Competitive Analysis

[mneylon]

Good read - must try it out
Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs | SEOmoz

 

[ryanoryan]

Looks good alright. Handy little tool.

 

[TwoHeadsWebDesign]

Thanks BK for yet another super post. All I need now is "time" to go through it in detail but thanks for sharing!!!

 

[Kieran]

Tried it out this week. Works very well. You need the SEOMOZ API key but it dumps out a nice Google Docs report and I like it. If you want a nice tool for automating looking at your top 10 competitors it is nice. Whats even nicer is that he provides the actual spreadsheet so you can copy it and use it right away.

Kieran

 

[TwoHeadsWebDesign]

Can someone help me understand an ongoing question I have not yet been able to crack? I have a client competing in a busy market, but looking at his page one results of competitors there are no great shakes there in terms of basic looking sites, with only a small amount of content, not very well optimised, and then to cap it all off when I run a backlink check I see they have only 4 low rank backlinks with useless anchor text. On the face of it we should we able to make it off page 3 with the number of backlinks and the way in which our Anchor text has been managed.
NB, our site is live about 4 months now.

 

[Elegant_Designs]

Thank you blacknight for the nice share!

 

[Satanta]

Can someone help me understand an ongoing question I have not yet been able to crack?

It's a fairly generic question, so we'll struggle to provide anything meaningful... but when has that ever stopped us?

How are you assessing the backlinks? Most tools are notoriously inaccurate (compare the data from whatever tool you're using to a site you're in control of [and have more accurate data for, e.g. WMT, GA, etc.] and compare the results, you might be surprised at the differences). This could be part of the problem giving you an inaccurate picture of the authority of the sites in question.

From your previous posts, I'm assuming you've a firm grasp on factors like the relevance and theme of the links, so you're considering this when reviewing the sites. There's always an outside chance that there's a penalty at play, but I'd assume you'd have spotted this if it were the case.

Remember to take an holistic approach to it, look beyond the backlinks alone and compare citations/mentions/links from social media activity. If they're engaging well with the users (or users are happily sharing the content even without SMM activity by the sites), this is one area that might be partly relevant.

If the sites in question have been around longer than your client sites, they may have built up a strong historic CTR which will take some time for your client to achieve. This is the most likely reason, but again due to the lack of information it's very difficult to say for sure.

 

[TwoHeadsWebDesign]

Big Thanks for such a thorough answer - very much appreciate your time indeed! Thanks too for the PM which I have replied to in detail.
So to answer publicly for others reading this thread, your observations in the first 3 paras are spot on. I do believe you have a point with the tools Im using for Blink checking - so I need to look at that further. I think you may have come close to the issue with regard to strong historic CTR. I was thinking it could be this, but really wanted to ensure Im on top of my game in all the other areas so that allowing time pass will result well. Anyway, lets see what you make of my PM
Thx again

 

[dumak]

looks like a valuable tool, I will give it a try.

 

[johnphilip2880]

Competitive analysis refers to the techniques applied to find out the different methods that are being used by the competitors to get high ranking in the google.