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Competitive Analysis

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This is my presentation for Pubcon 2009 on the competitive analysis panel.

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Page 1: Competitive Analysis
Page 2: Competitive Analysis

I Am Brand New To All Of This - Where Do I Start?

• Hubs - Find and Identify the “easy ones”. Places to find content ideas, links, sites that will help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.

• Anchor Text - Find and Identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks for the words they do.

• Unique Domains Linking In - Find and Identify to get a better idea of the work that is ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.

• Strong Content - Find and identify the strongest pages of competitors.

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Hubs - The Easy Ones To Snoop

• Press• Review Sites • Forums • Local• Directories• Articles Sites

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Press• Press - How is the competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities,

linking opportunities, as well as seeing how the competition is using press for SEO, social marketing etc.

http://trendwatching.com/ is a great resource for learning about trend watching.

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Search For Review Sites• Review Sites - Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who is writing

about them? How are these reviews getting done? Blog Posts? Videos? Images?

The way you search makes a difference!

You now know where your site can get its products reviewed, and what is being said.

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Forums• Forums - Find out what people are discussing in your industry. Although there are

many forums out there that no-follow, there are plenty of forums out there that do-follow and could be a great source for link building, discussion ideas and topics.

What are people talking about? What can you learn? Can you find any opportunities?

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Local• Local - What, if anything, are your competitors doing LOCAL wise? Do some research, and

learn how to gain valuable citations that will help you dominate local search!

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Directories• Directories - (I know I know) but it is very important to find the sites that are linking to more then one

competitor, it is also a great tool for keyword research and finding “niche” places to gain links from.

This is a great way of finding the more “trusted” directories that your competition is listed with. Also by looking at their listing, you can see their anchor text and how they vary it, and use it!

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Articles Submission Websites• Articles Submission Websites - Another great way to keyword research, generate content

ideas, and see how they are using these sites (and how many of them) for link building.

You can then go to each article site and do a search for the URL, and see what they are posting, what keywords they are going after (by anchor text) and how many articles, links etc. they have.

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Anchor Text & The Allinanchor: Search Operator

Allinanchor: This search operator is still important for researching the competition because it shows the sites that have high number of inbound links with specific keywords. This helps you keep a better eye on your progress as well as snooping on how the competition is doing.

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Search Operator

You now know which sites are doing the best job with their anchor text (and what keywords they are going after) so its time to see where they get all their links from!

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Now that you know the sites that are on top by using “allinanchor:”, you can do a search with those sites and the keywords that you are targeting to get a better idea of places to find links, and why the competition ranks.

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ALSO: You can now start to compare the top sites, and gain valuable information (including top keywords) from sites like Compete.com

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You can take the top sites and compare the data side by side.

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If you use tools that are available to you (and FREE), like the SEO For Firefox Tool (by Aaron Wall of SEOBook), You can get very exciting site comparison data.

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Site Comparison Tools• Majestic SEO• Compete• Raven Tools• SEO For Firefox SEOBook.com• Alexa• Trellian• Quantcast• Hitwise• Google Insights & Google Trends• SpyFu (spy on PPC too)

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Unique Domains Linking In

• Use these same tools to help you find out how many unique domains are linking to the competition. This will give you a better idea for link building and how much effort you are going to have to put in.

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Strong Content

• What pages of the competition are getting the most traffic? What pages have the most links going to them? How can you tell which pages are doing the best on social media sites?

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The easiest option is to use the SEO For Firefox tool to gather this data by doing a site: search in Google. This will tell you what pages/content are doing the best. Its obvious what you would then do with that kind of data!

Data for: Digg, Delicious, SU, Twitter and more! Great for researching STRONG content!

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Yahoo Site Explorer• You can get valuable information about who is linking to a specific site OR page with YSE.

You can then use this data to give you ideas of creating even better content!

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Social Media For FirefoxThis is a great tool to use for research, and finding STRONG content that has done well with social networks.

When you have the tool installed, you can browse on any site, or bring up any Google search - show all pages to a site, whatever you want, and it will show you the data! Download the tool here:

www.97thfloor.com/social-media-for-firefox

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Google Search Operators• Google has many Search Operators that you can use to research the competition, find great

sources for links, and do some pretty intensive competitive analysis - and its all FREE!

The source of these Search Operators can be found here: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html With an explanation of each operator and what it will do for you. All great and worth the time it takes to research. Highly recommend!

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Matt SiltalaDream Systems Media, Owner

http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com@Matt_Siltala on Twitter