From your research, start piecing together competitive strategies and determine the weaknesses and strengths of your site. Prioritize the changes you can make right away to improve your SERP status. Just as important is to keep improving the strengths you already have to make sure your organic rankings don’t slip.
Take what you’ve learned in this competitive exercise and start applying it today. Although it takes time to see improvement in search engine results, your continued efforts will pay off
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Saturday, September 5, 2009
Compare page rank
In addition to how well a competitor ranks in search engine results, you can also find other website data from Google, Alexa or SearchStatus. For quick access, add one or more of the following toolbars on your computer to compare your page rank information with your competitors.
Install the Google toolbar. Once installed, you can modify the tools you want to view on the toolbar. The one you’re interested in for this exercise is PageRank.
Install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa provides a wealth of information for sites including traffic trend data, inbound links, keywords, and related links.
Install SearchStatus for Firefox and Mozilla. SearchStatus is a one-stop shopping toolbar allowing you to view Google PageRank, Alex data, indexed pages and more.
The information gathered from these toolbars is for comparative purposes, not as absolute data. Alexa traffic data accuracy is often questioned and Google PageRank is only an estimation of page value based on several variables. It is conceivable to have a high PageRank, yet still have low traffic to your site. For your competitive research, the absolute numbers are not as important as trending information over time and the discrepancy between your figures and those from competitive sites.
If you get hung up on the absolute numbers, you’ll lose site of your goals. Your ultimate goal is a high search engine results page (SERP), meaning your site appears high on organic results based on keyword searches used by prospects.
Install the Google toolbar. Once installed, you can modify the tools you want to view on the toolbar. The one you’re interested in for this exercise is PageRank.
Install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa provides a wealth of information for sites including traffic trend data, inbound links, keywords, and related links.
Install SearchStatus for Firefox and Mozilla. SearchStatus is a one-stop shopping toolbar allowing you to view Google PageRank, Alex data, indexed pages and more.
The information gathered from these toolbars is for comparative purposes, not as absolute data. Alexa traffic data accuracy is often questioned and Google PageRank is only an estimation of page value based on several variables. It is conceivable to have a high PageRank, yet still have low traffic to your site. For your competitive research, the absolute numbers are not as important as trending information over time and the discrepancy between your figures and those from competitive sites.
If you get hung up on the absolute numbers, you’ll lose site of your goals. Your ultimate goal is a high search engine results page (SERP), meaning your site appears high on organic results based on keyword searches used by prospects.
Find the riches revealed in source code
Looking through a competitor’s source code feels devilishly fun the first time. Here in plain sight, you’ll peek into bits of your competitors’ online strategies. To reveal code, follow these steps:
Find a competitive website and go to the home page.
Right click on the page and then click on View Source or click on View on your toolbar and click Source. A box of HTML code will pop up and in there you can find the meta description and meta tags for the page. It’s a bit difficult to decipher at first, but if the page has this information, it will be near the top of the code. Meta description is generally a quick overview of the web page and meta keyword tags are words and phrases the competitor has chosen as clues to help search engines appropriately determine web page relevance and rank when a prospect conducts a keyword search.
Do the same for one or two other pages, particularly those with a high search rank, to determine if your competition is optimizing individual pages and make note of the meta tags and descriptions used on each page.
Did any of your competitors use keywords that you surprised you? Were there keywords you hadn’t thought of that make sense for your site? How do they use the keywords in page content? Can you get a sense of how their online strategy differs from your strategy?
Review your own source code to see what improvements you can make to influence your organic ranking.
Find a competitive website and go to the home page.
Right click on the page and then click on View Source or click on View on your toolbar and click Source. A box of HTML code will pop up and in there you can find the meta description and meta tags for the page. It’s a bit difficult to decipher at first, but if the page has this information, it will be near the top of the code. Meta description is generally a quick overview of the web page and meta keyword tags are words and phrases the competitor has chosen as clues to help search engines appropriately determine web page relevance and rank when a prospect conducts a keyword search.
Do the same for one or two other pages, particularly those with a high search rank, to determine if your competition is optimizing individual pages and make note of the meta tags and descriptions used on each page.
Did any of your competitors use keywords that you surprised you? Were there keywords you hadn’t thought of that make sense for your site? How do they use the keywords in page content? Can you get a sense of how their online strategy differs from your strategy?
Review your own source code to see what improvements you can make to influence your organic ranking.
How to gather competitive online data(Identify your competition)
(this data is taken from www.examiner.com)As with any other competitive research project, you need to first decide what competitors you’ll track online. Limiting your list to five competitors will keep the results focused and easier to analyze. Make sure you record your findings, then repeat the process every month or so to see how the rankings compare. Since search engine optimization (SEO) is an organic process, the results will vary over time. Your goal is to keep rising higher in search engine results.
Your most serious competition may be an entire company or specific products or services competitive companies offer. The first step is to do a search for your competition and record the organic results for each as well as what web page or pages are ranking highest. How does your organic ranking compare to the competition?
We’re not looking at paid placements right now, but if you see a competitor has a paid listing, make a note of it.
Your most serious competition may be an entire company or specific products or services competitive companies offer. The first step is to do a search for your competition and record the organic results for each as well as what web page or pages are ranking highest. How does your organic ranking compare to the competition?
We’re not looking at paid placements right now, but if you see a competitor has a paid listing, make a note of it.
Track online results
Based on the SEO goals for improving organic search results, identify the core metrics you can measure. The deeper you get into SEO, the more you’ll realize the infinite possibilities for measuring key performance indicators as well a minutia. Sometimes minutia is very helpful for content, but not always for higher level analytical analysis.
At the beginning, keep metric measurements simple, yet meaningful. At the very least, when prospects call your office, want to buy your products or hire you, ask them how they found you. Make note every time someone mentions your website and dig a little by asking the role the website played in their decision to act. Even this minimal information provides clues for improving the home page, making the online purchasing process easier and quicker, reworking ineffective pages, or discovering new keywords.
Using your benchmark information, you can compare figures such as sales, donations, memberships, and subscriptions before and after your SEO improvements.
You can also glean useful information from your website’s analytical package or from a multitude of free analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Become familiar with the type of data available and then determine what makes the most sense for you to continually monitor. Data can include:
Search engine traffic: the percent of visitors arriving through search engines vs. total site traffic, top keywords and search engines used to arrive at your site.
Unique visitors
Referring sites: other sites sending traffic to your site.
Page views: entry and exit pages, page views per visit, top bounce rate.
Time on site
Using benchmark information, specific goals and your new ability to track and measure relevant data are the building blocks for interpretation and continued improvement. You’ll be able to spot trends and determine whether you are moving toward or have reached your goals. You’ll also identify problem areas such as high bounce rates, ineffective pages, and keywords visitors are using to arrive at your site that are not being optimized to attract even more visitors.
SEO is a continuous loop process. Once you create and execute the strategy and analyze the results, you have the information you need to return to the optimization stage. A website are no longer just nice to have, it is an essential component to your marketing strategy and the time spent getting the site to full potential is well worth the effort.
At the beginning, keep metric measurements simple, yet meaningful. At the very least, when prospects call your office, want to buy your products or hire you, ask them how they found you. Make note every time someone mentions your website and dig a little by asking the role the website played in their decision to act. Even this minimal information provides clues for improving the home page, making the online purchasing process easier and quicker, reworking ineffective pages, or discovering new keywords.
Using your benchmark information, you can compare figures such as sales, donations, memberships, and subscriptions before and after your SEO improvements.
You can also glean useful information from your website’s analytical package or from a multitude of free analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Become familiar with the type of data available and then determine what makes the most sense for you to continually monitor. Data can include:
Search engine traffic: the percent of visitors arriving through search engines vs. total site traffic, top keywords and search engines used to arrive at your site.
Unique visitors
Referring sites: other sites sending traffic to your site.
Page views: entry and exit pages, page views per visit, top bounce rate.
Time on site
Using benchmark information, specific goals and your new ability to track and measure relevant data are the building blocks for interpretation and continued improvement. You’ll be able to spot trends and determine whether you are moving toward or have reached your goals. You’ll also identify problem areas such as high bounce rates, ineffective pages, and keywords visitors are using to arrive at your site that are not being optimized to attract even more visitors.
SEO is a continuous loop process. Once you create and execute the strategy and analyze the results, you have the information you need to return to the optimization stage. A website are no longer just nice to have, it is an essential component to your marketing strategy and the time spent getting the site to full potential is well worth the effort.
Create measurable goals
Every good plan has goals both specific and measurable. The same is true for your SEO plan. Get your team together and agree on a set of goals your website can reasonably achieve. Start by agreeing on the role your website plays in the greater scheme of your marketing strategy. How can the website be aligned to contribute to the business and marketing goals already in place? What do you want visitors to do when they get to your website?
If your website is:
A distribution channel, goals may include increasing online sales volume or average order value, donations, or subscriptions, or decreasing the number of bounces or exits before a conversion (or action) takes place.
An information center, goals may include more downloads of white papers, educational materials or other information, an increase in unique visitors, better awareness of an issue, an increase in online form submittals.
A support center, goals may include improved assistance for products purchased online or in a store, increased hits on the frequently asked questions page, increased use of features such as email, live chat or an 800 phone number.
A community builder, goals may include an increase in memberships, more people connecting via blog postings, forums, or bulletin boards, an increase in reader comments, or more volunteers.
Of course, improving organic search engine rankings is foremost on most web marketer’s minds. So, you may have goals like these: Improve organic rankings by one page. Based on organic results improvement, decrease paid Internet advertising by X percent.
Goals will be specific to your company, its position in the marketplace, business and marketing objectives, your industry and other factors. Regardless of what makes sense for you, make sure the goals are clear, agreed upon and measurable.
Track online results
If your website is:
A distribution channel, goals may include increasing online sales volume or average order value, donations, or subscriptions, or decreasing the number of bounces or exits before a conversion (or action) takes place.
An information center, goals may include more downloads of white papers, educational materials or other information, an increase in unique visitors, better awareness of an issue, an increase in online form submittals.
A support center, goals may include improved assistance for products purchased online or in a store, increased hits on the frequently asked questions page, increased use of features such as email, live chat or an 800 phone number.
A community builder, goals may include an increase in memberships, more people connecting via blog postings, forums, or bulletin boards, an increase in reader comments, or more volunteers.
Of course, improving organic search engine rankings is foremost on most web marketer’s minds. So, you may have goals like these: Improve organic rankings by one page. Based on organic results improvement, decrease paid Internet advertising by X percent.
Goals will be specific to your company, its position in the marketplace, business and marketing objectives, your industry and other factors. Regardless of what makes sense for you, make sure the goals are clear, agreed upon and measurable.
Track online results
Manage expectations
If your company decides to embrace SEO to augment its marketing efforts, managing expectations among key players will be fundamental to success. Everyone with a stake in improving and maintaining the website needs to be on board during the planning stage and agree to the goals set forth. Some of the players to include in SEO improvement planning are executives responsible for the overall business outcome, marketing staff and content developers, the webmaster/programmer, and the web designer.
Whatever changes you make to your site will not occur overnight. This message must be understood by the SEO team to avoid confusion and misunderstandings later. SEO is a long-term project implemented and tweaked over time and everyone on the team needs to agree they are in it for the long haul. The reason expectations must be managed is that, even with carefully laid out plans, you’ll be at the mercy of search engine crawlers coming to your site in their own sweet time to pick up on the enhancements and improvements you’ve made. There are a lot of variables you can improve, but there are a lot of variables simply out of your hands.
Developing benchmarks as the basis for the SEO plan will help the improvement team understand your site’s current level of performance and will create a starting point for developing realistic goals to measure.
Whatever changes you make to your site will not occur overnight. This message must be understood by the SEO team to avoid confusion and misunderstandings later. SEO is a long-term project implemented and tweaked over time and everyone on the team needs to agree they are in it for the long haul. The reason expectations must be managed is that, even with carefully laid out plans, you’ll be at the mercy of search engine crawlers coming to your site in their own sweet time to pick up on the enhancements and improvements you’ve made. There are a lot of variables you can improve, but there are a lot of variables simply out of your hands.
Developing benchmarks as the basis for the SEO plan will help the improvement team understand your site’s current level of performance and will create a starting point for developing realistic goals to measure.
Create an SEO blueprint to improve your website
Operating without a search engine optimization (SEO) plan is like constructing a building without a blueprint. Possible, but not likely to be cost-effective or efficient and the final results are almost impossible to predict or measure. With a blueprint, a builder knows whether it will be a simple stone building or a cathedral. Likewise, with an SEO plan, you’ll move toward website improvement confidently knowing what kind of success you’re trying to create.
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