This week sees us finishing the series with a case study covering search engine optimisation. The case study will cover a ‘fictional competitor’ and highlight how you can react to your competitors.

1. Sun Tzu – The Art of SEO part 7
Last week we started our ‘The Art of War’ series covering design, CMS and SEO. This week
sees us finishing the series with a case study covering search engine optimisation. The case study
will cover a ‘fictional competitor’ and highlight how you can react to your competitors.
“When the enemy is close at hand and remains quiet, he is relying on the natural strength
of his position.”
We will be using online tools to help us and for our ‘The Art of War’ series we are calling them
‘agents’. The agents we will be using are:
- Ahrefs ‘Site Explorer’
- Google’s Keyword Tool
- Google Search
- Page Rank Checker
- SEO Centro’s ‘Meta Analyzer
- Whois Services
For an overview and links for these tools please refer to:
http://www.neogain.com/sun-tzu-the-art-of-seo-part-1
http://www.neogain.com/sun-tzu-the-art-of-seo-part-2
This case study covers a fictional competitor, but is a website that does exist. The website has
details of a home product with amazon affiliate links. We won’t divulge specific details about the
website as we don’t want their actual competitors to use us to do their homework!
Using Google search it is clear the fictional competitor is off to a good start, their domain name
is actually two important keywords together. They are top of Google and just below two Google
AdWords adverts.
However using ‘Page Rank Checker’ I discover their Google PR is only 1, so that is the second
weakness that has been discovered.

2. Now using ahrefs ‘Site Explorer’ let’s look at some details statistics.
The data is extremely revealing they have a weak search engine optimisation strategy. What is
also revealing is that those backlinks only come from one website! So let’s examine whois
details for their website and the site providing the backlinks. On close examination it turns out
both domains are owned by the same person!
Already there are at least four strategies that can be used.
Upon examination their anchor text from the website are the same keywords as their own domain
name, which as you know relates to the product they cover.
Now using Google’s Keyword Tool I looked at their monthly search data. Their keyword yields
14k+ monthly searches in the UK, but they are missing out on a wide range of related keywords,
some for words related to their product and some for products that have strong synergy.
Coming up…..
In the next ‘The Art of SEO’ article we will carry on focusing on this specific competitor and
then provide some tactics to not just ‘attack’ this competitors position, but also strength our own.
Please take this moment to subscribe to our blog. Plus if you need SEO assistance, please
don’t hesitate to contact us.