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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But  even  Venn  diagrams  have  their  limita9ons!

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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