Online Competitive Intelligence Factors
| Manoj Jasra - Thursday, March 27, 2008 3 Comments |
Coming from an agency, there are often times when there is need to perform a competitive analysis for a client in order to better understand the client's position in the competitive landscape. The main purpose of a competitive analysis should be to gain awareness of the competitive factors analyzed and to leverage the client's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) to their advantage. So what kind of factors should be included in an online competitive analysis? Below are a few that I feel should always make the competitive analysis list:
- Domain Age: The age of your domain can have an affect in the way search engine determine authoritativeness for your site. Theoretically, the longer the domain has been active, the more value it receives from search engines. Webconfs has a great tool for calculating the age of your domain and your competitors' http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.
- Search Engine Visibility: Take your vertical's main keyword basket and analyze how visible your site is compared to its competitors in Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL. Comparing the number of top X rankings can give you a sense of your keyword market share.
- Site Traffic: This one is difficult to compare unless you have access to your competitors' analytics, however Compete.com's search analytics does a fairly decent job of providing some insight.
- In Bound Link Quality: Using a combination of Yahoo Site Explorer and a batch PageRank checker you can begin to determine the quality of back-links for a given domain. The quality of links is more important than the quantity.
- In Bound Link Anchor Text: The quality of links is partially based on the theme of the linking site as well as the anchor text that is linking to you. Image or branded links aren't as high quality as keyword rich links. http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php
- Meta Tags: This maybe considered simplistic and old school but meta description and title tags are still important in SEO. Analyzing description and title tags can help you determine which competing sites best differentiate themselves as well as the messaging the site is providing visitors.
- Paid Search Campaigns: On the other side of the fence their is sponsored campaigns and a tool like SpyFu can give you some insight on PPC competitors and keyword costs.
- Blogs: Got a blog? Check out Blog Juice from Text Link Ads, which looks at Bloglines, Alexa and Technorati to compute a "juice" score.
Labels: SEO
Excellent summary. If factors like these are considered thoughtfully (in addition to a site’s core structure and content), they can enable every site owner to improve their web marketing tactics and overall search engine performance.
A few other website competitive intelligence metrics that are sometimes useful as well include:
Outbound Links – In addition to inbound links, outbound competitive link analysis can sometimes also provide insights into related outside sites that may provide valuable link opportunities, good reference/resource materials, useful industry sites/info, potential strategic/sales partners, etc.
Website “Collateral” – Some search engines provide “advanced search” options that enable you to specify a document type by domain. For example, only “pdf” documents or “xls” spreadsheets on a particular domain. This can be very useful in quickly collecting and analyzing competitive data sheets, product specs, docs, etc.
Google PageRank – Like meta tags, Google PageRank is often thought to be a bit outdated and irrelevant – and for some applications it is. However, a quick comparison of Google PageRanks can still provide some initial indicators about newly discovered competitive sites, since it really is just a reflection of many of the other individual factors mentioned above (site traffic, number/quality of inbound links, domain age, etc.). And while PageRank may not have much influence on “long-tail searches” (i.e. very specific and detailed search queries), in some cases it can still have relevance in Google SERP for more generic “short-tail searches.” So, when used carefully, site owners can still extract some insight from understanding their PageRank relative to competitors.
Weighted Search Engine Exposure – this is really just another way to gauge the Search Engine Visibility aspect you mentioned, but one that our clients find very useful. Knowing the relative volume of searches done on the major search engines (for this example, let’s assume Google: 6Billion/mo, Yahoo: 2Billion/mo, MSN:1Billion/mo), combined with a weighted scoring that assigns a higher value for each of the higher-ranking SERPs on each search engine analyzed, you can compute a single “Weighted Exposure Index” that is very useful for comparing overall search engine exposure potential for various sites by keyword. This one is a little complicated to compute by hand, but is one of the metrics we build into our software/service so that this Weighted Search Engine Exposure Index can be quickly viewed and compared across targeted competitive websites at a glance, and has proven very useful.
Along with all of the factors that you mentioned previously, we include all of these additional metrics and others, in our AttaainCI Competitive Intelligence/Market Intelligence software-as-a-service offering, and have seen that careful analysis, tracking and application of these kinds of factors can and does have significant impact on client’s web site performance. Thanks again for the interesting post!
Daryl Scott, Attaain Inc.
AttaainCI – Active Intelligence for Strategic Advantage
www.attaain.com
Daryl, great insight. The comments about collateral and search engine exposure are very interesting. Please send me an email to mjasra@gmail.com to discuss your products in more depth.
Thank you for a great summary. One item to add relates to Local Search. Be sure your company phone number and address are listed correctly in Yellow Page websites and Google/Yahoo Maps. That also includes printed yellow pages in which you are sure to add your url. These type of sites organize your listing by category and have expanded listings. As a rule they should also be free to update. In working with SEO for my clients I have discovered so many mistakes in phone book listings that also gets picked up by Google Maps. Again, thanks for post. Lia B.