Find, Rank, Assess, Track, and Beat the Competition

July 22, 2010 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 300 views // View Comments

Learn how to beat that competition, like Ali in his prime!

This is a guest post from Jeff Herbst, the founder of jobZook. Jeff is also an e-commerce SEO enthusiast with The Supplies Guys, a leading online retailer of Oki toner supplies as well as other genuine and compatible ink or toner cartridges for the office. You can also follow their tips and deals on Twitter: @SuppliesGuys.

If you are actively marketing your brand and or products online, you need to understand your competition. Regardless of the channel you are competing within (SEO, PPC, social, shopping) finding, assessing and tracking your competition is critical to the success of your own initiatives. That is why I put together this 60-minute action plan, which will give you a solid foundation in launching your competitive research.

Before we get started: Open up a spreadsheet and create that contains the following column headers. As you perform your research, quickly record the following statistics.

URL (the homepage URL of your competitor).
Index PageRank (the PageRank of their homepage according to Google Toolbar).
Inbound Links (# of inbound links from your favorite link tracking program, free options are Yahoo Site Explorer or OpenSiteExplorer).
Est. Monthly Unique Visitors (# of estimated unique visitors / month from Compete.com).
Tier (classify your competitors into tiers based on the above attributes, best to use a list ranging from 1 – 4).
Optional Columns: # indexed pages, PPC presence (yes or no), SEO presence (yes or no), Company Blog URL, Twitter handle, Facebook page, YouTube channel.

1.) Finding Your Competitors

The first step is to find your online competition and luckily, for you there are a wide variety of free tools and techniques available. The following list will present tools & techniques from simplest to most complex.

Google your targeted keywords (which could be the products you sell, primary content your site provides, etc) and see who is dominating the organic and paid search results.
Head over to the Google Directory (and other reliable directories) and open the category that best identifies you. Take note of others listed within the particular category.
Use Google Trends Websites to find what other sites a visitor to your competitor’s website visited.
If you are selling products then review the competition coming in from Amazon.com, eBay.com and other shopping channels such as Shopzilla.com. Search for your products and see which of your competitors are participating in these channels.
If you are a content site or provide a service, you might want to spend some time searching the news and blog aggregators (Google blog search, Technorati, AllTop, BlogCatalog, etc) for sites participating in your niche.
After you have identified a few of your biggest threats, it is time to head back to your favorite search engine to perform an advanced search engine operators to find even more competitors. Related:www.sitegoeshere.com (this will show you other sites the search engine believes are related).

2.) Assessing Your Competitors

After you have found the top fifteen or twenty competitors it is time to start separating the whales from the minnows. When assessing your competition, remember to focus on the metrics that your business considers when determining its own success. Do not get caught up in breaking down every single metric, you will waste an awful amount of time.

First thing to do is establish just how big your competitor’s site is. Run a site search command independently within Google, Bing and Yahoo (site:www.sitegoeshere.com). Although this is by no means an exact science, it will give you a good guess onto the size of your competitor’s website based on the number of pages the search engine has indexed.
Analyze PageRank across the competitor’s website starting on the homepage and moving inward for deeper pages. Focus on pages that are relevant to your business objectives. Make sure to have the Google ToolBar or an SEO plug-in installed.
Re-visit Google Trends and this time use the “Search,” section. Compare your brand keywords with theirs to check which competitor has the stronger brand presence.
While you are determining PageRank, quickly check the in-bound links each page is receiving. The number of in-bound links a page receives helps search engines rank a particular page’s popularity. You can either use a free or paid back link checker or do it the old-fashioned way with advanced search engine operators. Link:www.sitegoeshere.com –site:www.sitegoeshere.com (searches for referring links from everywhere, accept the competitor’s internal links). Site:.edu inanchor:www.sitegoeshere.com (searches .edu sites for your competitor’s URL in the anchor text, it might be better to substitute in the brand name of the competitor).
Visit Compete.com to identify approximately, what your competitor’s web traffic is and who is referring them traffic. Then move on to Alexa.com and assess their market reach using “Alexa Reach.”
Estimate your competitor’s social media presence by analyzing their social bookmarking presence (Digg.com, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati, etc.). Is the web talking about their brand?
Use the Benchmarks tool in Google Analytics to compare key metrics to sites, which are comparable in size and within your industry.
If you were competing in paid search (Google AdWords, PPC, etc) then it would be beneficial to find out what your paid search competitor’s strategies are within those channels. Use a tool such as SpyFu.com or KeywordSpy.com to learn how much your competitors are spending in AdWords.
You may want to find research reports and surveys that disclose the conversion rates of retailers within your industry. Now, these might be expensive but if they can be extremely enlightening if conversions are vital for your business. A good place to start is eMarketer.com.
Again, if you are in the business of selling products then looking into a company database such as Hoover’s or D&B might be a wise choice for determining revenue estimates.

3.) Ranking Your Competitors

There are several ideologies when it comes to ranking your competitors, dependent upon: a) the type of business you are operating and b) what metrics are most applicable and relevant to the overall business objectives. For example if your business sells products then the most important metrics could be revenue based (conversion rate, sales, average order value, abandonment rate, bounce rate, etc).

However, if you are a content site then obviously you are more concerned with popularity (unique visitors, referring site traffic, average time on site, advertisement click through rates, etc). After you have dug up all the information you can, start segmenting your competitors into different tiers. It is best to start with the biggest competitors (Tier 1) and move your way down (Tier 4 or 5, whichever makes sense).

Aim to identify the top ten or fifteen competitors that you will be tracking. It is important to determine where it is your company fits into this picture so that you can set goals and use these competitors for benchmarking when initiating your strategy.

4.) Tracking Your Competitors

You have taken the effort to find, rank and assess your top ten or fifteen competitors now it is time to track their marketing activities over time.

Set-up Google Alerts, to send you daily or weekly e-mails on your competitor’s brand related keywords and URL. This way you can automatically track their web presence.
Monitor their e-mail newsletters or promotions by subscribing to their newsletter (remember to use an e-mail address separate from your company domain).
Jump on Twitter and or Facebook to find what your competitors are doing (if anything) in the social channels. Use each channel’s site search to type in your competitor’s brand and or your targeted keywords in order to track the conversations. Monitor their usage with a tool like SocialMention.com or BackType.com.
Set monthly reminders or use automated software to monitor search engine ranking positions for your targeted keywords, track their site popularity with Google trends and back link tools and continue to use a tool to track their paid search campaigns.

5.) Beating Your Competitors

Now that we armed you with this knowledge and information, it is time to start planning your action plan for out-thinking and out-performing the competition. Have a few “mindstorming” sessions with your employees and compile a list of actionable tactics. Consider if off-line marketing should influence or affect online marketing at all. Then you have prioritized the tactics and assigned responsibilities, set your goals and objectives. Now, get to work because the ball is in your court, the nice thing about online marketing is that you are in charge of your own destiny!

There are plenty of other tactics for each of these five steps, so be sure to add a few of your favorites in the comments below, happy hunting!

Thanks to Jeff for submitting this excellent guest post! If anyone else would like to submit a guest post, I’m all for it! Submit your inquiries on my guest blogging page.

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Search Engine Marketing

Hi Jacob thanks for all great points. Yes focus groups are a more formal way to assess customer opinions about products, and they can be coordinated in-house or outsourced to a product research firm.
Mike

Chances are, you have a lot more competitors than you think. so tracking top 20 google results on various keywords for your business can provide you added benefits.

I will add that conversation tracking services like Echo and UberVu also allow you to track through public conversations, blog posts and traditional media sources.

If you want to track back links, yahoo explorer as well as OSE are best tools to use, you should be expert to us linkdomain tags in yahoo explorer, because by defaultm yahoo will only show first 1000 back links only
KevinEdwardLong

Nice one AgentSEO - passing this one to my team to get started on right away. We have done a few of the steps but never taken it all the way. Thanks for the push.