check your positioning, then you will absolutely drive yourself nuts on a daily basis. It’s similar to investing in the stock market. While there are no guarantees with either, you will find that with some smart research, and knowing everything about your market and your competition will help as well as follow good SEO practices, you can know that your site will indeed climb. But don’t be surprised if your site dips from time to time. The important thing is to track is a steady climb overall, and not your daily rankings.
Hopefully this article gives you a great start to being able to beat out your competition in the search engines, and the next time the update happens, you won’t be nearly as freaked out as you could be.
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