Leap Frog your Competitors’ SEO Strategies Dennis Hart, President Analytics SEO LLC @analyticsseo www.analyticsseo.com Big Marketing Data™ & Software for Professional Marketers
Dec 05, 2014
Leap Frog your Competitors’ SEO Strategies
Dennis Hart, President Analytics SEO LLC @analyticsseo www.analyticsseo.com
Big Marketing Data™ & Software for Professional Marketers
5 Tips Leap Frog your competitors’ SEO strategies
And overtake them on the SERPs that matter most
Leap Frog your competitor’s SEO strategies
1. Competitive Landscape Find your “ONLINE Competitors”
2. Competitive Audit Compare key metrics to understand your competitor’s strategy
3. Competitive Rankings Find Your Keyword Competition
4. Universal Search Find the opportunities
5. Find Competitive Linking Opportunities Target competitors’ high quality links
1. Competitive Landscape
Marketplace Potential
Who are your TRUE ONLINE Competitors 1. Ask your client or internal stakeholder
Terrestrial distortion- local competitors may be the least of your worries ONLINE
2. Check the “first page” for a few keywords Market distortion- may identify competitors that are way to big or way too small
3. Use various available tools Using a bucket of keywords you can assess your actual online “marketplace”
Define your market and your competitors
Marketplace Potential
Find Your TRUE ONLINE Competitors 1. Search for your top keywords
and keep track of which websites are ranking better or worse than you are.
2. The Sites that are ranking better are your targets. Those below you may be targeting you.
3. Based on the available volume of searches for those keywords, you can calculate your Marketplace Potential.
Define your market and your competitors
Marketplace Potential
You could also make use of Big Data to find lots and lots of overlapping keywords across lots and lots of domains
But that has its challenges…
How ‘Big’ do you want to go?
An old friend…The Venn Diagram
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You need a method for comparing A against everyone, then B against everyone and so on….
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Graph Databases for SERP data
Imagine Venn Diagrams on Steroids!
Insights Big Data and Graph Databases can help with….
1. How big is your market? • How many competing sites? • How many organic ranking keywords? • What is the market search volume (add SEMRush,
Adwords)? • Is the market growing or declining? Is it seasonal? • Which keywords are trending up/down, which are
seasonal? 2. Who you are really competing with…
Examples: • MeetingZone.com vs Match.com • Snowandrock.com
^ There are a number of studies that give you CTR% estimates by ranking position. We use anonymized data from GWT.
2. Competitive Audit
Competitive Audit
Once you understand your TRUE online competitors, you’ll need to assess the strengths and weakness across various SEO metrics. You can pick up clues as to what your competitors are doing and how you may be able to overtake them.
Analyze your Competitors
Lots of Readily Available Site Metrics
What Why How
Site Maps They follow best pracJces Check manually, various tools
Robots.txt
They are direcJng the SEs Check manually, various tools
Page Load Speed RelaJvely new indicator Pingdom, Google Page Speed Insights
Custom 404 They care about overall user experience
Check manually, 404checker
Domain Age How long have they been in the market?
Webconfs.com (mulJ), manually
Alexa Rank
Kinda old, but not a bad indicator of site overall
Alexa
Site level SEO metrics
Lots of Readily Available Link Metrics
What Why How
Inbound Links Overall popularity MajesJc, Ahrefs, Moz, ASEO
Referring Domains
Overall diversity MajesJc, ASEO
Referring IP’s More specific diversity metric
MajesJc, ASEO
Referring Subnets Most specific diversity metric
MajesJc, ASEO
Deep Link RaJo Did they buy a bunch of links?
MajesJc, Ahrefs, Moz, ASEO
Link metrics
Competitive Audit
Simple competitive matrix
Detailed Page Level Comparisons
And much deeper page level analysis
Compe99ve Gap Analysis at Page Level
Prioritize your team’s actions
1. Quick ROI
4. Low/No ROI
3. Long-‐term ROI
2. Maintain ROI
RelaJve Strength
Organic Growth Poten
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3. Competitive Rankings
Overlapping Keywords = Opportunity
SpyFu Analytics SEO
1. Find your
2. Compare your competitors’ rankings against your own rankings
keyword competition
There are lots of providers to choose from!
Rankings Across Competitors
Multi-sort to see the Keywords your competitors are ranking better for than you
Competitor 1 ranking 1-10 AND Competitor 2 ranking 1-50 AND Competitor 3 ranking 1-50 AND “Your Site” ranking >10
You CAN overtake them!
4. Universal Search
Typical Scenario
Search is no longer just about those 10 blue links.
Step 1- Set up “Places” (Google+ Business Page)
Step 2- Add Categories, Descriptions, Images, etc.
Step 3- Hope you’ve done it right and check back later.
OR… Local, Images, Video, Shopping, etc.
Finding the best opportunities
Find the keywords that ALREADY generate Universal Search results- THEN Optimize
Local, Images, Video, Shopping, etc.
5. Competitive Link Analysis
Competitive Link Analysis
Even with equal amount of links, not all links are equal!
Competitive Link Analysis
Target the competitor’s links with the highest: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, (Majestic) Domain Authority, Page Authority (Moz) Domain Rank (ahrefs)
Leap Frog your competitors’ SEO strategies
When empowered with this data you’ll be ready to overtake your competitors by: • Implementing technical best practices
• Writing better content
• Sharing in more relevant neighborhoods
Thank-you!
Dennis Hart, President Analytics SEO LLC @analyticsseo www.analyticsseo.com
Big Marketing Data™ & Software for Professional Marketers