One factor that’s obvious and prominent about SEO is competition. In some cases, many thousands of websites can be competing for top position with specific keyword. SEO remains a very important thing if you want to gain proper thing. We often see advices on how to perform proper on-page SEO improvements. However, an important external or off-page factor that you need to deal with is the competition. You can’t control how competitors will think and behave, but we should still be able to respond to their actions. SEO competition can be identified with how many websites and home pages that are competing for a single term or keyword. If there’s another website that offers a content with similar topic or a similar product, then you should consider it a competition.

It should be possible for you to gauge the level of competition for specific keyword and you should know more about the competitors. There are many ways you can do to examine the competition, such as checking the domain age. You need to check the domain age of all websites shown in the top 10 results and you often find that they have been created since many years ago and in many cases since 1990’s. Domain age is essential to determine whether a website is consistent enough in providing content and it is an important SEO factor that can ensure higher placement. If your page is relatively new, you may need to do a few other things to compensate for this deficiency. The size of the site is also essential when you examine competing websites.

Well established websites may already have more than one thousand webpages and they have amassed a significant quantity of information. It will take a lot of effort and time to match the size of older websites. Fortunately, although a competing webpage has plenty of webpages, not all of them are relevant to your primary keywords and you actually only need to compete with a few pages of that website. A good example is Wikipedia. Its place in the top position for many short and primary keywords can never be defeated, however the online encyclopaedia may not compete with you for many long tail keywords. As an example, it has the first rank position for the keyword “shoes” and a few other related pages.

However, Wikipedia doesn’t provide a page on how to clean or repair your mountain climbing shoes. So, the volume of relevant pages in Wikipedia could actually be low for many keywords. It means that you don’t need to compete with Wikipedia and other popular websites for common keywords like “shoes”. We also need to check competing websites for the number of inbound backlinks that they get. With proper tools, this should be easy to achieve and we will also know other information such as the originating webpage of each backlink and their PageRank values. This information should also give us an idea on how to get similar backlinks, perhaps from the same originating websites.