Competitive Analysis

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 [...]

Competing with untouchable competitors

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 23, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

There are very few sites I cannot outrank in my most competitive queries. Who outranks me today is not nearly as relevant to my point as who has outranked me for the last two years. Rankings fluctuate but if over two years’ time you haven’t knocked the top dog out of the number [...]

Query Busting: What the new kid should do

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 24, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

There’s nothing like a competitive SERP. I mean that. Literally. There is nothing like a competitive SERP. Of course, every time you say something in an SEO forum, anyone who disagrees with you is more than likely to say, “You obviously don’t compete for competitive queries.”
Most people evaluate queries on [...]

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 [...]

Pro bono optimization and query competitiveness

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 13, 2007 in Competitive Analysis

Every now and then an SEO discussion turns into a contest of wills resulting in a pointless game of oneupmanship, where at least one person tries to discredit the other person’s point of view by suggesting or claiming the other person is not working with competitive queries. The rule of thumb is, if you [...]

Web Intelligence Operations: What search engines don’t tell you

Posted by admin on February 19, 2007 in Competitive Analysis, Search Engine Optimization

At the highest level, we can divide the factors that affect any given page’s rankings in search results into four categories:

What the Webmaster does with the page
What other Webmasters do with their pages
What the search engines do with their data
What people search for

Technically, you can insert a fifth category between the first two: What the [...]

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