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It’s the second day of SMX Advanced London and we’ve installed ourselves armed with laptops, cameras and Fox sweets in a conference room with the idyllic name ‘Orchard 1’. I suggest ‘Windswept Beach’ would be more suitable as it is freezing - but this should keep us on our toes. We’re here to get you an answer to the question how you stay ahead of your competitor in SEO this morning after all.
Dave Sottimano -SEO consultant at Distilled- is doing a great job in answering this question in an easy to understand way. David once did days of data mining for a client only for the client to ask him what on earth he should do with this information. That was the start of getting to actionable insights for Sottimano.
Audience participation at day 2 of SMX Advanced London
Steps to SEO Competitor Analysis
‘Clients often needed a week to get back to me with a list of competitors’ says David ‘only for me to find some weren’t even online. For SEO only your online competitors matter and they can come as a surprise, you may find that Amazon instead of the shop around the corner is your biggest SEO foe’. So how do you systematically go about analyzing this?
1. Find your SEO competitors on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).
2. Get high level data on these competitors.
3. Answer the big question – Why are they better?
4. Deep dive for more data.
5. Use this data to build your own (better) feature
Data for High Level Decisions
1. Make keyword lists (actual + hopeful).
2. Look at rankings (you and those of the competitor).
3. Look at the URL rankings for each keyword.
Use and weight the ranking to come to valid conclusions and decide what sections of the site – across time- give your competitor the most of the SEO benefit. This could - for example - be a blog.
Dave Sottimano
Indicators that tell you what content is on a page are for example:
1. Comments
2. A regularly updates RSS feed that suggests a new posting
3. Post archive or calendar of past posts
4. Labels and tags on posts
5. Word-press based
6. Hosted on a blogging platform
7. Share on Twitter/Facebook/Tweetme etc.
Keep your Friends Close but Keep Your Enemies Closer
When you have a clear picture of your main competitors based on the findings you have weighted off against each other it may be time to leave the tools for what they are and to visit their sites to see for yourself what they do and why their features may have such an edge for SEO.
Act on the Intelligence
A question to the audience proofs that many people gather data but that a fraction actually does something with it. Now you have meaningfully determined who your main SEO competitors are and why it should be a lot less daunting to get into action & create that bit of content your users/customers love and that search engines adore.
Stay tuned for more SMX Advanced coverage!
Best,
Simone Schuurer, EMEA Community Site Manager
SMX Advanced London: Opening Keynote on Instant Answers, Social Search and Mobile
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Hi Simone
That's a good point about finding out who your competitors are - anyone who ranks above you for the keywords you're targeting, regardless of whether they're in the same industry.
I think David went on to suggest that you categorise the competitors by type, so that you can identify possible reasons why other sites are ranking ahead of you, which is something we've been working on at Wordtracker. Should have more news in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, Wordtracker has produced a round-up of the best bits (including the Tweets) from SMX. 221 takeaways and top tips is at www.wordtracker.com/.../smx-london
Enjoy!
Justin
thanks for sharing Nice Information