Competitive SEO Analysis for Beginners

Posted by Michael Martinez on September 9, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

If you’re just learning about search engine optimization and you need to evaluate what your competitors are up to, looking at Toolbar PR and backlink reports from Yahoo! are not going to tell you anything useful.

The first thing you need to know when doing competitive analysis is which queries are being competed for. That is, competitive analysis begins with keyword analysis. You have to divide your queries into three groups: the “money” queries with the most traffic, the secondary queries with relatively little traffic, and the irrelevant queries.

Your keyword expressions can usually be broken into “roots” and “qualifiers”. “Britney Spears” is a root keyword. “News” is a qualifier for “Britney Spears”. “Posters” is a qualifier for “Britney Spears”. “Orange Trees” is a root keyword. “How to grow” is a qualifier. “How to prune” is a qualifer.

Roots are concepts, not words.

Qualifiers are concepts, not words.

I am not talking about Latent Semantic Indexing. I am not talking about Semantic Analysis. All I am talking about is breaking down an active query that drives traffic to Web sites into two components: roots and qualifiers. If you feel compelled to think, say, or write something that uses the word “semantic” then you need to stop, go to the top of this article, and start reading again.

If you are new to search engine optimization, can you really depend on a keyword tool to show you which queries have the most traffic? No. The most heavily optimized keywords usually suffer from a lot of rank checking, so their top keyword variations may have disproportionate hit counts in keyword suggestion tools. The lower queries may actually be the money queries.

How do you tell? You look at the query results pages themselves. Look at listing titles, listing text snippets, page URLs, and count the number of sponsored ads on the pages. Look at the top listing and note whether it is rewarded with sitelinks, a map, or picture.

In short, follow the money. People who intend to make money off of queries invest the most time in optimizing for those queries. They don’t obsess over links. They go after everything that can be grabbed: titles, URLs, in-page text, meta descriptions, and paid ads.

If a query show relatively few of those clues, it may not be very competitive. But don’t stop with the first page of search results. Look deeper and see how many sites are competing. Scan the search results for as many as five pages.

Make a note of which domains come up the most often. If you see 3 to 5 domains appearing more than once in the top 50 results, the odds are pretty good they want that name space. If you see little to no paid advertising in the margins, the odds are pretty good there is little to no money being made of the query.

Next, take a look at who is competing on the basis of anchor text. If the search engine you’re evaluating supports inanchor, try a search for “inanchor:’query expression’”. That shows you which Web pages have anchor text pointing to them using the specific keywords (you can use “allinanchor:” and drop the quotes).

Don’t stop with the first page. Look 2-3 search results pages deep. Do you see any familiar domain names? Make a note of who is playing with links.

Next, use the “inititle” query operator to find out who is putting keywords into the title. Make a note of who the major players are.

Next, use the “inurl” query operator to find out who is putting keywords into the URL. Make a note of who the major players are.

Finally, use the “intext” or “inbody” query operator to find out who is brave (and smart) enough to put the keywords into the indexable text of their pages. Make a note of who the major players are.

In a truly competitive query you should have easily identified 10-20 domains that are competing for the name space. If your list is at least that long, don’t attempt to optimize for this query.

In a moderately competitive query you should find 5-10 competitive domains. You can try to optimize for this query but you may not have much initial success.

In a lightly competitive query you should find no more than 5 competitors. This is where you should make your play. You may be able to find dozens of such queries related to your Web site’s topic. You may only find a few. It depends on how popular your topic is with searchers.

You don’t have to know how many backlinks a site has to understand that it is playing the anchor text card. In fact, since you cannot determine which links pass value, there is no point in doing link research as it’s just a waste of time.

However, if you want to know how much effort a competitor has invested in link building, compiling a few numbers will give you a rough idea of where the backlinks are piling up. It won’t tell you which backlinks help and it will not show you who has the strongest backlink profile.

If you’re going to use Yahoo! for your link research (a generally bad idea, especially if you’re concerned with Google’s search results), then make sure you eliminate as many backlinks as possible. You don’t want to see internal links in a Yahoo! backlink report. You don’t want to see more than one link per domain in a Yahoo! backlink report. If you can figure out how to get rid of the bogus, non-existent backlinks that Yahoo! reports, you may actually find some useful information.

Most SEOs are not aware that Yahoo! reports false links. Yahoo! will show you links it scraped from Javascript. Do not ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, bet your competitive advantage on a Yahoo! link report. You’re a damned fool to use one in the first place but if you’re just looking to see who is building links it MAY give you an indication of relative link strength.

For example, if site A has 30,000 backlinks and site B has 10,000 backlinks, that’s a pretty reliable indicator that site A has more backlinks than site B. It doesn’t mean that site A has 30,000 backlinks. If site A has 10,000 backlinks that would be surprising.

Remember that Yahoo! reports far more links than either exist or pass value.

Now, if you want to know how well a competitive site uses its internal linkage, do a site search on Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!. Do you get similar results on any 2 or 3 of those search engines? If you do, that site most likely has pretty good internal linkage. But that’s just one test.

Now look at the navigational text on the site. If their links pointing to the root URL say “home” or something else that doesn’t help, you can safely assume the site has either not been optimized or has been optimized by someone who doesn’t understand the power of internal linkage.

If the internal navigation points to the root URL with some useful text, then do a site search for that navigational text. See how many pages come up for the text. While you might think it’s reasonable to assume that every page uses optimized anchor text, you may be surprised to learn that many sites don’t. One of the most common problems sites share with weak internal navigation text is that they use inconsistent navigational systems.

If you find a site has a fairly consistent internal navigation system, it’s probably well optimized.

If you find more than 3 well-optimized sites, don’t expect to do better than to get a page into the top 5 results. If you grab the number 1 position for a targeted query, great, but don’t expect it just because you have few competitors and lots of room for opportunity.

Your competitive analysis at this stage is crude. It’s about what I would demand of a beginner. Nonetheless, few SEOs know how to do real competitive analysis. They don’t know what to look for because they babble endlessly about Toolbar PR and Yahoo! backlink reports.

You may be a beginner, but if you can put down the Google Toolbar and back away from the bogus PR number system without stumbling over a nonsensical Yahoo! backlink report, you’re already miles ahead of your more experienced competition.

Good luck in the SERPs.

12 Comments on Competitive SEO Analysis for Beginners

By dodito on September 10, 2007 at 3:41 pm

Michael,
you mention that if you encounter 10-20 domains competing for that name space, to not try to optimized for those keywords. What if you’d have no choice. What would you recommend doing in that case. The major weak spot I see with many is (fairly) weak internal linking and not all of them having those keywords in their menu’s or otherwise uniformly spread in anchor text on all pages.

Patrick

By tinkerbellchime on September 10, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Thanks for this generous post. I’m going to try this method and create a track sheet to tally results.

By Michael Martinez on September 10, 2007 at 7:57 pm

dodito, any advice given on a forum or blog should be taken with a grain of salt. If you’re in a position where you have to compete for a competitive name space before you’ve got much experience that makes the task harder but not impossible.

People sometimes have to undergo a “baptism under fire” and bypass the standard safe apprenticeship.

That doesn’t mean the task is impossible.

By dodito on September 10, 2007 at 10:57 pm

Michael, haha that was funny. Yes OK, well… let’s have the cannons then ! Your method DID help in understanding what I intuitively knew in terms of competitiveness and which sites are heavily optimized. Now you can more or less see a drop off where for example the first 20 websites do *all* of it (and a lot more I don’t know about I am sure) and where sites suddenly start to get less methodical. I guess that area is a first good region to aim for ! Thanks for all the great posts, I am starting to understand them better and better.

By wibbler on September 11, 2007 at 2:12 pm

Micheal, thanks for another great post - it leads me to my problems and understanding where I have gone wrong in a roundabout way as it happens.

*****
As you are quite specific in mentioning backlinks in your competetive research, can you hint at whether or not anchor text played a significant role in the florida update in 2003?
*****

Im about to embark on some changes across hundreds of domains, and Im pinning my last hopes of ever ranking in google on these changes.

(I am making a bold assumption also that once the changes have been made, sites which are non-greybarred on the toolbar PR (IE still in the index), my sites - if the changes are correct - should clear the Florida filters regarding backlinks and anchors and attain a more natural / unpunished position.

Does this make sense?

Thanks
Wibbler.

By wibbler on September 11, 2007 at 2:13 pm

Sorry - misspelled Michael - will attempt to get it right next time.

By Michael Martinez on September 11, 2007 at 7:42 pm

Whatever happened in 2003 occurred so long ago it has no relevance to today’s Google, which is at least two generations in design away from that Google.

By wibbler on September 12, 2007 at 12:31 am

“Whatever happened in 2003 occurred so long ago it has no relevance to today’s Google, which is at least two generations in design away from that Google.”

I was thinking that the “filters” or at least the “methods” affecting my domains are still in place - maybe there are more problems aswell as those applied by the florida update, but I had felt that I needed to find out what happened back then aswell - because that was when I basically lost 100% of google rankings.

By Michael Martinez on September 12, 2007 at 7:28 am

I breeezed right through that update, believe it or not. I saw the agonizing in the forums but didn’t have to really analyze it for myself or anyone else. It was not, however, the Hilltop update many people assumed it was. Google introduced Hilltop in 2002 (through Google News).

I would guess in retrospect that the big 2003 update may signal where Google began implementing serious filtering to compensate for link spam. But only a Googler would know for sure.

By wibbler on September 12, 2007 at 2:05 pm

Michael,

“I breeezed right through that update, believe it or not.”

I do believe that you did - some people did and many more didnt. Many unsuspecting “page chucker uppers” probably landed a cash cow - without a clue why.

I went through all kinds of theories about the 03 update. I wrote the most monstrous LSI “information gathering” systems thinking it may be what my pages were missing (related words from a ducument set is the way I coded it) - as opposed to something I had done. Tried adding words to pages which my systems had dug out - given a seed of the target keywords for my sites. All to no avail.

Having recently decided to re-address these old sites (some are as old as 01 I think), I started reading heavily and ended up in here.

Now that you have written this :-
“2003 update may signal where Google began implementing serious filtering to compensate for link spam.”

I think the situation is - well - lets just say more confirmed in my mind at what my network of domains has about it which could fall foul of the filters.

If I narrowed in a bit onto the word “spam” - I would perhaps prefer to define that to meaning me simply adding links on my own sites pointing at my own other sites. I didnt mass spam gb’s bloggs or anything like that - infact I didnt even manually post to get links.

In summary, I suspect that its a combination of a couple of things to do with my linking which had me busted.

A point I would like to share in return - I have what I call “floridered” sites (I have a lot of them - there must be millions still out there). Those hit hard. And I recently placed new pages in those domains and flung in a couple of links to them. Interestingly, those pages rank from 10-50 already after around 2 weeks. (Yet to see if they hold).

I enjoy this business - I was ready to give up and get a job, but reading this tells me that ranking on G is still possible, even for affiliate sites like my own.

I guess the SEO journey is one which continually “restarts” over and over and over again. A bit like groundhog day.

:)

Cheers
Wibbler.

By tinkerbellchime on September 12, 2007 at 11:34 pm

“If I narrowed in a bit onto the word “spam” - I would perhaps prefer to define that to meaning me simply adding links on my own sites pointing at my own other sites.”

Hi Wibbler–Interesting story. Thanks for sharing. I’m new, so I didn’t have websites back then, but I’ve got a few now. I currently have two sites on the same subject, but with different content. I put up footer links from one of them to the other and have had no problem. How extensive is the linking between your old sites? How many sites did you link together? I wonder what the limit is on intersite linking by the same owner. I’m very open about it. If you’ve noticed, Michael also has links to and from at least two of the sites he owns.

By wibbler on September 13, 2007 at 9:34 am

Tinkerbellchime - the interlinking on most sites isnt that bad really one way linking mainly, but the odd “map” whereby every domains root page links to every other domains root page - is a real mess.

This used to work *EXTREMELY* well - and we made a LOT money doing this sort of thing.

We would interlink any number of domains in various ways - if you can think of a way - then we have done it.

I dont think its the way which you interlink sites now that matters so much (with the obvious exceptions (ip, whois, registrar identicality - and then of course grossly interlinking where you have sites a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h all linking to each other - all bad)) - but I think that one must be more careful with the anchors - make them look natural.

I do not honestly know what the maximum limit is on sites owned by the same person.

If there is a limit imposed unfairly by some SEs on same owner domains linking to one another, or eg sites a, b, c, d, e, f, g all linking to h where a-h are all owned by the same person - then from the outset - do everything in your power to disguise the fact they are all yours.

(I am being EXTREMELY DIPLOMATIC)
;)

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Michael Martinez is the Director of Search Strategies for 1st Query, an Internet Marketing firm offering organic SEO and PPC services.

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