We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and affecting websites the world over.
Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they are doing that you should also adopt for your company.
So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).
By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to see you there! Ok, let's dive in.
Email marketing
If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:
What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website (micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:
If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:
- What time do I send my emails?
- How often should I send them?
- Should I invest in good design?
- What kind of call to action should I include to start with?
Stalk your competitor's emails
If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet, taking into account:
- Name
- Email date
- Time arrived
- Custom design?
- Call to action
- Subject line
- Did I click?
- Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on their site)?
My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:
I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:
Throw Into Wordle
Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:
Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.
Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside of blogging :-)
Content production
Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this, everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but possibly less accurate) fashion.
Manually
Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com "webinar"] search, I get 14 results:
That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.
More automated
If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and published on their site.
So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type. If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!
Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
Social amplification
You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list, right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.
*Whistles tune*
Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking, it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are creating.
Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).
Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:
This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which is more stable) and see who the influencers are!
Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.
As always you let me with my mouth wide open, John, and with the insane (and not always useful - ah! deadlines!) desire of putting apart what I'm actually doing and start testing all the things you have written, especially testing and eventually personalizing your Excel spreadsheet.
Talking about Inbound competitive analysis, I think that a similar approach as the one you described could be done following another path.
Let me wonder (not having a clue if it could work).
I repeat, I've no idea if my process could work, but surely it something I (or you) could experiment :)
Thanks again John for this post.
Great Post John and Nice insights into the competitor analysis this Fiorelli. Its always good to measure how socially active are our competitors and what kind of posts or what posts of them on their site are actually getting social media traction. A combination of Social Crawlytics and Follower wonk can be deadly in doing a social media competitor analysis to unearth lot of competitive intelligence data.
gfiorelli1: it should work. The basic idea is to be aware of what the competitors are doing and your methodology does address that.
I think there's just something wrong with your data, 7 mentions of blog URLs on SEOgadget? :D
View Page Source > Cntrl+F - seo gadgetI'm picking up 4 URLs and 2 words of the actual name of the site ^^
Probably because your blog doesn't have /blog/ in the URLs, my friend :-)
ie https://seogadget.com/creativity-is-king/ is a blog post, but no /blog/. The methodology isn't *perfect*, but it gets us a lot further along than we otherwise would have been!
#1 piece of advice during a "manual" search analysis - Do not use a browser you are signed into Google with - better yet - use another computer in general.
Your pal,
Chenzo
I have a Cheap VPS - $13/month, use it to do all my searching and a few other SEO related tasks..
Or, set up a custom search engine that's depersonalized (&pws=0) that takes care of personalization. There's not much you can do from a manual perspective to take care of localization aside from changing your location to "United States", but why do that if it's not what users are really seeing?
I love looking at competitors to see what they are doing that I might incorporate but also I think a lot of people go over board and just start copying them. thats not what your loyal customers want they want your style and flavor. I know that's not what most of this would lead up to but it does present the possibility in some cases and I wanted to share my 2 cents.
Reverse engineering is always a great idea. Thanks!
U have been doing this for my competitors since day 1! this is a great post, but I love spying on content...usually what I like to do though is see which content is performing the best on social and put my own spin on it or update the information.
Excellent post!! I love the idea on email marketing. I seriously think email marketing is always understimated by marketing agencies, but its a really strong tool towards revenue and goal accomplishment.
Thanks, Regards!!
Competition analysis explained! Well worded - Will definitely test the spreadssheet!
I wish I could be there to see you talk more about it in Boston. We stalked our competitors to get ideas and see how we could improve on what they were already doing by looking in highly competitive markets as well. Sent our first email campaign out a couple of weeks ago (with full Google Analytics tracking and email stats - Interspire email marketer is sexy), we saw the effort it took to do this research, buy the software and create an email pay for itself in this first email, can't wait for the next one to be sent out. Great post!
Well I love the use of Wordle and in my business checking up on competitors and their emails is something I have become lax in doing...i do go out of area to see how really good competitors work their magic (I found it annoying if I were a customer actually!)...I've got to try your spreadsheet method..thanks!
SimilarWeb is a quick and easy way to improve the impact of email distribution. Similarweb is a competitive intelligence tool that analyzes traffic for any website and shows the most significant referrers, including traffic from email. If you see that your competitors are deriving a lot of traffic from email campaigns, you know that you're on the right track.
Awesome post John, since I am already getting my competitors emails I shall use your advice and ananalyse them, will also use your Excel spreadsheets- thank you for sharing them with us:-)
Great post John. Some cool actionable takeaways plus tools to make it happen. Cheers.
A fantastic post with some great advice that I will be sure to include in my competitor analysis from this point forwards. Also some great links provided by some commenters. Thank you.
very informative And helpful post will try this when i get time ....what do people think of spyfu ?
Really interesting to see email marketing right behind SEO. It does make sense because the user opted-in (hopefully) to the email list as some point, so they are more inclined to open. There are definitely a lot of companies - AppSumo, Thrillist, Groupon etc. - who's bread and butter is email marketing.
Amazing post, big information about internet marketing is sharing with all.
Thanks for the keypoints you have provided for inbound marketing. Focusing more on email increases consumers. Ill be honest with you, this process is somewhat new to me but i woudnt be afraid to try it out. Ill update you for any outcomes. Thanks for sharing your insight.
Great post. The 3 areas you mentioned are important areas to look at. I like the idea of putting the key words in the competitor's subject line into Wordle and getting a visualization of which words have been working for them-it's is an actionable idea.
Aside from email marketing, content production and social amplification, are there any other areas of competitors you would consider analyzing? Coming up with more areas to explore, and using your strategies to analyze them would be very helpful!
-Karen Yu
Thanks for sharing very useful information about E-mail marketing !
P.S - Keep it up
Competitor research can make all the difference for a blogger who engages in inbound marketing. At least, this post has been able to highlight some key areas of research.
I still feel that researching how the competitor ranks in content production should precede all other researches.
This is because content is the channel through which value is offered to the customer. More so, content production is aligned with email, social media, and search engines optimization.
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Nice post about competitor’s analysis, we use lots of tools for making purpose. But always try to grabbing it manually.
I agree. Both, SEO and Online Marketing are changing. With Panda and Pinguin we might see more quality search results. Thanks for the great post about competitor analysis. It gave us more insight into how you operate in the US Market. In Germany, we are still a bit more old-fashioned in the way we conduct a competitor research. Here we rely rather on survey results and very rarely if at all conduct a competitor analysis. Your pointers are valuable to us. Thanks again!
Sure thing. Take a good look at your competition, and their strategies, and you will always find something interesting, something you miss. Then use this knowledge and experience to make your stuff better.
Nice post I really liked it.
Very informative article! Thanks for putting it together!
Congrats, John.The quality of your posts is incredible. As always very useful, especially your spreadsheets, that I'm ready to give them a try right now.I imagine a not so far away time when (or where?) competitor analysis will definetly lie on content. With inbound spreading its tentacles to almost everything (in a marketing way, so speak), content faces the challenge of being the amazing cornerstone of all kind of strategies (wow, it sounds poetical).Great post, as always.
Big piece of advice. Download Search Ranking app for IOS, Raven Tools, and of course seoMOZ to check keyword ranking. Google will trick you. It's great for UX and crappy for SEO :-/
John, Thanks for your informative post and the idea on potential tools. Competitive intelligence in business is an important subject that does not get enough attention. In a prior life I worked as a tactical intelligence Marine. Our intelligence cycle started with Planning & Direction (what do we want to know), followed by collection, processing, production, dissemination, and hopefully utilization. The key to the effort was to produce a product that helped decision making. Although your post is primarily on inbound marketing, this process can be applied to everything from products and services to pricing. Your post woke up part of me that has been dormant for a long time. Thanks.
Thanks for this post, it has definitely added to how I will monitor the competition from now.
Great use of competition analysis, Excel metrics and external website usage to compile metrics. I haven't tried your exact Excel work, but I did do something similar with Competitious.com when that was still free (now RivalMap.com). I try to do a lot of competitive analysis on different competitors, but for the most part, get exhausted from doing too extensive of an analysis.
I haven't tried Wordle yet but from the initial look, it looks great. Thanks for the tips!
Very interesting research you got here! Will definitely try this spreadsheet.
Another golden post from you, good sir! Being a struggling freelance (and still on a learning phase) inbound marketing student that I am, I don't have the fortune of having access to the awesome tools that would have made my tasks lighter and my output data more accurate. What I do instead is make use of keyword research data (supplemented by analytics organic traffic data if it's a pre-existing site), pop those phrases into a gDocs spreadsheet I've customized based on Tom Anthony's version. I'd then go further by querying a clean list of those websites through SEOGadget's data gathering tool (usually when gDocs' importXML() limits messes up the sheet which prompts me to move into using a local Excel version). From there, things get a bit manual (stalking the competition, check on top influencers who follow them, understanding their content strategy --- basically knowing what worked best for them).
Love the methodical approach. Thanks. I've learned a lot from you.
One of your best posts , hats-off !!
The way you present the data is very good ....actually am addicted to ur writing !!
Keep Posting !!