Competitive Analysis

Posts about competitive analysis principles, methodologies, and tools.

Exploiting the holes in search market share data

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 22, 2008 in Competitive Analysis

I have been monitoring and measuring search market share since public data has been released by the various services. Danny Sullivan has been doing it for many years more than me. However, as I have noted in past discussions, today’s metrics don’t accurately report real search market share. Search market share metrics […]

SEO Metrics - Search engine marketing metrics

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 14, 2008 in Competitive Analysis, SEO Metrics

Metrics matter most when you don’t have them.
There are many ways in which to measure success, failure, and stallout. No one really has the right solution for measuring SEO campaign activity because we have no industry standards.
I occasionally point out that (my research over the past couple of years has indicated that) somewhere between […]

October 2007 Search Engine Market Share

Posted by Michael Martinez on December 5, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

Every month (more-or-less) I compile a summary report for search engine market share and post it at Spider-food. I’ve now uploaded the October 2007 Search Engine Market Share report to Spider-food. Among other things, the report links back to eariler reports so that people can get a feel for how these numbers change […]

How not to write an SEO analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 19, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

I like Fantomaster. He’s a smart guy with a no-nonsense attitude. So when he links to someone’s analysis I usually follow the link and see what’s up.
I was disappointed with this study of the possible correlatione between PageRank and search results because the paper doesn’t even begin to describe the data that was […]

Using free analytics data for competitive analysis

Posted by Michael Martinez on September 17, 2007 in Competitive Analysis, SEO Metrics

Free Web Analytics Providers

Alexa
AttentionMeter
Compete
Quantcast
Rankings

There have been times in the past when I have spun cautionary tales about using Alexa data for comparative analysis. Many times.
I beat up on Alexa mainly because one marketer likes to bleat about his Alexa rankings. I sometimes wonder if he has made the connection between his proselytizing for […]

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 […]

Use snapshot metrics to measure optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on September 6, 2007 in Competitive Analysis, SEO Metrics

How well optimized is your Web site? There is really no accurate metric for gauging the quality of a Web site’s optimization. There is certainly no universally recognized metric for measuring optimization.
Search engine optimization is “the art of designing or modifying Web pages to rank well in search engines”. The technical definition […]

Market Share, Metrics, and SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 24, 2007 in Competitive Analysis, SEO Metrics

I like to analyze things. I suppose that’s obvious by now.
I’ve been watching search engine market share reports for years. They never seem to agree on what the search market should be. You have four major reporting services: Compete, comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen. Although a couple of these services have begun […]

AlexaRank, Compete, Google Toolbar PR, and other SEO quackery

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 31, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

First impressions are hard to recover from. They are also not very trustworthy.
I usually form an opinion of someone’s SEO capability within 30 seconds of reading the subject line of their forum posts. If their opening sentence or paragraph mentions Alexa, Google Toolbar PR, or some similar popular “ranking” value, I usually write […]

Google broke the URL reference query

Posted by Michael Martinez on July 19, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

Google broke the “URL reference” query functionality. This was actually a technique recommended by Google some time back (maybe 2-3 years ago) when people complained about the “broken” link: query operator (which was never broken — Google has always shown only a random sampling of backlinks).
Up until recenty, perhaps when Webmaster Central Tools started […]

Next Page