Watching out for your rivals in business is a fundamental procedure if you want to become king of the castle. By viewing what they're doing and analyzing their success and more importantly their failures (this is something most people neglect in competitive research), you'll have the capacity to keep a leg up and an aggressive edge.
That being said, we're going to look somewhat more inside and out into why you have to be fusing focused examination into your SEO and advanced advertising methodology, a few measurements you ought to be consciously aware of, and also noteworthy results that you can use to generate actionable strategy from. Competitive research has always been an integral part of businesses because it works.
Pushing up the rankings of your target phrases is a big elephant in the room for every SEO plan and every business.
It boils down to rankings and the traffic they produce.
There are a variety of approaches to expand your rankings but there is no one size fits all recipe and often SEO agencies get into a flow of doing the same thing over and over and sometimes I feel decrease their effectiveness due to having a scalable system in place.
First off, know your SERPS. Every SERP is its own league. The rules are different for everyone. There are general rules to apply across the board, but it's smart to consider each SERP for each possible KW existing in its own little world.
This is not a how-to article as there are plenty of those around, but rather an overview of what information you want to collect per SERP. Typically I collect the following information from the top 5 sites for a given KW and also collect the same information for my own site as well. Then I compare.
It takes a while to gather all the data, but once you have it all and organized its actually quite easy to see where the opportunities are.
• on-page: Title & H1 - Is KW contained?
• ranking page power
• page rank
• loadtime
• responsiveness (would it say it is responsive?)
• # of recorded pages
• internal connections
• off-page (domain metrics)
• inbound links
• average domain authority of inbound links
• followed links
• followed/aggregate connections
• total linking domains
• sitewide links
• off (page particular)
• inbound joins
• average Domain power of inbound connections
• followed connections
• followed/aggregate connections
• total connecting spaces
• sitewide joins
• social
• Facebook shares of positioning URL
• tweets of positioning URL
• LinkedIn...
• G +...
• most mainstream content on location
• content recurrence
• common linking domains (which external linking domains do you competitors all share)
Also while gathering all this information, you will use tools that are efficient to gather some non-competitor information about your own site. I do this so that I can find the low hanging fruit and easy wins within my own site and use those to leverage the low hanging fruits from my competitors.
Example: I was working on Brilliant, a ground transportation company and noticed that some of the landing pages bounce rate were very high. I also noticed that the competition had crappy design, bad above the fold content and were not very far ahead, link-wise. Everything else from competitive research was about equal. So I knew those were our opportunities.
But I had an idea to experiment with. It has been passed around that Google is factoring user interactions and social more heavily into the ranking algorithm. So without building any links we first worked on the on page above the fold content and bounce rate by adding a clean header and interactive 360 degree tour guide on the Mercedes sprinter limo page. We also starting bloggingFand becoming active on Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus occasionally linking with our social accounts back to the page.
Guess what happened? Without building any traditional links we went from 13 to 7 in one week. I think it's fair to say that social media can be considered an legit SEO tool from this point forward.
I did another experiment with a local Utah breast augmentation site. This is a second site for a prominent plastic surgeon in the area and it's not even finished yet. The site is still being built. But when when we were doing competitive research we noticed most of the people ranking for our terms were ranking with non-optimized pages and were relying solely on a high DA of a general plastic surgery site.
So we simply built a new site with a smaller focus on breast augmentation by simply having a site with the KW in the URL and all the on-page optimized to that KW; even with lorem ipsum we are ranking 6.
Like I said: with competitive research the research takes ages; it probably took me two weeks to gather all that data and organize it. But once we did, it was easy to see where to go and what to do.
I think in 2015 focusing that research just on competitive social media will be the next big thing. Be on the lookout for tools that do just that.