Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reigns supreme when achieving online success. As we’re working with our clients on their site optimization, there are three general ranking factor areas we focus on when it comes to technical SEO:
- Page speed and overall site performance.
- Backlinks to the page.
- Page content and metadata.
As we monitor our client’s keywords and associated ranking with tools like Semrush, we can easily identify the competing pages we are up against. However, analyzing each competitor is quite an undertaking, working with crawling software, backlink audits, analyzing source code, and doing comprehensive site audits.
If you ever just want to get a quick check of page content and meta data across multiple competitors, there’s a free tool online that provides some of the critical page content comparisons of the pages you’re analyzing:
Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool
The Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool enables users to directly compare their website’s key indexable content and that of their competitors, providing:
- On-page Analysis: Provides the word count, linked words, unlinked words, internal links, overall page size, title tag, meta description, and meta keywords (no longer applicable to SEO).
- Headings: The tool provides all H1 and H2 heading text for each site compared.
- Keyword and Phrase Usage: The tool breaks down the repeated single-word, 2-word, and 3-word phrases within the content.
- Internal and External Links: Provides a list of all the internal and external pages linked within the content.
- On-Page Text and Source Code: Captures the non-linked on-page text and even the source HTML for each page.
Leveraging the Power of Comparison
To illustrate how this can be utilized, I rank a comparison of my article What Is Martech along with the 4 sites that were winning the top spots in the SERP. Here’s a preview of some of that report.
A quick review of this provides quite a bit of information. My word count, links, and page size are quite large in comparison with the competitors. I’m not too worried about that as I believe I have a far more in-depth and up-to-date article in comparison to the other sites. However, what was glaring to me were my title and meta description tags. My meta description wasn’t even filled out and the page was defaulting to the first sentence.
Doh! Those are now updated.
I also want to be clear that this isn’t a comprehensive solution. Page performance and backlink analysis are two critical areas that the tool doesn’t analyze. It also lacks some modern coding techniques like semantic tagging in HTML5.
While lightweight, it’s a solid free, quick, and easy tool for getting some core information about you and your competitors.
