What is competitive analysis in SEO ?

[arianagrand]

You can't analyze your competitors, if you don't know who they are. In some cases identifying your competitors is very easy ‐ for instance, if you have an offline business and you know your competitors there, just check their sites and you are done.

However, in other cases, identifying your competition isn't that easy. Your competitors could be sites in your niche, sites that rank well for your major keywords, or direct competitors for your long tail keywords, etc. The list of your competitors might be a pretty long one and obviously you can't monitor all of them. Perform a search with Google about your target keywords and make a list of the sites/companies that pop high in the search results. You can consider these to be your main competitors.