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Measuring Competitors’ Advantages

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 22, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

When you evaluate a competitive Web site, you need to look past the backlinks, Toolbar PR (which is worthess for competitive measurements), and number of words in the query. To understand how strong a competitive site truly is, you need to establish a metric for that query.

Query-based metrics are tedious but essential to high-powered search engine optimization. If you measure strength with respect to a query, rather than strength with respect to links or PageRank, you can save yourself months of time and effort and cut to the chase.

Every Web site, no matter how large, no matter how well optimized, no matter how many backlinks it possesses, has a weakness. You have to find that weakness with respect to your query so that you can exploit it. Even if you know in advance that you are going to compete on the basis of link anchor text, the sooner you figure out the other guy’s weakness, the sooner you’ll achieve your best possible results.

While most people are aware that surfers click on the first result more often than other results, it is indeed possible to get more click-throughs on a lower result — although it needs to be above the fold in the search results. Your competition’s descriptive text and page title may be his weakness.

His brand may be his weakness. It may be that you can capitalize on bad press that afflicts your enemy and — without referring directly to his PR nightmare — suggest to potential visitors that your site won’t entangle them in the competitor’s controversy. Demonstrate the value of your brand.

His URL may be his weakness. Page URL psychology is still in its infancy, but people tend to trust shorter URLs because they’ve been burned by so many long spammy URLs they would rather find what they are looking for on a page that is close to home. “Close to home” doesn’t necessarily mean there are fewer folders in your path than in your competitors.

Some URLs also use the wrong words. In some queries, if most sites look like they have integrity, an overoptimized URL can make you look bad. In many queries, people do look at what is bolded in the descriptive snippets, titles, and URLs. You have to understand your audience’s psychology to know if URLs are a vulnerability you can exploit.

How many pages does the competition get into query results? Many SEOs now glibly assume that it is better to have two pages shown together than just one. Don’t be so sure of that. In a forest filled with redwoods, an apple tree is still unique. If the other sites look like they are trying too hard, you can seek the advantage of looking like you’re not trying as hard as they are. Negotiate from a position of confidence from the moment the surfer first sees your listing in the results.

His page design may be his weakness. Just because you cannot top the other guy in the search results doesn’t mean he’ll get all the converting traffic. If his page doesn’t lend itself to good conversions, assume that unhappy visitors will return to the search results to look for more useful pages. Be the page that makes it easiest for people to do what they want to do in this query.

His extensive content may be his weakness. I have been trumped more than once by smaller content sites. They see me doing a good job with some topic and decide, “I can do better than Martinez.” Then they put together concise little sites that just slam the topic home with killer design, tight innovation, and super high value content.

I do my best to provide quality content, but a specialist can almost always outgun a generalist. I am a generalist, and so are many other people. It is possible to beat Wal-mart, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Apple to the punch. Smaller sites do it every day by offering specialized value the mega sites cannot.

But be careful in evaluating large content sites. Some large content sites are speciaists. They’ve been specializing so long, or have so many resources to bring into play, that you won’t beat them by specializing your content. Before you decide a large content site is a generalist, make absolutely sure it’s a generalist. A good rule of thumb is that if a large content site has at least three significant sections of relatively unrelated content, they are probably a generalist.

A successful generalist is a Web conglomerate. It lumbers along through search traffic in most queries picking up the long tail surfers. You cannot beat the generalist head on for its brand niche, but you can probably knock it out of the best position on secondary queries.

Teach yourself to look for weaknesses in competitive queries. Along the way, you’ll learn to tighten your own sites’ vulnerabilities and limit their exposure. Just remember that you’ll never completely eliminate your own weaknesses. Eventually, someone will come along and exploit your vulnerabilities. That’s when you’ll know it’s time to change strategies. By then, you may be the big player anyway, in which case you’ll have more options to choose from than when you first entered the competition.