Let's continue with our Local SEO Quick Start Guide with Step 3 - Conducting Competitive Research.  First of all, it's important to point out that competitive research isn't necessarily to decide whether or not you should roll out an SEO campaign.  After all, your market is your market, and unless you're flexible enough to completely change businesses, you probably have to deal with whatever the realities are when it comes to your competition.

But competitive research still comes into play since it can give you a sense for how skilled your competition is from an SEO perspective, how easy (or difficult) your SEO efforts will be, how long it will probably take to see results and so on.

Some Signs Your Competition "Knows SEO"

When working with clients, one of the things we help them with is surveying the competition.  In fact, I like to get an idea of how good or bad the competition is in terms of SEO before I even take on a client.  If you understand basic SEO, then the things I look for will come as no surprise.

• Do they use effective title tags and do they appear to be targeting the best keywords?
• Do they have compelling description tags on each page
• Do they have different titles and descriptions on each page
• How many links are pointing to the site?  Are they good, relevant, authority links or just a bunch of directories?  Are they just pointing to the homepage or to internal pages too?
• Are they using text links for their navigation, with effective use of internal linking?
• How many pages are on their site?  Do they have a static site or do they appear to be adding content periodically?  How often are they adding content?  How good is the content and is anyone linking to it?
• Do they have Google Analytics or some other form of tracking setup on the site?  If not, they're probably not keeping tabs on what's working and what's not as far as their SEO efforts go.
• Do they have a call to action on most of their pages (more of a conversion issue than a pure SEO issue, but it still counts)
• Are they collecting names and email addresses (minimum) to follow-up with website visitors (conversion issue vs. SEO issue)
• Are they split testing anything (conversion issue vs. SEO issue) - most won't be

Keep an Eye Out for Competitors Focused on Conversions Too

Note that some of these are conversion issues rather than pure SEO issues.  You can have a great search engine ranking without split testing, collecting visitor information for follow-up later on, etc.  But having these elements in place speaks to the overall web-savvy of the competition in your market (or the experts that are advising them).

Don't Let Competitive Research Be the Deciding Factor

The whole point in doing this sort of analysis is to get a feel for how tough your SEO work is going to be.  You might decide that some keywords aren't worth going after right now.  Or that your competition is ignoring a large number of long-tail keywords that, when added together, will probably bring in more traffic and better qualified traffic than the generic terms they've chosen to focus on.

The point is, don't let competitive research alone dictate whether or not you invest in an SEO campaign.  But definitely use it as a litmus test for which keywords you might want to target for the fastest, most profitable results.