How to Enable SEO to Beat the Competition

When we combine web analytics along with a thoughtful SEO strategy, we have a winning combination. Here are several strategies you should pay attention to be sure you’re beating your SEO link building competition:

Step 1: Discover Who is Your Real Competition

Of course you already know who you think your competition is, but your opinion may not be truly objective. In order to truly understand your competition, you need an objective assessment, and here’s how to do that quickly:

When you use Google Webmaster Tools, it reports to Google Analytics, so you’ll have three months’ worth of data in your Acquisition – Search Engine Optimization – Queries report. Set your date range to gather that information, and then break out an advanced filter so you can remove brand terms. Keep in mind that anything in the string is matched, so you can usually filter out all brand queries with two or three filters pretty effectively.

Set rows to around 5,000 (It works better if you spoof this into the URL to gather some additional data) and then export the file as an Excel sheet. Understand that this is a Google Analytics necessarystep because the export data is set to match the report view.

Using Webmaster Tools, you don’t need to set a number of results when you query the same data, just get all of them. Also, you don’t get to stack filters, so it will be hard to remove every single brand search from your data. When you grab data from Analytics instead, this becomes possible.

Both of these data sources allow geographic filtering. This may be advisable if you haven’t localized your site and configured your analytics profiles in addition to webmaster verification so that you segment out in-line with your web domain architecture.

Next, ready a search rank checking tool to get rankings for your top terms, from 250 to 500 or so. The more, the better, as your insights will be more accurate. But you should not go above 1,000 with the larger websites.

Get Google’s AdWords data for the keyphrase set that you’ve just exported. Set your bid and maximum bid settings high enough so that you can get average position 1 listings. Later you can runa pivot table against that data to export it as an Excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to grab all of the ranking data for your search term list. If you’re using a tool like

Searchlens, you’ll be prompted to input which domains are top performers for the set when the results have been gathered. That way, you can wait until then in order to get the best performing competitors. Next, add them to the report and then regenerate the report.

If you are using a different tool, search to find the highest volume search term in your set that showsup closely relevant to your particular market. This will likely be a 2-3 word term at most using your AdWords data, and then grab the relevant domains from the top 10 to show who are your competitors.

To calculate your top performing domains, all you need to do is export your raw ranking data and use pivot tables so you can pull out all the rankings you achieve by each domain that shows up across each tracked search term. Make sure that you can get all the total results listed that show up against each search term in addition to the ranking positions.

If you are a little more technically proficient, you might find this step a little easier using full ranking data CSV exports from the rank checker you use, and then dump the results into an SQL database. Then, you can query the database to be able to write CSVs of all the ranked results for anydomain that you choose, plus you can also pull the total result data for each term.

Using your AdWords Excel sheet, add in your CSV export data into a separate tab for each domain that you’re interested in. The CSV exports from using Searchlens will work perfectly here. Then, open another tab and use some of Excel’s formulas to create a rank matrix so you can calculate domain performance.

With the rank matrix you’ve created, we also can calculate all the domains that rank highly by deciding on the metrics that we care the most about. You can do this with a program like CTR factorby applying it against the ranked position and then including the number of results it gives you for each term as a ‘competition’ factor.

You can also to use the market share of the search engine in the particular country from where you’re running your searches. These metrics are included in the Searchlens’ ‘Search Visibility’ calculations. Then you can export these along with their rankings.

The resulting visualization will show you the top performers of the ranking data and also the domain scores. Then you can easily pick out target domains to analyze the backlink profile of each one or perform a SWOT, or for content-led project research. Be sure to save your sheet as a template and then you can reuse it with fresh runs of data or comparisons of month to month performance.

Step 2: Go Ahead and Beat Them

Now that you have an insight into the true top performers for your set of target terms, the next step is to short-cut the strategies that worked for the top domains with a little bit of analysis.

For example, if you use Moz’s Opensite Explorer, you can breeze through backlink profiles and see exactly where the best value links come from. Those links will have driven performance in Google for a specific domain in your target area. That’s an area about as close to a guarantee of security andSEO performance as you can find.

Finally, be sure to remember that all this is a reactive strategy. It should be slotted into your wider SEO project to ensure that you can overtake your competition, not used to duplicate their best performing strategies and use it yourself.