How can I tell if my competitor is doing SEO?

Well, in all honesty they probably are.

But if you want a slightly better indication than that, here is a checklist of things I might look for.

1.) Do a site search in Google as follows “site:www.competitors-site.com” and look at the results that are returned. Each result that is returned has a title, a descriptive paragraph of text and the URL of the page. Are all the titles unique? If they are unique, are they focussed and do they include keywords, or are they just words like “home”, “services” or “about us”. Are the descriptive paragraphs unique or are they all identical? Unique titles and descriptions that contain focussed keywords are a good indicator of SEO.

2.) See if your competitor has a robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is used to tell search engines which parts of your website you want it to look at and which parts of your site you don’t want it to look at. It also allows you to include the path of your XML sitemap. The robots.txt file must always be located in the same place so that the search engines can find it. If it exists, it will be located at www.competitors-site.com/robots.txt. If the file exists, have a check to see if it includes the line “sitemap: http://www.competitors-site.com/sitemap.xml”. The sitemap file doesn’t actually have to be called sitemap.xml but it needs to be in XML format and the line needs to start with “sitemap:”. If the robots.txt and the XML sitemap do exist, it might indicate the SEO fairy has visited.

3.)Do they have a 404 error page? Type www.competitors-site.com/loadofrubbish.html in to the URL bar at the top of your browser. If it returns a user friendly error page with the look and feel of the website then that’s a good start. The next step would be to check whether this page has a header status of “404”.. You can read a bit more about header status checks in Emily’s blog

4.) View the HTML source of the homepage and do a search for the tag “<h1>”. If you find it on their page, check the keyphrase that is contained within. Is it a meaningful keyphrase or does it say something like “Home Page”

5.)Flick through the pages of the website. Are they using internal linking using keyphrases? Are they using phrases like, say, for example “search engine optimisation” or does it say “click here”

This is not conclusive evidence. Some websites may be using an SEO company but the SEO company is unable to access various elements of the site so can’t modify all the things they want to. Other people may just be using search engine friendly practises due to having spent some time doing their own research however – it’s a start hey.