Research on target industry and competitor
Whether you design a new website for yourself or provide SEO services to your clients, you should do an investigation and research on the clients' industry and their competitors just before you sign a contract with them. By doing this you can first get a general idea of the difficulty and workload of the optimization, and if it is too hard, you should not promise to you client easily.
For an extreme example, you will not success if you want to launch a news related site and optimize "news" as the keyword in search engines. However hard you may work, you can not beat Sina.com or Sohu.com.
You can begin with the research on the degree of competition when you want to investigate the industry and competitors. Usually I will observe two points:
The first is the amount of results when you search your target keyword in Google, Yahoo and Baidu. When the amount turns out several hundred thousand, it is not a hard competition. When the amount reaches a million, it's rather big competition. When the amount shows three to five million, it will take lots of efforts to optimize. And when the amount reaches ten million, the competition will be hotting up.
But the search amounts will not always show the real situation of competition. So the second, you should also consult the amount and price of the keyword's competition in quotation in Google, Yahoo and Baidu. Sometimes the competition in quotation can better show the situation. After all, the competitors are willing to spend the real money to compete with you.
If reasonable, your competitors have also done the research.
Then you should look through the websites rating from the first page to the tenth page found in the main search engines with your target keyword. It will be great if you can put some figures together in a chart and make it easy to study.
Such as:
- How large the sites are? How many pages each site owns?
- How many pages of each site are cached by Google?
- Are the contents original or collected or reproduced?
- How about the PR?
- When the domain name registered?
- What is the density of the keyword on each page?
- Where the keyword appears?
- Is there any rule we can learn?
- Searched in Yahoo, how many inbound links the sites own?
- What are the inbound links?
- Do the inbound links come from exchanged links, rubbish links or news portal
If the links come from message boards, blog commentaries and alike, it is not very hard to beat them. If many of the links come from news reports, I am afraid you can not make it if you only use SEO techniques. I guess you should produce some news topics and use public relations.
Only in this way can you totally understand how much time and energy it will take you to optimize a site. If you do SEO for others, then you can know how much you should charge. |
RongWay Team 
