Monitor Your SEO and Your Competition
Strategic marketing decisions are best made when adequate information is available. While information could include any number of internal factors, in most circumstances, it is critical to have as much external information that can be gathered about the competition as possible if the end goal is to have an effect in the marketplace.
There is much more to Search Engine Optimization then applying a few tricks to rank higher in the search engine rankings. Do not get sucked in looking for that magic bullet! Gathering real competitive intelligence on search results will provide insight on the competition and help you develop a real SEO strategy.
Gathering SEO Competitive Information
Some of the most useful information about your own site, as well as that of the competition is readily available, for free. It’s just a matter of allocating the proper resources collecting the information. After all, how hard is it to go to Google and enter in keywords and press search? Anyone can do it. In fact, it is the principal that anyone can do it that makes this some important, because so many do it every day for keyword terms that would probably help your business, or your competitors business.
The first step of collecting information is very easy, but it is extremely time consuming. This is probably why most do not do an adequate job of gathering good competitive intelligence for search engine results. It is just a matter of determining the most important keyword terms – search phrases including 3 to 5 (or more) words – and executing each of these searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most do this to some degree, but fail in a few major aspects. First, it is important to have as many keyword terms as possible. A search engine optimization strategy based on optimizing for 5 keyword phrases is not a good strategy at all. It should consist of 25 or more phrases, usually even 50 or more. After all, what site would not benefit from being #1 on 50 terms instead of 5 terms? Therefore, the first step is to identify the strategic set of keywords and keyword phrases to be optimized, ensuring all permutations are covered including reverse order of words in many cases. Another common mistake is the actual data collection technique. Most will enter search terms, look at #1, #2 and then find their own site, before moving on to the next search terms. Analysis is done by feel, without tracking all of the information in a database where further analysis is possible.
SEO Competitive Data Analysis
While gathering data is necessary in any competitive intelligence or strategic activity, it is the analysis that yields the really important information. If you conducted 50 keyword term searches on each of the three major search engines, and tracked the top 10 results of each search, you would have 1500 results. You would also have many questions:
- Which website appears the most?
- Which site ranks #1 the most?
- Based on the results, which sites are likely to get the most traffic from these terms?
- Does a competitor’s site do better on Google instead of Yahoo?
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges, especially when dealing with such a large number of search terms, is really figuring out which website is really the best performing for these search terms. Google is used more often then Yahoo, so it must carry more weight. A #1 result gets clicked on more often than #2, so there must also be some form of weighting applied to this as well. One method would be to come up with a weighted average based on the anticipated click through percentages.
Managing the Process
Traffic from SEO is critical and a significant amount of effort is necessary in order to optimize properly, beginning with establishing proper parameters and methodology for analysis. If you are working on any type of Search Engine Optimization, you must have data to help answer some critical questions:
- Have any of the SEO strategies of the past 2 months yielded results?
- Are we gaining real ground versus the competition?
- What sites have improved rankings and what can be learned from them?
There are two fundamental choices. Dedicate the necessary resources and implement a repeatable process to conduct your own SEO analysis. Or, if you do not have the bandwidth or resources, hire someone to do it for you.
Add this page of New Tampa SEO to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
