Competitive Analysis: Online Competition Vs. Offline Competition

Who are your competitors? Most companies we deal with answer this question quickly. They will name three or four companies who they consider to be their biggest competitors. The competitors they name are almost always their offline competitors not their online competitors.

You might be thinking this makes a lot of sense in your world as SEO consultants. After all that is why companies are coming to you to figure out how to compete in the online world. And this is true for the most part. Occasionally someone will ask if we mean online or offline but not too often. We don’t qualify the question at the beginning by asking who their main online competitors are because we really need to know both: online and offline competitors. They are the best resource to tell us who their offline competitors are. We look at the online marketing activities of the offline competitors both to determine their level of online marketing activity and to compare their web site to our clients. We learn a lot from this exercise; good content ideas, key phrase ideas and deep linking opportunities to recommend for our clients web site.

Our research determines who their online competitors are. The first step is keyword research. We don’t start online competitive research until we know what key phrases we will be optimizing for. We then determine the top 10 websites they are competing against in Google, Yahoo and MSN for each keyphrase both in the organic listings and sponsored listings. We choose five competitors for both organic and sponsored listings based predominantly on this information after weighting of the results.

The major things we look at for each competitor web site are:

1) On page optimization – page title, meta description, keywords, etc.
2) Off page optimization – blogs, social media optimization, video optimization, etc.
3) Linking – the number of external links, quality of these links, etc.

The goal is to see what the competition is doing and determine the best search engine optimization strategies to implement to get our clients web site to achieve higher search engine rankings than their competition.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Holistic Search Engine Optimization

Internet marketing with all its bells and whistles fundamentally is not that different from other marketing avenues companies pursue. Yes, the implementation strategies and vehicles are different but they both should adhere to principals learned in Marketing 101. Who are you trying to reach? Is it the 30 year old male or the 75 year old grandmother? Or both?

Defining your target audience is second only to defining the goals and objectives of your site. Is your goal to share information and create a community? To establish or strengthen your brand? To sell your products? To sell your services? To become a knowledge portal with several different monetization strategies? Ample time spent in strategic planning lays the foundation for your web site. Combine your goals and objectives with your market research to identify your target audience, do your keyword research and then design your web site to make sure you are reaching this audience and enticing them to do what you want them to do while they are there – buy something, fill out a contact form, call you, etc..

Search engine optimization encompasses many strategies to improve the amount of traffic you are attracting to your web site. Getting this traffic to your web site is one step in the process. You don’t benefit from these efforts unless you are converting these visitors.

Do you have a good user experience on your site? Do people easily understand how to find what they are looking for – quickly? It’s all about quickness, blink and they are gone if your site isn’t instantly understandable. Can they get to what they want within three clicks? Is the design of your web site appealing to your target audience? Are you targeting the right key phrases? Is the code on your pages optimized for these key phrases? How about the back end architecture – is it optimized? Do the search engine bots find your site easy to index, easy to understand? Are you asking for the sale? Appropriately? Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? How many come to your home page and go no farther? How many pages on average do they look at? Which pages have a high bounce rate – meaning the percentage of visitors that bounce from a page – not converting?

A broad, holistic approach to SEO looks at all aspects of your web presence integrating strategy, design and implementation with seo best practices to accomplish your goals.