Let me start by asking you this. What makes your site:
- Different?
- Remarkable?
In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself. Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy. We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them. Are you feeling confident?
We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc. We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable. Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product.
We’re going to slice and dice the competitors in a couple of different ways, and like most of what we’ve covered so far, you should feel free to do any kind of research or use any tools that work for you – you don’t need to do exactly what is shown here. I highly encourage getting creative and breaking out your own competitor template and/or build on top of these examples,
TEMPLATIZING COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
If you’ve read the previous steps in this SEO Strategy series you know I’m an Excel junkie and you probably know what I’m about to say next, don’t you? That’s right! We’re going to open up Excel and make tabs!
This time we’re making a competitive research template that you can use for any of your SEO competitive research projects. The tabs we’ll create for this example will be:
- Features
- Sentiment
- On-Page
- Inlinks
- Traffic
I know I don’t need to say it again (but I will) – this is just an example. You can do whatever you feel is right here. The idea is to get a good big-picture look at what our competitors are doing, not just in their title tags and inlinks, but what features, tools and social visibility do they have? What is it that’s making them rank so well, and what is it that’s making people like them, want to share their content, want to link to them, etc. We’re not just counting inlinks and looking at the anchor text. We’re comparing product offerings. We’re looking for what makes a site naturally popular.
It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics. If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally. And if that’s what our competitors are doing, then we want to peek into their properties and see how we can do even better, or at least do great at the parts they’re slacking on (finding or refining our niche).
We’ll create one of these Competitive Template worksheets for each category we’re comparing (from the categories you defined in Step 2 and/or the Gaps and Opportunities you want to target from Step 3). This way we’re looking at our competitors in each niche, rather than just for the site as a whole, since they oftentimes are very different.
GET IN THE MINDSET
Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Based on what I’m learning by looking at my competitors’ offerings, what specific things should be built into this product in order for it to have a good chance at outranking them?” Remember in high school when you wanted to be cool like the popular girl so you studied how she acted, what she said, who she hung out with, what she wore, etc? It’s sort of like that except you don’t want to be like her, you want to be even AWESOMER. You want to be the one who has the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the best parties in town that everybody wants to go to and cant stop talking about.
So I encourage you to be as specific and thorough as possible in your research, but also be realistic. If you just can’t afford to be that cool for example, then can you be the coolest kid in town for a specific group of people (aka can you be the best and most relevant site for a specific niche or subgroup/subtopic)? Think creatively and always keep in mind who you’re targeting and what you can bring to the table.
Now that my cliché high school movie clique speech is out of the way, I’ll share some examples of research you can do, but feel free to compare whatever features you feel are important.
REMEMBER YOUR TARGET MARKET AND THEIR GOALS
If you’ve done some persona research or defined target markets in Step 1, keep that in your mind for this Step. Remember that you’re looking at these site features and content from your target market’s perspective, and you’ll want to check that whatever goals they are trying to reach are available on your site and the competitors’ sites, and how easy those goals are to find and to achieve.
For example, let’s say I have a music site, and I defined a persona in Step 1 that I named Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy is a Rolling Stone reader and music aficionado who likes to impress his friends with his endless wealth of music industry knowledge. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy likes to stay on top of the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll news, so he’s looking for the best site online to get breaking rock ‘n’ roll news and fresh perspectives in his RSS feed and maybe could be swayed into a newsletter.
I would have created a music news keyword category just for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy in Step 2. I found out who my competitors are for music news keywords in Step 4. Now, when I dig into these competitor’s sites, I can poke around and look at everything they’ve got going on, but I also want to pay special attention to the task(s) at hand for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Does my site and/or my competitors’ sites offer what he’s looking for? Is it easy to find? Are steps to conversion simple and user-friendly? How does my conversion process compare to my competitors? What product is Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy more likely to subscribe to, come back to, share with his Rock ‘n’ Roll friends, etc?
Putting this lens on allows you to catch things you might not have noticed by just comparing inlinks and tags. If you’re intrigued by this process, check out my favorite industry book to hit the shelves recently - Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google. It goes into this kind of stuff in more detail – you’ll love it.
Now let’s get into some spywork, shall we?
TAB 1: FEATURE & CONTENT COMPARISON
I’ll usually compare at least these three types of things in my feature & content comparisons:
- Content & Landing Pages
- Resources, Widgets, Tools
- Social Presence & promotion
I’ll create a matrix with my site and 1-5 of my top competitor sites (that we defined in Step 4) in the rows, and the aspects I’m comparing in the columns. So it might look something like this:
The stuff I compare is different every time I do one of these. Think about what you want to compare that would be important to visitors and/or your targets, and put that in there. I’ll usually end up adding things as I go along. For example if I find out that one of my competitors provides a calculator tool and I hadn’t thought about that, I’ll add it to the feature comparisons.
Once you’ve done this, step back and take a good look at what sets these sites apart. Ask yourself some of these questions:
- What features/content do my competitors have that I don’t?
- Does this content serve a need my target markets are looking to fulfill?
- Could/should I provide those features/this content? Could I make them even (more comprehensive, easier to use, more valuable to my visitors, provide it faster, easier, cheaper, etc)?
- How active are they in social networks where my target markets might be?
- How are they promoting their content through social sharing functions on their sites?
- Do they have proper targeted landing pages for the terms I care about?
- Are there calls-to-action on the landing pages? How apparent are they?
- Are there features of the site (tools, calendars, calculators, communities, etc) that might encourage repeat visits to the site?
I could go on, but the idea is to get a good feel for what’s going on in this competitive space, and start to form some recommendations based on this comparison that you’ll put in your Recommendations section of your Strategy document. Take notes on this and start to form your recommendations now. You can iron them out and make them sound good later, but you don’t want to forget, so make sure to get these thoughts while their still fresh in your head.
TAB 2: SENTIMENT (LIKES/ DISLIKES):
This one can be a crap shoot, but if you can get any insights out of it – excellent.
First, if you happen to have any good social monitoring tools that are half decent at determining sentiment (I’m a huge fan of NetBase for larger shops) use these to determine what people like about your competitors products and features, and what they don’t like about yours (if applicable). Also check out what they wish someone provided, or what they want or need or are looking for that they haven’t been able to find online.
If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search! Search for any variation of things like:
- “like” + [your brand name]
- “love” + [a feature you provide]
- “I wish” + [a feature you provide]
- “sucks” + [an author or blogger on your site or your competitor sites]
- “hate” + [your competitors’ brand names or features]
What you find may or may not be useful, and remember, we’re not just looking for SEO-related stuff here – we’re not looking for whether people love or hate our SEO – we’re looking for what people love or hate or how they feel about your product and your competitor products. We want to know why they like the popular girl more than the other girls. Or more specifically, we want to know why they visit, revisit, link to, share, email, bookmark, or talk about that product.
If whatever you find is relevant and insightful, make a note of it. The insights you gain from here will go into your Recommendations in the next step.
TAB 3: SEO ON-PAGE COMPARISON
On-page comparisons can be automated, and there are a few good tools that provide usable data. But of course the best on-page comparisons come with a touch of SEO know-how to not only show where there might be a flag, but of course determine 1) if the flag is actually a concern, 2) the level of concern/priority for each flag, and 3) the actions to take to fix it.
Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools that you can use any combination of to compare yourself against competitors:
Of course there are lots more out there – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments. But remember, automated tools are not SEO consultants. They can only do so much. Use this as a base to compare some of the on-page features, and add your own analysis to what’s working or not working for you vs. your competitors for these on-page factors.
Make notes of the things you consider flags - not all of it has to be noted or used in your recommendations. In fact, I usually only note a few things here that stand out. For everything else, I point to regular canned SEO best practices from the Recommendations section of the Strategy document. This isn’t a best practices document; this is a custom analysis with specific insights and recommendations (which is why you’re worth so much). ;)
TAB 4: INLINK COMPARISON
I’ll keep this one light and simple – you guys know how to do link research by now. You can use some of the inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links in this tab. If you do, be sure to graph the results.
What I’ll often do with inlinks too, is create a grid to see if I can determine who’s possibly link-shacking with who. Take your top x sites, including your own, and put each site in a cell across a couple of columns of your Excel tab. Put the same sites in rows in the cell tab that you’ll cross-check with the columns.
Then do this search in Yahoo Search:
Site:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com
This will return any pages from site 1 that are linking to site 2 (and indexed in Yahoo). For example, here are the pages on Wikipedia.org that link to seomoz.org:
https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awikipedia.org+linkdomain%3Aseomoz.org
Do this for each site (both directions). Keep in mind some of these links might have nofollows on them (use the SEOmoz toolbar to easily see nofollows). Sometimes you’ll see some sites with heavy cross-linking. This might mean a partnership, network, or paid links. Whether or not any of this cross-linking info is useful is questionable, but I like to see it if I have time to do the work.
Use this tab for any link comparisons you feel are important to explore. Because I’m skimping on this section a little, I expect you guys to share your competitive inlink practices in the comments. If you gain any good insights from what you find in your competitive inlink research in this tab, make a note of it for your Recommendations that we’ll build out in the next step in this series.
TAB 5: TRAFFIC COMPARISON
We know who our competitors are in search results. I also like to look at overall traffic to get an idea of who’s killing it beyond just Search. If your competitors are getting a lot of traffic in general, they’re doing something right. Also what are their traffic trends?
Here are some tools you can use to look at traffic and traffic trends:
This is another one of those things that I like to look at, but usually isn’t extremely actionable for SEO. I like to know the trends and the overall popularity of my competitors. I might gain some insight from looking at these, like if any competitors are losing ground or gaining fast (many times this could be due to search traffic since search often drives a large percentage of traffic to many sites).
TAB 6+: YOURS
What else do you want to compare? Add as many tabs as you like. This isn’t necessarily something you have to give to your client (although you could add it on as an appendix), this is a space for you to use to explore the competitive landscape. Add what you feel you want to dig into, and take notes on what you find that is useful for your recommendations along the way. We’ll be creating that part of the Strategy document next.
WHAT YOU NEED IN THE END
You need specifics. You need competitive insights that go beyond title tag comparisons. You need to know everything about the popular girls. The most important tab for me in this whole process is usually the features & content comparison. This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular (as long as I’m comparing the right things) and it’s the stuff that can affect some of the other tabs like inlinks and traffic. I use the insights I gain on this tab almost every time. I may not find any really good insights in the rest of the research, but I almost always find some juicy nuggets in the feature & content comparisons.
You should now have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively, and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets. Combine that with Gaps & Opportunities we found in Step 3, and categories and keywords of interest you found in Step 2, and you should have a nice set of notes that you can use to form some solid, specific recommendations in the next step.
Go to any of the 8 steps:
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research
Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities
Step 4: Define Competitors
Step 5: Spying On (and Learning From) Your Competitors
Step 6: Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations
Step 7: Must-have SEO Recommendations
Step 8: Prioritize and Summarize
I knew it! I knew it that this sixth episode was going to be central.
Because central is the job you are describing here Laura.
In order to outstand your competitors and not only from a SEO point of view YOU HAVE TO do this kind of competitive research. It's a question of basic business: infact all the good practices Laura suggest in a such structured way can be translated to any offline business.
Talking about "offline", I would like to remark that this aspect of reputation and buzzing is important to be analysed:
how my competitor engage with traditional "offline" marketing in order to promote its brand?
This is especially important for big brands, but not to be underestimated by small business as well.
If big brand spend big bucks on traditional Ads, sponsoring events, funding charities, radio Ads or on any other kind of marketing mix, this is true also in the case of aggressive small business and/or local ones
To monitor this can be a little hardier than just checking the online reputation and marketing. But to find out and verify this kind of information can be done (for instance Nielsen audience datas for tv adverts).
Finally, to complement this great post, I'd like to remember the first memorable one by Joanna Lord
Wow. I'm back. And you totally didn't disappoint again. I'm amazed that you have shared as much as you have in this series Laura.
I've never done competitive intel the way you've laid it out. I've been much more general and unfocused. But I really like your processes and how you map everything out.
You're making a convert outta me Laura.
Laura, a terrific post from you as always -- please keet them coming: may the steam of enlightenment continue!
Speaking of link analysis, by the way. In general it's a very natural and potentially productive idea to try to exploit your top competitors' linking opportunities. Find their best links and get links from the example places. One caveat I would like to add, though, is that in some markets, namely, those where link manipulation is rife and Google seems to pay especially close attention (e.g. gambling, pills and possibly even real estate), getting links from the same sources is likely to cause those links to be devalued (both for you and your competition).
I'd like to add another perspective to competitive research. The post above focuses on exploring on the competition's legitimate practices. What if you find that the competition is doing something seriously fishy and heavily violation the search engines' TOS. Now, if thse competitors are especially successful and the manipulations especially prominent, much can potentially be gained from investigating their practices in depth and documenting the abuse with an eye to reporting them.
This is much on my mind because I have just been hired to investigate a domain farm that appears to be spamming the search resultsfor certainly highly competitive keywords. Such research can be extremely involved, so here are some tools that can help with it; they can be useful for normal, non-investigative analysis as well. (Guys, if you know other tools that can help with such investigations, please mention them!).
Multiple IP checker
Multiple Whois
Domain Outboung Link Checker (better than Xenu Link Sleuth for this because Xenu won't let you filter out internal links, so far as I can tell)
SEOBook Reciprocal Link Checker
And, not least of all, Find Other Sites on the Same Server
As usual a great comment, Philip-SEO.
I want to open a thread here asking you to YOUmoz a post.
Hey, thanks kindly, buddy! Believe it or not, this YouMoz been much on my mind, so I especially appreciate the encouragement. I have been hursing some ideas for posts, so it's just a matter of time! Before too long.
I absolutely, positively echo Gianluca. Post , post, post! Your audience is eagerly awaiting!
Guys, you've made my day and resolved my doubts. I'll dream something up soon. Just let me get out from under these ugly big (but beautiful!) proposals that I am writing.
Thank you!
Hey Philip... now for sure you are making me very curious... what's this ugly big (but beautiful!) proposals you are writing?
Thanks! the tools are cool!!
Great article Laura!..truly useful!
You guys really make me smile with all of the great comments after each of these posts. Thanks so much - I'm glad some of this is helpful - I've learned some really good nuggets from your comments too.
I'm starting to think Rand is paying you guys to be so nice. RAND...?
Great post Laura.
I've always just brushed the surface whenever doing competitive analysis. I knew there was more to do, but just wasn't sure what it was. This post really gives an insight into the things you should be looking at, not just taking it on face value.
Thanks for that. I'll also have a play with some of the tools you suggested as well.
Congratulations on being shoved over to the main blog!!
Great article Laura, thanks for the insight!
I always found competitor comparisons a hard one to go through since it requires so much work, especially when you want to dig in deep. You gave some really nice hands-on advice here, which I'm surely going to use!
Just one question: In Tab 1 sheet you use a great summary metric, "score". How did you come up with that? In other words: What's the calculation behind it? Is it just different from analysis to analysis, or do you have one solid measurement for it?
Oh yes, Laura,
that's something I was going to ask you and forgot.
From what you write I suppose the % calculation changes as far as you add or subtract elements of comparison, right? Or do you have a some sort of formula, also in order to give more weight to one factor vs. others?
It's a really basic division of the good/green items divided by all items. For example, if I scored 'Y' (green/good) for 15 out of 20 cells for a site, I'd divide 15 by 20 to get a percentage score. It's very rudimentary (no weightings for how important each individual item is), but of course you can expend on that. :) I use it just to give an initial graph view that either everything is great comparatively (if they're score is higher), or something is wrong (if they're score is lower), and then go into some of the details in my rcommendations doc from there.
Hope that makes sense?
Great post.
I love doing competitor analysis as to can open your eyes to new opportunities but the issue i have at the moment is that i have found a competitor walking a very fine line between paid links and good PR.
e.g. Give products in return for a paragraph full of achor text. Targeting charities.
I am trying to establish if this is bad SEO (Google could take action or not) because it's working fantasically for them.
for more detail checkout my post on this forum...
https://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=5934
What is your opinion?
Hey Laura,
Great article :-) Very detailed and insightful information with every minute details included.
I became your Fan, excited to read on your writeups which I had missed in past and looking forward for your future articles.
Thanks a lot!
Great post.
Especially enjoyed the insight on using searches for sentiment analysis. Even though there are a ton of social media tracking tools, I think a lot of us forget that sometimes it is easier to just write a search!
i am working competative niche from many years but i cant beat out them an inch.i have quality site and strong back link source .why this is happen?will age of the website helps more ranking?thanks for the nice article.
Hi from Wakefield UK :-)
Good DIY methodology for on line comp research, definately one I'll be printing off and adding to my learning journal :-)
Hi Laura,
I have just been tasked with drafting my first SEO Strategy for a major client of ours and stumbled upon this. This has saved an absolute enormousness amount of time, and opened up a complete new side to my SEO work going forward.
Thank you so much for sharing this, this is GOLD!
Regards
Sean
Awesome post Laura. I can see how this competitive research can be great when you are working with start ups. It's the perfect time to bring this level of consulting to the table.
As I said, I am late to the table, but I am thoroughly enjoying this series. Our agency is shifting towards a consulting role, and these posts are extremely helpful.
"It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics. If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally."
This is so true... Thanks for all the great information Laura, can´t wait to continue reading your posts. You are giving out really valuable information to the community. I´m going to follow you every where...
Great work Laura. Simply enjoyed the whole post. Very informative and provided a great insight. Worth reading. Thumbs up to you.
Congrats for your promotion to seomoz blog.
great post Laura !
Great article, lots to do for me tomorrow :-)
Another thing not to forget is maybe to set up google alerts on the main competitors to know when and what they are changing.
Hi Laura,
“We are delighted to hear you are a fan and honored to be included among the latest and greatest online research tools. We specifically designed ConsumerBase to go beyond listening to help market researchers with understanding consumer emotions and behaviors, likes and dislikes and overall passion about brands. We will keep you posted on case studies!”
Please do! I saw MarketScout about a year ago (along with over a dozen other social media montioring tools we reviewed at Yahoo) and I really really loved what you guys were doing. I'm excited to see your offerings evolve.
I just logged in, and was greeted by this post Laura. I haven't read it yet but I wanted to drop down here to tell you something before I do.
This probably sounds a bit lame and makes it look like I need to get a life, but I was really, really excited to see your latest post. You have shared such excellent tips, that I've created a separate Laura folder for your posts.
Now I'm off to go read the latest!
goodnewscowboy I'm not sure who's a bigger fan: you of me or me of you! :)
Nahh. I'm definitely a bigger fan...No backs, no takes, no gives! :-)
I'm curious - how long did this overall process take to evolve? I think we can learn a lot not only from the specifics, but from the very notion of defining a process over time. We're all going to do it a bit differently, but building a system out of what we do every day is vital to long-term success.
I can only try to answer about what I do...
and the answer is that is almost 15 years that I work almost daily building, personalizing, restructuring and readapting a model I first used to determine what movies/series people born between 1965 and 1975 (the italian X generation) wanted to see and therefore build a tv channel that tried to fullfill their "tv" needs.
That's about the target and competitive part of the Strategy Plan.
About keywords and other more SEO related things, I still relied at first to a method I was using in order to "target with words" the public of the channel. Because keywords were and are important also in the offline word and in a/v (just think about the so scientifically structured copy of adverts or movie trailers). Obviously the more I got into SEO the more I implemented in my method the SEO tactics and focused it to SERPs.
Summarizing... the method somehow came to forge my way of working.
More and more often we are all going to see people trying to compete for the same stuff. Everybody wants to make money off of real estate, everybody wants to make money off of celebrities etc. When you start working with clients who are trying to penetrate a saturated market but bring nothing new to the table you're literally forced to help them define what makes them different and/or better, which heavily involves defining specific target markets and dfigging into what's already out there.
Working with Yahoo properties that are competing in some of the most competitive verticals - news, sports, finance, etc., it became very clear very fast that it was imperative to be doing more than just your regular SEO implementation to get ahead. If people dont like your product you're screwed. But traditional marketing teams and SEO dont always *actually* work together, despite SEO usually sitting within marketing, and/or SEO consultants oftentimes dont go and sit with clients' marketing teams to help fit SEO into an overall marketing strategy. It's a huge gap, and doing this target market research competitive analysis helps to bridge those two practices.
But to answer your question, I started using this process at Yahoo, seeing the same structural gap there. The process is different for almost every single property/client we work with - it has to be tailored - but at it's highest level it's all part of putting the SEO puzzle piece into the whole marketing puzzle.
Best article yet Laura, this series is really great - can't say enough good words about this!
Great post, and great series Laura.
I've seen (far too many) ebooks and other 'paid' guides with information not even half as helpful and insightful as your posts.
I think of the five articles so far in the series, this has been the most useful for me. Defining competitors, what makes them attractive and how you can emulate/improve upon their ideas, and how you can position your own ideas to show that you are better than them is fundamental in being successful. Yet it's something I rarely find myself doing for clients. Like usability testing, it's something that's very time consuming, and people often don't want to commit budget towards it. Which is a shame. A nice framework, though, that I shall definitely be using.
Looking forward to seeing how you pull this all together next time!
It is strange to see that most businesses only intent to commit budget towards elements that creates the fastest result as possible!
I think that this step however really could get some balls rolling towards the right goals (slowly getting in the Soccer World Championship mood :) )
More over... I am deeply convinced that if they do it (hopefully) as a part of a more general marketing plan, they should do it when realizing their online marketing plan.
Even more: there should be no existing a difference between marketing plan and online marketing plan at all.
More great stuff Laura! A little bit of spying never hurts and often generates some good ideas.
Thanks for your insights :)
Great series! I especially got a kick out of the Feature Content Comparison and have knocked out a copy for use in our discussions with clients.
Thanks much!
All I can say after reading this post is...Thank You! I am stealing your excel methods, they are far superior and more organized to what I hash out :)
Another tremendous post all in all. One important point that I will echo - using competitive intellegence for SEO is not simply a one-time task. Especially for those of us who are full-scale marketing managers for larger brands / ecommerce sites, you absolutely must track what your competitors are doing in the SEO landscape.
Hi Laura,
Our favorite post of the series!
In response to your comment: "Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments."
A shameless plug but https://www.webpagefx.com/seo-tools/spiderfx/ has a great free keyword/page scorecard. We recently integrated SeoMOZ link metrics which took the scorecard to the next level.
Cant wait for the next 3!
awesome post Laura! it's great to find competitors' weaknesses that can give you the advantage while reviewing your own checklist. looking forward to #6 of 8!
Another great instalment Laura, I am going to have to re-read this to fully take it in and then set up my own content comparison with the sites I am competing with
So, is link chasing helpful in anyway?