Conducting your business on the Internet isn’t easy, and you need every advantage to be able to succeed online. In order to succeed, companies have to understand how to manage the marketing information they find. This information is used to help strategic planning, monitor competitors and provide early warning signs for new opportunities or potential issues. With that said, knowing where your competition is marketing is vital if you want to outrank and out perform them.
There are two key components to monitoring your competition online, analyzing back links and the development of marketing intelligence. We are gonna look at both and how we can use them to build links for SEO.
Analyzing Backlinks
When looking at a competitors back links, I’m looking for two things: the anchor text used and where it sits. Of the four components of link popularity (link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance) they are the two strongest elements to affect rank.
Anchor text, the clickable part of the link you see, is a ranking indicator. It tells both humans and search bots what’s coming next.
How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results. If your competitors are ranking well for a certain phrase, look at the anchor text in their back links and ask:
- Do you see the phrase listed?
- Are the links sitting on topically relevant pages that have been indexed?
- Are those anchors sitting in content areas?
If the anchor text phrase is listed multiple times in your competitors back links, you’ll need to exceed that number to rank ahead most likely.
Marketing Intelligence
Marketing intelligence is the collection and analysis of competitive information within a market. The goal of this is to help with decision making, keeping an eye on competitors, opportunities and threats.
Competitors place tons of information on their sites as a way to add content, attract customers and the media. One cush section is the news/media area which holds the company’s press releases. I set alerts to these media pages and when a change happens, I’m notified. I’ll track the press release taking note of where it was sent and to whom. If a journalist or blogger talks about the release I’m notified and take note for future linking building.
If we rely on back links alone to provide the bulk of our competitive information, we may miss opportunities to build competitive links. Look at everything your competitor has – back links, website, job postings, blogs, advertisements etc., as an opportunity to build links.
- June 2, 2009
- | Category: Search Engine Optimization, Tips
- | Comments: 0
