Competitive Analysis for SEO - SEMNE

HOW TO BEAT YOUR COMPETITORS:
THE RACE FOR SEARCH TRAFFIC

CASIE GILLETTE
DIRECTOR OF ONLINE MARKETING
10
YEARS
SEO
@komarketing
casieg@gmail.com
@casieg
casiegillette.com
#SEMNE • @CASIEG • @KOMARKETING

• WTF
–
search
result
screenshot
It’s always a bummer to do a search and find that your site is nowhere to be found! What can
you do? Why? You wonder. This is what I like to call competitive denial and there are three
stages.

Compe4tor
Denial
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result
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COMPETITIVE DENIAL: WTF

WHY?
The first stage of competitive denial is the why. Why are they showing up and I’m not? Why are
they doing better than me? Symptoms of this stage include curiosity, intrigue, and wonder.

T
HEY
AREN’T
BETTER
THAN
ME!
The next stage usually consists of phrases like “They aren’t better than me” and “This is
bulls##t.” A little less calm than the Why stage and tends to include anger, confusion & sadness.

F
- EXCITABILITY
INE
Lastly, we have the “Fine” stage. You come to accept it is what it is and you are ready to move
on and fight the good fight.

STEP 1: SEARCH RESULTS

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RESOURCE
RESULTS
COMPANY
RESULTS
Before we get to the competitors themselves, we must understand the search results. We
need to understand the what vs. the who. What is showing up? What type of content?

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BLOG
POST
WHITE
PAPER
SERVICE
PAGE
What content is ranking? Blog posts? Internal company pages? What is that you need to be
targeting to get your site to show up here?

I
NTENT
All of this comes down to understanding the intent of the user. Or at least what Google
thinks the intent is.

WARNING
THERE’S ABOUT TO BE SOME TRUTHINESS

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WE MUST
UNDERSTAND THE
WHAT

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SEM
RUSH
There are some great tools that can help us with the WHAT. When you put a
keyword phrase into SEMRush, it will give you related terms, phrase match terms,
and the full set of results and URLs.

SERP
STAT
SERPstat will give you the suggested search terms but also questions. With the
hummingbird algorithm and Google’s dedication to answering the user query, it’s
important to know what your audience is actually looking for when they search a
keyword.

AD
WORDS
One of my favorite tricks – place the search result URL into the AdWords keyword
planner tool. Hat tip: @aimclear

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YOUR SITE HERE
The bottom line is, if you want your site here, you need to understand what type
of result the search engines actually want to put there.

SEM
RUSH
The second part of this is understanding the content actually ranking. With
SEMRush, we can put the URL in and get all sorts of amazing data. We can see
traffic, links, related keywords, and much more.

RAVEN
RavenTools also has a great feature, Research Central, that gives you some
meaty information on a specific URL. It pulls link data, keyword data, design
data, and more.

RAVEN
Backlink data includes both Moz and Majestic information.

MOZ
Of course Open Site Explorer also can provide link data on a specific URL.

RAVEN
One of the most interesting features of Raven’s tool is the Semantic Analyzer
which looks at what the page is about. This information is invaluable because we
can look at all the sites rankings to understand the semantics involved.

BUZZ
SUMO
Perhaps the URL doesn’t have many back links. What about shares? BuzzSumo
gives us the number of shares for a particular URL by network.

BUZZ
SUMO
We can begin to understand the value of those shares by looking at who is
sharing the content. Are these people influential? Do they have a decent reach?

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result
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WE WANT TO
IDENTIFY TRENDS IN
THE WHAT

STEP 2: COMPETITORS

THIS IS THE BELMONT.
The Belmont is the longest race of the Triple Crown. You aren’t going to perform
a competitive analysis and suddenly be killing it. It takes time, patience, and
understanding of the competition. It also means ensuring your horse is the best.

All
the
components
• It’s
not
that
easy
though.
• Chart
of
all
Online
marke4ng
components
ONLINE MARKETING ISN’T JUST SEO.
I love this map from Gartner that looks at the online marketing landscape.
Messy? Yup. Online marketing is more than just SEO and all of these factors play
a role in how your site performs.

We have to look beyond the simple piece of content. Beyond just links or title
tags. We have to look at the big picture.

We want to look at all the data associated to not only the URL, but the site.

We want to look at social engagement and the effort involved.

We want to look at newsletters or events and anything that else that is
playing a role in a companies online presence.

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BRAND
LINKS
CONTENT
PRSOCIAL
We must understand how these factors help a site and we want to know if
our competitors are using one, many, or all of them.

PLEASE EMAIL CASIEG@GMAIL.COM FOR
THIS WORKSHEET

What makes this data gathering important is we can then take a side-by-side look at our
competition. We need to know the whole playing field to understand where we need to
be spending our time and money.
COMP 3
SOCIAL
YOU
SOCIAL
PPC
SEO
COMP 1
RETARGETING
PPC
SEO
SOCIAL
PR
TESTING
COMP 2
PPC
SEO
SOCIAL
PR
PPC
SEO
EVENT
A/B

C ODE
One of the first places I like to look for this information is in a site’s source code.

The code can provide an inside look at the various marketing efforts occurring on site.

Along with SEO tags or PPC tags, we can look for A/B testing tags, Remarketing tags,
Live chat code and more.

TRACKED
CONTENT
Want to check up on your competitor without constantly have to visit their site?
Tracked Content will do it for you.

CHANGE
DETECTION
An oldie but a goodie – Change Detection will email you when the content on a
page changes.

C ONTENT
Along with the code, we also want to understand the type of content competitors are creating.

WHICH HORSE SHOULD YOU
PUT YOUR MONEY ON?

SCREAMING
FROG
One of the best ways to figure out what type of content is on a site is to scan it.
Screaming Frog will crawl all the URLs of a site, giving you insights into
competitive content.

ARTICLES • BLOG POSTS • RESOURCES
Look for things like articles, blog posts, resource sections and more. Note:
Change your user agent to Google. Some sites block SF and we want to most
accurate picture.

OSE
Back to our tools – these can help us determine how specific pieces of content
perform. OSE can show you the top linked pages on a site.

SEM
RUSH
SEMRush will also show us the top indexed pages along with backlinks for each
of those pages.

RANK
TRACKER
Moz also has rank tracker, that will let you see if a site is ranking for a particular
keyword. You can save that search and keep an eye on it.

BUZZ
SUMO
Lastly, BuzzSumo can show us the top shared content on a domain. What is that
your audience really likes? What is it they share with their friends? You can even
set date ranges.

With all of the information, you can start putting together the pieces of the
puzzle and figure out where you really should be spending your budget.

L
INKS
One of our favorite subjects – where the heck are your competitors getting their links from?

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result
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BRAND
LINKS
CONTENT
PRSOCIAL
We know that links are still a pretty big factor in how a site performs. But we don’t want to just
know how many links. We want to know what type of links are helping the site.

OSE
If you haven’t noticed, many of our tools do a lot of things. Moz’s OSE lets us
see who is linking, from where, using what anchor text and more.

MAJESTIC
Majestic has a ton of great information. It will show you new links, old links, link
profiles, when a link was created, and when a link is no longer active.

By looking at the overall picture, we can begin to understand why a site who
maybe doesn’t have a ton of links does better. We can also start to see how
they are obtaining links.
COMP 3
PARTNERS
YOU
PARTNERS
MEDIA
BLOGS
COMP 1
PRESS
RELEASES
MEDIA
BLOGS
SPAM
COMMENTS
COMP 2
SPAM
MEDIA
BLOGS
PRESS
RELEASES
BLOGS
COMMENTS
SPAM

WE WANT TO
IDENTIFY TRENDS IN
THE LINK PROFILE

MEDIA
TARGETS
AUTHORS
& EDITORS
INFLUENCERS
PARWTeN wEaRnSt
to leave that link audit with Ga UpEoSrTtf oOlPioS
of potential media targets and
partnership opportunities. We want to know who the editors and authors are
that we should be talking to.

Ok…now we’ve seen their source code, we’ve looked at their content, we’ve
looked at their links…it’s time to get creepy!

• SEO PLUGINS
• A/B TESTING CODE
• SCHEMA MARKUP
• OPEN GRAPH TAGS
• ADWORDS
• ANALYTICS
BUZZ
SUMO
Remember how BuzzSumo will show you shares? It will also show you who
shared the content (on Twitter).

• SEO PLUGINS
• SCHEMA MARKUP
• OPEN GRAPH TAGS
• ADWORDS
• ANALYTICS
BUZZ
SUMO
You can break individual accounts down by companies, bloggers, journalists,
regular people, and influencers.

RIPPLES
Google+ ripples are also an excellent way to find specific people who are
sharing content. AJ Kohn Ripples. Did you know you can email people when
you post an update?

• SEO PLUGINS
• SCHEMA MARKUP
• OPEN GRAPH TAGS
• ADWORDS
• ANALYTICS
One of Facebook’s “newer” features, allows you to watch other pages. Keep in
mind, those pages are notified that you are watching them.

FOLLOWER
WONK
Company employees can give you some inside tips on what’s happening
Followerwonk allows you to search Twitter bios by keyword. Searching a
company can give you an easy list of employees to follow. Create private lists so
you don’t look like stalker.

TOPSY
Topsy Influencers can give you both employees and even non-employee
influencers for a brand.

And of course there is LinkedIn. Along with general queries, you can use
advanced search queries to find specific positions within a company.

• WTF
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result
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BRAND
LINKS
CONTENT
PRSOCIAL

NO MORE WTF!

YOU JUST WON.

THANK YOU!
@komarketing
casieg@gmail.com
@casieg
Slideshare.net/casieg
casiegillette.com

Competitive Analysis for SEO - SEMNE

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