Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence, or CI, is something you can’t do without if you’re going to have an online business. As well, it’s something you or your SEO specialist had better be doing; you have to know your competition before you ever have a chance of beating them. (Recommended reading: Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World)

If you’ve ever dreamed of being a spy like James Bond, Jack Ryan or Tom Bishop, the intriguing world of competitive intelligence is your chance. Okay, so it doesn’t include cool cars and you don’t get to use lines like “shaken, not stirred”, but you do get to be a spy-ish.

Step 1: Who’s My Online Competition?

The first thing competitive intelligence does is define who your actual competition is. Against whom are you competing? Good question. As we’ve said before, your online competition may not be who you think they are. Your online competitors are those showing in the SERPs for your key terms. Plain and simple.

The frustrating part is that your competition can include places you wouldn’t even think of:

• Government websites
• Wikipedia
• Informational websites

These are the three most common competitors for a given search term. Most of the time, they aren’t even selling a product or service; they’ve simply been chosen by us informavores as the best places for information about XYZ. Bummer. Your biggest competition may be the online equivalent of a teacher or library.

Finding Your Competition

We’re assuming you have a key term you want to rank for (if not, you need to find your key terms and then come back). So, use your chosen search engine and put in your key term. The top 10 – 20 results are your competition for that key term.

Drop those sites into a spreadsheet.

Step 2: Measuring the Threat Level

Threat level – How strong is the competition? What kind of work are you looking at to beat them out of the SERPs? Well, to find out, we measure the competing sites.

Measuring Threat Level

Competitive Analysis

You can use Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Yahoo Site Explorer or any number of other tools. Run them on the competition. Export the information to an Excel file for easy categorizing, sorting and comparisons:

• How many links (who has the most?)
• Quality of pages with the link
• PageRank of pages with the link
• PageRank of ranking competitor page
• Anchor text
• Type of links (widgets, badges, mentions, press releases, guest blogs, etc)
• Social reach (SEO Site Tools (Google Chrome extension) can give you good feedback on a page’s social reach)
• Page speed tests (nice list of page speed tools)

Competitive Monitoring

Once you gain some insight into your competition, you don’t want to lose it, right? Monitoring your competition is part of gathering competitive intelligence. Plenty of page monitoring tools are available (short but nice list of page monitoring tools).

Page monitoring tools can help you stay updated on any changes your competitor may make to their site. For example: does your competitor have a particularly heavy duty landing page that’s kicking yours out of the water? Set your chosen tool to monitor changes and send you an alert.

What you get is immediate notification when your competitor changes something, giving you a chance to respond quickly with your own changes (if necessary). Think legal insider trading.

Social Monitoring

Turn on your high-tech cloaking device (browser) and visit their social accounts:

• What are they talking about?
• What hashtags (#key term) are they using?
• What pages on Facebook have they fanned?
• What types of links are they sharing, and from what sites?
• Do they seem to be actively engaging their community?
• Have they posted a new sale?

Step 3: Finding Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Find Your Strengths & Minimize Your Weakness

Yes, it’s not all about the competition. If you don’t know already, you need to find out how your site stacks up to the competition. Essentially, you’re running a competitive analysis on your own site:

• Check number of incoming links
• Check PageRank
• Check incoming anchor text
• Check your social reach
• Your site’s speed

Step 4: Putting the Information to Work

All of this information gathering will help you strengthen your SEO campaign. For example, if your competitor has 1 Million + links and you only have 19, you know link building needs to be part of your campaign.

You now have information about your competitors’ high quality links and anchor text. Instead of going for low quality links (such as most directory submission), you can target the high quality first. Here’s a hint: you’ll have to have tons more low level links to make up for a few high quality ones.

If your competitor is heavy into social and a lot of their pages have been dugg, tweeted and bookmarked, you’ll need to look at how your social campaigns compare. Check with places like Klout to gather information like this. Klout isn’t perfect, but it’ll give you a good overview.

If you’re way behind on page speed, well, it’s time to have a serious talk with your webmaster about how page speed matters in ranking.

Don’t automatically copy your competitors’ strategies. Take a good long look at each one and decide what would be best for your company; not every strategy will work for you.

Conclusion

Competitive Intelligence isn’t anything as glamorous as real spy work. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. We don’t recommend ignoring this step in creating an online marketing campaign; this isn’t one of those “optional” things. Without knowing who your competition is, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it (all things a good SEO specialist should be able to tell you), every campaign is just going to be guesswork.

It’s your turn. Have you done any competitive intelligence for your key terms? If so, were you surprised by who turned out to be your competition? If not, please tell us why you chose to bypass this step. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

Semantics:  the study of language meaning

Analysis: an investigation of the component parts of a whole and their relations in making up the whole

David Harry over at the SEO Training Dojo wrote an excellent article entitled Semantic Analysis for SEO: Going Beyond LDA. For you search geeks that understand… well, search geek, just click the link, head on over and have yourselves a good read. For our readers who aren’t search geeks, have no idea what LDA is, and are now throwing their hands up in the air saying, “oh crap, now what”, stick around.

I bring up David’s article because he makes a very valid, very interesting point about keyword vs. word usage. These tidbits of information can be of huge value to you, who may be reading SEO blogs to learn how to create your own campaign (or, at the very least, to understand what your SEO company representative is saying when they tell you how the campaign is going). It’s just one more piece of the puzzle you can use to gain the whole picture.

Adding Meaning to Key Terms

There’s this thing; It’s called semantic analysis (SA). As David mentions in the article, SA isn’t necessarily about synonyms and plurals – and here’s where this article really begins…

In content, you have synonyms, plurals and related terms. When you read a sentence, you get the meaning of a word based on the context. You get the meaning of the sentence based on the surrounding sentences. In fact, a lot of our reading comprehension doesn’t come because we’re walking dictionaries, but because we use surrounding information to support our understanding of the written word.

Take, for instance, the word pilferer. Do you know off the top of your head what it means? Some of us may see the word, not recognize it and go find a dictionary. Others “guess”, using the surrounding text…

“He’s a compulsive pilferer. Everywhere he goes, stuff disappears into his pockets. Last week, he walked out of the store with a pack of gum without paying for it. He doesn’t even like gum!”

Okay, so maybe you wouldn’t use the word in a normal conversation, but using the surrounding text, you’ve probably guessed a pilferer is a thief. How do you know? The surrounding text:

…stuff disappears into his pockets… walked out of a store… without paying for it

Yet, none of these words are synonymous with thief.

Like Human, Like Search Engine

Search engines work much the same way. They using surrounding text to “understand” how relevant a page is to the search term. Apple is a good example. With just the word without surrounding context, you could mean:

• The fruit
• The company
• A color
• A desert

The SEs decide what you mean by surrounding text:

• The fruit – Granny Smith, Jonathan, Autumn Gold
• The company – iPhone, iTunes, MacBook
• Color – Candy Apple Red, paint, color
• Desert – Candied apple, cake, cobbler

Without these surrounding words, all you get on (at least) the first two pages is information about Apple – the company.

What does this mean to you?

When you write an article, blog or web page, reread with an eye on semantic value. Consider what you’ve written about when linking. The worst thing you can do for your site and your visitors is write a whole bunch of words and then throw a keyword or two in there. Frankly, it just makes for crap.

It’s all about relevance, but relevance doesn’t necessarily mean just similar words or even words that mean the same thing (i.e. SEO and search engine optimization). Create a list of words you might use to support your key terms like using:

• exercise to support Pilates
• PPC to support conversions
• cat to support jaguar (David’s example)
• Granny Smith to support apple

If you take the time to make sure your SEO efforts – whether it’s writing Meta data or building links – include supporting words, you’ll end up building a rare thing: a tightly focused website with excellent links, strong ranking and content your readers (and the SEs) can understand.

So, right now, I challenge you to look at your site, your articles, your blogs, your links, what have you, keeping semantics in mind. Do your keywords get the support they need?

Keywords in your domain

Funny I was having this conversation on Twitter just the other day. Granted not much of a conversation with 140 characters but I decided to take it a bit further and write a blog post.

You’re setting up your website. You already know you’re going to pay a professional SEO specialist to perform the complete kit-n-SEO-kaboodle, you just haven’t hired anybody yet. Now, you’re pretty sure you read something about domains being important for the process, but how important is it?

… and what’s a domain?

As you may or may not know, a domain is your Internet address. It’s the “http://www.mysite.com” you type in to reach your site. It’s also an important part of your SEO strategy to consider if you haven’t bought a domain yet.

If you already know you’re going to hire someone to do your SEO, don’t wait until after you have your domain. Many of the strongest SEO strategies have been created before the website was even built. In fact, it’s often easier to create a highly optimized site from scratch than it is to come in after the site is created… and it all comes down (for the most part) to keywords.

If a potential visitor is looking for widget makers for example, and your domain is “widgetmaker.com”, you get double power from your domain. One, the search engine will consider your site to have a higher amount of relevance in the search (thus, ranking your site higher). Second, the potential visitor will believe they’ve found just what they’re looking for.

Search engines are always looking for relevance in their algorithms; finding relevant keywords in the domain name scores very high. They give a lot of weight to keyword rich domain name.

If you’re iffy about this, do a search for anything. Instead of looking at the information for each listing, look at the domain name…

• #1 listing for “SEO company” – www.seocompany.com
• #2 listing – www.seocompany.net

• #1 listing for “golf shoes” – www.golfshoesplus.com

• #1 listing for “internet marketing” (after Wikipedia, that is) – www.freeinternetmarketingcourses.com

WWW or Non-WWW?

People are starting to drop the “www” from their speech; when people remember a site name, they seldom add the www to it. Whichever you choose is fine, but remember search engines will index both versions. This can cause issues. Once you decide make sure you set which one you’re using in your .htaccess file.

For non-www to www

For www to non-www

The problem now is that people are realizing that having keywords in a domain helps with organic SEO. There’s a good chance all the good domains have disappeared. For example, “business.com” was the highest valued domain ever, and will never be available again. You have to be original.

.com, .net, .org?

Another discussion ensued on Twitter about the .com, .net, .org  here is what you should keep in mind. Several domain types are available – so many that it can be overwhelming. Which type of domain is best? First, consider the user. Most people simply assume a domain name will end with “.com”, so it’s easy to remember. If you can’t grab a good .com domain name, move to the next best thing, which is “.org”. The third is “.net”.

However, don’t give up a good domain name just because the “.com” isn’t available. For instance, if you want “widgetmakers” and the .com or .org aren’t available but the .net version is, go for the .net. As with anything, the potential visitor is the ultimate target, not the search engines; never give up user experience for search engine ranking.

Find a good keyword-relative domain name for your new web site, but try not to make it too long. Make it catchy, memorable and as short as can be. So next time you are in a position to help a client or a friend choose a domain name what are you going to do?

We’ve all been there. You have this sweet SEO campaign planned out to the nth degree. You’ve put it into motion. You’re sure it’s going to:

• Increase your traffic
• Boost your ranking
• Boost your ROI (Return on Investment)

Problem: After three months, your ROI is still a sinking ship. Your ranking seems to have a severe lack of motivation; it hasn’t even tried to move. Worse yet, your visitors have the attention spans of guppies, staying only long enough for the site to load – if you have visitors at all.

Let me repeat myself “one more time again”. We’ve all been there. Yes, even the SEO professionals get it wrong… occasionally.

See, SEO has this undefined human element. Yes, computer programs can do some of the grunt work for you, but eventually you cross a line where you have to actively make a decision. At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to choose keyword A or keyword B, and then jump down the rabbit hole. Eventually, you, the human, have to act.

I believe the largest difference between the SEO professionals and the layperson is how you act. When it comes down to the wire and you see the SEO campaign you spent so much time on isn’t working, what do you do?

• The Layperson: In my experience, I’ve noticed that most laypeople tend to have a “shove all” approach. If the SEO campaign isn’t working, shove all you can at the site and see if it helps. Either that or they toss the campaign and start over. Sort of like tossing out the baby with the bath water (I’m full of clichés today).

• The SEO Professional: The professionals seem to take a sort of laid-back approach. First, there’s an unsurprised, yet thoughtful, “huh…” We immediately know we missed something somewhere along the way. Rather than toss out the campaign and start over, we turn into perfectionist naggers, nitpicking at every detail of the SEO campaign. Our job now is to find out what part of the campaign isn’t working as expected.

How do we do that? With the Three T’s of Optimization, of course. We track, tweak and test the campaign. Notice that I started with “track”. You, on the other hand, need to start with a part of any SEO campaign commonly missed by the layperson: the benchmarks.

You have to start with where you are and add where you’re going:

“My site is currently ranking 47 on Google for Keyword A. I want to see position 1 -4 for Keyword A within six months. To do this I will…”

Decide what methods you’re going to use to reach your goals. Then, write down the metrics that will be affected by those methods. For instance, if you’re going to use link building as one of your methods, you need to know how many, and what kind of, sites are linking to yours – before you start your campaign.

So – benchmarks. Don’t forget them.

As your campaign goes on, track the changes in those benchmarks on a regular basis. If your analytics program shows you a new site referring traffic to yours, you want to make a notation. If your search engine traffic goes up, you want to make a notation. If you post an article, write a blog, change a meta tag… you want to make a notation.

When things change, in other words, it’s a sign that your pen needs to visit the notepad. Mark it. Write it down. Highlight it. If things go wrong you’ll then have a recorded history of changes, making it that much easier to figure out where it went wrong. If you know the “where”, it’ll be easier to figure out “what” and “why”.

Comparing After the Fact

Maybe you didn’t think about the benchmarks. With most web analytic programs, you’re given the ability to compare the past with the present. For example, you can compare the month before you started your SEO campaign with the current month.

In this way, you can find out if your keyword reach (how many keywords, relevance of keywords, traffic coming in from them) has changed. You might find that targeted Keyword A is bringing less traffic than before, while you now have two more untargeted keywords bringing a few visits each.

While it’s not as comprehensive as a benchmark report, it’ll do in a pinch. Any kind of comparison can give you enough information to go on.

A final note: don’t assume you know what’s wrong based on information from one metric. Before you change anything, look at the whole picture. Some things, such as search engine changes like Google Instant, are beyond your control. A serious change in algorithms can derail a whole campaign – or it can mean a longer time span before your SEO campaign takes affect.

Now, in the SEO industry, Google Web Analytics is a touchy subject. So, for those in the industry who feel the need to yell and rant because I’m adding “Google” to the title, yell on, while I talk to the target audience.

Because, you see, GA is a free analytics platform. Thus, it’s widely used by many business owners small and large. As well, tons of SEO tools incorporate with Google Analytics, such as Raven Tools – a product I’m testing now. While you can use the analytics program offered with most web hosting platforms, many find it hard to read the raw data. Thus, GA – nuff’ said.

How do you use Google Analytics, though? How accurate is it? What can it tell you?

Well, GA can give you tons of useful information. The information isn’t completely accurate, but it’s accurate enough to pinpoint what pages need help in terms of conversions. It can help you find out what types of referrals bring you the most bangs for your buck (which also helps you develop a more targeted link building campaign). It’s not the Holy Grail of site statistics and SEO, but it’ll definitely do in a pinch.

Part 1: Understanding Keyword Reports

GA shows your traffic in an overview and in a format broken down into forms of traffic. “Keywords” is one of these metrics. The image below shows a small excerpt of our keyword data metrics for the Article Archive. What we want to know when looking at this metric is:

• What key terms are bringing people to the site?
• How long do they stay?
• Does the content keep them looking around the site?
• Are they new or returning visitors?

Now, keep in mind these are simple metrics; this is not an advanced Google Analytics course, merely an overview. You can click on the image for a larger view. I did skew the report to show no bounce rate, but our bounce rate is our business :).

What are you looking at?

• Column 1: Which terms people have used to find our site
• Column 2: Which page they landed on when clicking through from the SERPS
• Column 3: How many visitors came in from the key term
• Column 4: The average amount of pages looked at from those brought in through the key term
• Column 5: The average length of time they stayed
• Column 6: Percentage of unique visitors
• Column 7: Bounce rate

Quiz Question: Which column is least important? I’ll tell you the answer in a minute.

Let’s pretend that the site is new and these are the only key term hits we’ve received. Now, we have reason to be happy, because we’re starting to show up for relevant key terms: relevant to our site and our business. For instance, “SEO my site” and “reputation SEO” are good ones.

So let’s ay we’re looking at a site and not a blog. I’m going to break down what we’re looking at and how we beginning choosing what to test/tweak.

First, we look at relevant terms:

1. How to SEO my website
2. SEO my site
3. Reputation SEO
4. Reverse SEO
5. SEO and online reputation management

1: How to SEO my website

For this month, we had three brand new visitors land on a relevant page for the term. This is good. However, we need to know if they found the information they wanted there. The statistics of 10 seconds says we didn’t grab their interest enough. They stayed to scan the information, but didn’t find it interesting enough to look around the site.

Because of the search term, we can “almost” assume they were looking for enough information to do it themselves. Although these visitors might convert, it’s not likely.

2. SEO my site

We have the same statistics. The difference here is that the possibility of conversion is more likely. In other words, they may be looking for someone to provide SEO, rather than information on how to do it themselves.

Because they only scanned and didn’t look further into the site, we can safely assume we didn’t grab their attention enough. At some point in the game, we missed the ball on conversion. So, I’m going to set that aside as a page to analyze, tweak and test.

3 & 4: Reputation SEO, Reverse SEO

This is excellent, or could be. Four new people used these phrases to find us and landed on an appropriate page. They didn’t just scan; they looked around at other pages on the site. Did they convert? They could have. I’ll put these aside also, to get more information.

5: SEO and online reputation

Of the two visitors from this key term, one was new, one returned. Neither went further on the site, but they stayed awhile. What do we learn from this? They found the information they wanted. Period. They weren’t looking for anything else. However, I’m still going to look at the page. It’s getting traffic from several search terms, and may or may not be getting conversions. I need to know what’s going on with that page and how I can better convert those visitors.

Quiz Answer: Bounce Rate is the least important metric.

Why? The bounce rate says, “this visitor came, went and didn’t stay long enough to really look at anything.” Seems like it’d be extremely important, right? However, here is one of Google Analytics’ faults.

Google has an insanely high amount of time someone has to stay on a page for it not to count as a bounce. How long does it take you to scan a page for information and grab a number? 10 secs? 15 secs?

On blogs, for instance, bounce rates can be extremely high. People visit to find specific information. They scan, for the most part, garner what they want to know and then leave. The bounce rate doesn’t say whether they:

• Called a number
• Grabbed an email address
• Followed on Twitter
• Bookmarked the site for visiting later

In other words, the bounce rate is just a number that, while somewhat useful, isn’t one you should put a lot of emphasis on.

I had planned to delve into several metrics, but you’d have a book to read. I hope this information has given you the beginnings of how to use Google Analytics for better SEO and conversions.

As we move forward over the next couple of months, Level343 and the Article Archive will be focusing on putting out more helpful, informational articles. If you have questions you’d like to see answered in an article, please feel free to drop one in the comments.