SEO Competitive Analysis - Rob Garner - iCrossing

New York | March 19–23

Competitive Assessment Direct, Indirect, and Internal

Rob Garner VP Strategy, iCrossing @robgarner

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Competitive research

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New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny

Think

• Evaluate past and current marketing programs

• Perform SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)

• Set goals

• Identify primary and secondary metrics

• Perform in-depth keyword and market research

• Analyze market research and identify opportunities

• Evaluate and customize dashboards and analytics platforms to accommodate new metrics

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Your competitors are direct, indirect, and internal

• Direct: Your typical business competitors

• Indirect: Those sites that dominate in search, for a variety of reasons

• Internal: Your organization – who is going to help, and who is going to impede progress?



Are rankings the best thing to measure?

• Don’t get hung on competitor’s rankings

• You don’t know if they convert

• Competitive ranking data is directional at best

• Personalization, social search, universal, etc. have scrambled the SERPs



A company’s biggest SEO competitor is itself

• Some companies are overly obsessed with their pet rankings

• Educate on the value and returns of SEO

• Implement the proper tools and analytics for measuring what you get from SEO

• Break down barriers that prevent effective SEO

• Focus on growing the good things that result from SEO, and reinvesting in SEO

• Know your site’s SEO and content value inside and out



Content

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Content audit – Internal competitive research

1) Finding out what you have 2) Finding out what you don’t have



How well do you know the content of your own site?

• How many unique pages reside within your domain, or domains?

• How many pages within your site match a given phrase, or set of phrases?

• How much of your site’s content is duplicated or repurposed in other parts of your site, or on other sites outside of your domain?

• How well your content inventory matches up to your targeted keyword lists (in other words, does your content literally support your keywords, at the page and site theme levels)?



How well do you know the content of your own site?

• Is your site optimized for search engines, and also optimized for social networks (shareable, portable, keyword-friendly and researched, etc.)?

• How fresh is your content, and at what time frequency do you publish?

• How many backlinks does your site have at the domain level?

• When checking your analytics and log files, do you notice any distinct patterns of declining or increasing traffic? Why or why not?

• Does your site push content out via RSS and XML feeds?



You have to have at least one page in the game to compete Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”



Or many pages

Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”



Depth of content is directly proportional to what you will get from natural search Site:www.domain.com Site:subdomain.domain.com



Example of direct and indirect competition



Characteristics of highly visible sites

• Well-written, and well-edited.

• Significant word counts at both the page-level, and site level.

• Provides substantial content that backs up the theme of the site, as it relates to the respective keyword set.

• The content is generally engaging, and good enough that people would want to link and share it without being asked.

• Each site has a high number of high-quality unique pages within the domain.



Recap

• Don’t become obsessed with rankings

• Focus on the three types of competitors: direct, indirect, and internal

• Know your own site(s) inside and out

• Shoot for broader goals, such as content depth, external linkage and social signals


Technology

SEO Competitive Analysis - Rob Garner - iCrossing