|
For a lot of search marketers, tactical approaches for the management and optimization of SEO campaigns would fill much of the time in the busy diaries. But as SEO and social media disciplines would merge, the importance of SEO and the social media disciplines come together, the importance would be that SEO is on the rise to a C-level agenda being a key driver of business goals which would include top line plus bottom line. Having an understanding where the competitors would be positioned in SEO would be one significant aspect in the competitive landscape for the meeting of organic search goals. There are a lot of ways to view competitive intelligence. A single framework would approach this from the content, authority, plus opportunity angles. We would like to think of the opportunity aspect of competitive intelligence consisting of: a. An improving share of voice: Understanding you and your competitors’ performance plus strategies, and utilizing this to make an improvement ofn your share of voice. b. Forecasting opportunity: Quantifying the value of SEO opportunities Technology Would No Longer be a Bottleneck It had not been a long time ago that being able to understand the competitive landscape and actually try to forecast opportunity in SEO would be very much a case of consulting luck omens and viewing results we are given. Developing SEO technology has given search marketers with much choice in tools plus fata from providers to aid us in understanding as competitive landscape. The SEO space would be viewing investment from innovative technologies as well as the integration between such technologies. So technology would not be a constraint and we could start to view how this may aid search marketers understand, estimate value in a better way, and then scale the SEO campaigns. Lets see how to take advantage of this through competitive intelligence. Eight Steps for Great Competitive Intelligence There are many ways to search and evaluate competitor activity would be in the market. These would differ from detailed spreadsheet/manual analysis, through the utilizing of a number of free tools, plus finally to utilizing an Enterprise platform to bring together competitive analysis, opportunity forecasting plus workflow and productivity. 1) Make a Discovery of Competition Competition and share of voice would be having an understanding how you would stack up against the competition. Share of voice would allow you to search the whole competitive landscape for a couple of keywords, the percentage of the keywords from the group they rank for, plus the number of keywords for which they rank. This would aid you in discovering new competitors plus make winning competitive SEO strategies. Discover competition, measure you plus your competitor’s SEO share of voice. For the SEO strategies to be complete plus effective, you will have to be aware of who the competition would be. While much of the marketers have a list of the competitors they track, it could be likely that they face competition from brands and companies they could not be aware of. One way that you can measure the competition would be to map the share of voice for each product or product category in relation to the keyword/keyword group. This is to give you an exhaustive list of competitors you need to track. 2) Make an analysis of the competition. Spotting competitors would be a strong first step. The next step is assessing the competition and viewing how you would perform against them. There would be many ways to measure performance against them, plus all of them would be of importance. Evaluate the competitor’s performance, plus the competitive landscape. Estimating value plus volume of all the keywords that a domain would rank for would aid you view the competitive field in more monetary terms, plus give you value based parameters to monitor plus track moving forward. Key questions one may answer with a map would entail: a. Would any company be dominating the market? b. What keywords would they be strong? And where are they weak? 3) Track the SEO Performance of all the Keywords plus Keyword Groups Having to keep track of performance would be a task that is complex, notably within the long tail. There would be three considerations that are broad in the tracking keyword performance for competition. First, you need to make sure that you track the data by product, brand, theme, project or any logical grouping making business sens. Analyzing data via these groups will make it better for you to prioritize handling competition for particular groups. Next, it would be significant that you track the organic/classic plus blended rank. Blended rank would measure rank among all the kinds of search results like test, images, video, local plus social results. Next up, you would need to ensure that the segment of your analysis via the geography/search engines that are tracked. The call to action from the analysis would be two-fold: a. Place a light on the keyword groups plus keywords for which you would outrank the competition, in order that you can reinforce what would be working for you. b. Call your attention to keyword groups plus keywords where you see stiff competition in order to take corrective actions. This would lead to the next step for having the ability to track universal search performance. 4) Measure Plus Track Universal Search Performance Google would continue to place more emphasis for universal results, showing image, video plus local results to make the search results relevant to the user. Tracking all this would aid you in better measuring your competitor performance. A couple of people would prefer to track competition manually or via Excel. But universal and local listings would make this a harder task. Spotting where you would be positioned and where the competitors show up across images, videos, social, local plus mobile would allow you to make decisions on future investment moving forward. This would allow you to rank across not only one but a lot of multiple channels. 5) Have an Understanding How Competitor Social Media Activity Would Have An Impact On Rank With Search Plus Your World, Google would signal a bigger importance for Google+ pages for the search algorithm. Understanding plus scanning social media signals including tweets, likes and shares would be of vital to understand plus track the competition’s social media activity, plus correlate it with rank performance. Again, this would have to be performed at keyword group level. Once you have insight on how social media is to make a impact on the competition’s rank, you may get actions like ramping up social media activity for keywords where the competition is to benefit from social media. 6) Put Insight into Competitive SEO Strategies The analysis in the previous steps will aid in painting a better picture of how you do against competition. While that would be a good way to reinforce what would be working and fix what would be not, it would not be enough. You would have to go down deeper into the competitions SEO techniques plus bring out new opportunities to make an improvement on share of voice—this is where real competitive advantage would be. Once you have had a grasp of the SEO share of voice, where the competitors would rank for keyword groups that are important, you can now take competitive intelligence to another level. Now would be a good time to have an understanding on what your competitors focus on. The next sequence should give you solid visibility regarding your competition’s strategies while helping you discover the opportunities: a. Make a list of the competitors top ranked pages. You need to ask yourself if the pages are in competition with any of the pages. If so, do the next step. b. You need to understand the target keywords for such pages. Are you able to track such keywords? If not, you would have to track them—make logical groups for such keywords. Once you make this list of keywords, make sure that you always track the performace for the keywords and the relevant pages would be optimized for the keywords. Use tools such as KeywordSpy for this purpose. c. In addition, map out the backlink profile for the competition’s top ranked pages. Backlinks would be a key driver of SEO performance. 7) Compare the Backlink Landscape with the Competition It would really be significant to map out competitions backlink status. For the competition’s top-ranked pages, you need to answer these questions: a. How many backlinks would the pages have? b. What domains with high authority would link to them? c. Would these domains link to you? If not, you will have an opportunity to link to them plus raise your rank. d. How would the backlink profile for the competitor’s domain (and not just the top ranked ones) compare with you regarding number of links and value for the links? Such an analysis could call your attention to a linking project, utilizing white hat methods) to shore up backlinks. As we have stated before, there would be a big number of tools that look into backlink analysis. The significant thing to keep in mind is that a lot of tools give you a lot of results so it is significant, regardless of the tool you employ, to put significant benchmarks accordingly, plus follow them in a rigorous manner. Make sure you go into backlink distribution through pagerank quality plus identify historical moves. 8) Compare the On-Page Factors of the Pages with the Top 10 Ranked Pages for Every Keyword Lastly, it would be time to look into plus compare the on-page factors with the competitive analysis as we go from strategic awareness right into implementation. Knowing gaps, turning them to opportunities plus building recommendations on page factors would be significant to do in parallel with the off page strategies. Utilize the knowledge to: a. Acquire suggestions for on-page tags, notably titles, H1 plus meta descriptions b. Make the case to do SEO improvements to the site in the company. c. Give an education to everyone on the best practices for SEO. Past Competitive Intelligence – Opportunity for Forecasting Making an evaluation of competition plus uncovering opportunities would be one thing. Putting a business value on the opportunities plus managing the efforts based on the value would aid you in prioritizing your approach plus make your competitive intelligence initiatives focused on ROI. At a point in the article, we had discussed revealing keywords that the competition ranks on that you do not, plus grouping them into business themes. Making a forecast of the dollar value of targeting of the groups will aid you in deciding the groups to go through with. It could also aid you in investing in SEO for such keywords. Get daily news on SEO and Internet Marketing by great Internet Marketing Guru Peter Zmijewski. He is also the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title Internet Marketing Guru.
Related Articles -
Peter Zmijewski, Keywordspy,
| 
