Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is how can you tell if a competing site, or not even a competing site, a website is engaging in SEO. I think this is an important conversation because oftentimes when we're doing competitive audits or just general research, we like to see if your competition is doing any SEO to give us a better understanding if you should do SEO, or if you can get a jump on it. But before we begin, I wanted to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a Pu'Er Tea that I drink all the time. I think this one might be the most recurring tea that we have on this channel.
Again, this isn't a Kirkland tea. This is just a case I use. As you can tell from my tea channel, a lot of the cases I use have nothing to do with the tea itself. It's just trying to be, I guess, thrifty, just try to use cases that we already have. We have one Earth, don't need more casing. But anyways, so this tea is Pu'Er Tea. It's very popular in the Asian community and it has a very dark liquor when you're brewing it. It's the closest thing you're going to get black coffee, even though it doesn't taste like black coffee.
But let's go ahead and get talking about the topic at hand. Hold on. Let me focus. This is really hot. Okay. So how can you tell if a competing website is engaging in SEO? So generally, when I'm looking at competing websites, there is no one golden rule that will tell you everything. We're generally looking at different things, but let me walk you through what I look at. Number one, the first thing I look at, I generally look at their referring domains, their back links. Now you might need a tool for this. I use Ahrefs for this, where we use Ahrefs, but you can use Moz or SEMrush. I'm not sure if you can check this without a paid SEO tool. I've heard that there are free link checkers, but most of the ones that I know of that are of a good reputation are paid ones.
So if you have access to a paid tool, great. If not, you may not be able to go down this route. But what we like to do is we like to measure how many links are referring to as a company and to their website over a period of time. If we see a steady and incremental improvement, and when I mean incremental, I don't mean one referring domain a month, I mean this company consistently grows the referring domains by 20%, 30%, 40%, every two to three months, then we're pretty confident they might be engaging in SEO. Because most of the time, if you're acquiring those referring domains, generally there's manual labor involved, or just some campaign that is involved in getting those links.
Second thing about that, that isn't always the case because sometimes the company is just really good at media and they know how to get attention, and so all of the links that they're acquiring are through exposure. I've seen sites where they're not doing SEO, but they have an amazing backlink profile because they are just good at getting press releases out there, getting attention in the media, and just organically get stories written about them. And that may be the case.
So on one layer, you want to look at the number of referring domains coming in. Again, for me, a sign is if they have any large incline of referring domains over a period of time, that's a general tell that they're engaging in SEO. Now let me say something there. Even if they're not engaging in SEO, and there's still a large referring domains, though they may not be doing SEO, that's still a problem for you because you have to face against that referring domain count. So whether or not they're engaging in SEO does not matter at that point, they've got a big reoffering domain count. But that's one way to tell.
The second way I also like to tell is I like to look at the pages of their website, and I like to see if they've written SEO tags in there. So what I like to do, is I like to go into Google, and I use a site search operator. So I put site, S-I-T-E, colon, and then their website. What that will do is it will return all the pages of the website in question, and then what you're going to see in search result is the title and the description. The titles are usually the way to tell if a site is doing SEO. If the titles are very basic, like they say "About," and then the company name, "Service," about the company name, "Contact Us," company name, generally, then they're not doing SEO because one of the basic tenants of SEO that you should be doing is updating your SEO tags. And SEO tags are about, I think, 65 to 70 characters.
It's always a little changing a bit, but that's kind of the threshold, I think, of 60 to 70 characters. If a site is consistently not using that threshold with 60 to 70 characters, they may not be engaging in SEO. Or if you're looking at the title tags and they just seem pretty barren or there's no central keyword focus, then you can generally tell that there's no SEO being done. And that's also another way to tell, and that's usually the big tell for me. I'll look at that. If I can see that there's no SEO tags written, especially for important pages like the services page or the homepage, I know they're not doing SEO. So that's the second layer.
And then a third thing I do sometimes to see if someone's doing SEO is I will also sometimes look at the internal linking structure. If, on the site, and I'm looking through it, they have internal links going throughout the site, internal linking is generally an SEO strategy, and you're really only thinking about it if you're in SEO. So if you go into the site and you read a blog post or a service page, and in the text of the body, you see internal links going to other pages, generally, I think you're doing SEO then, because that's something that only an SEO would really be worrying about.
So generally, that's the three layers I look at. Referring domain counts and progression over time, SEO tags, and then if I really want to dive deep, I'll do an internal linking analysis to see if they're putting that in place. That is a very quick 15 minute or less way of checking if someone's doing SEO. Naturally, when we engage with clients, we go much deeper. But if we're just doing a general scope out before are engaging with someone, that's what we'll look at at times. So that should be able to give you generally an idea about whether or not a site in question is doing SEO or not. That's how we look. That's the way that you can look to.
So I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea, now, guys. I have a fire truck coming along. I don't know if you can hear it. So I'll use that as a signal to sign out. So it's actually passing right now. There you go. It passed. Anyways, we'll go ahead and use that signal as a time to sign off. If you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.