Think this is impossible in the real world of the web? Check again! After a competitor analysis on another keyword phrase for out own website, we’ve already made a phone call to a company to tell them that their first place position in my web browser was possibly in danger. We subsequently became a business partner of theirs! Now, whoever gets the business lead, they get the business! Do we call that being a friendly competitor?  If you have been trying to attract customers via the Internet during the last year, your biggest competitor has likely not been as kind!

A Real Life Case Study – The Competitor Analysis of The Keyword Phrase “Child Abuse Prevention”

It’s important to date this case study. Today is December 23, 2008. As we go into this case study, we’ll update it from time to time and see where it goes. This analysis is shared here is done so for two purposes:

1) To promote Child Abuse Prevention

2) As an example of the type of data available through Web Intelligence Sniper

Your Website Intelligence and your competitor intelligence have both taken you to this point. It’s imperative that you allow your research to lead you in the direction you must go. Web intelligence is one of the things you shouldn’t take lightly. When you need competitive intelligence, you need a professional to do your competitor analysis. In the end, it will save you precious resources.

Which Keyword Phrases Do We Compete For? – Only Use Producing Keyword Phrases

There are several ways to measure success, yet without traffic, even the best optimization will not produce the desired traffic results! Optimizing for 10, 100, or 1,000 vanity keyword phrases won’t do you any good if there is no traffic to the keyword phrase! Do you see where this is going? It’s all about traffic! With the event of personal search vs. global search, we tell all of our customers that putting great content in the way of good traffic streams will produce results. Yes, which keyword phrase our customer chooses IS important! Only keyword phrases that generate traffic! Your competitor analysis will show you which keyword phrases your competitors are using. Don’t be fooled into spending resources on keyword phrases that don’t produce traffic.

Putting it differently, the choice of the correct keyword phrase is hugely important because the up front costs of optimization are significant. In other words, when examining the different types of search to use, organic search engine optimization often requires front-loading expenses to achieve results. This makes the competitor analysis even more important. We make no apology for this, because in the long run, attracting traffic using organic search engine optimization often only costs 25% or less of what Pay-Per-Click advertising costs. Much of the time, significantly less.

When guiding a customer in making the right decision for a keyword phrase, no matter what kind of search engine optimization techniques the customer chooses to pursue traffic, no matter how difficult it is to attract traffic to “our website” because of the level of competition for a specific keyword phrase, it always comes down to a business decision. What will traffic from this keyword phrase do for us, and how many of the hits can we convert into profitable entities? Put differently, what is our “cost per click”, and what are our “earnings per click”?

A Look At The Relative Factors – Real Information for Organic Search Engine Optimization

his graphic shows the proportion between factors that compete against each other in the search engines. Looking at the pie chart as a clock paradigm, the Inbound Back Link (IBL) factors make up about 35 – 40% of the requirements for the keyword phrase “Child Abuse Prevention”. The other 60 – 65% of the factors are On page factors. A professional search engine marketing Agency should quickly point out that the proportions of on page vs off page factors changes from one keyword phrase to another. This is why a full blown competitor analysis is so important. Find a keyword phrase that works for you – please contact us at 602-516-5513 to discuss the details.

The larger the slice of pie is, the more important that specific parameter is. As an example, the meta description word count (Meta Descr Count) is not as important as the meta description keyword density (Meta Descr KWD). The size of the green wedge is about 3 times the size of the orange wedge next to it. This means that the meta description keyword density is much more important than the meta description word count.

The Competition – Isolate The Top 5 Competitors For a Position. Leverage Strengths & Weaknesses

This stage of the analysis shows us who the competitors are. The competition for this keyword phrase is quite disparate. In this graph, the larger the wedge, the more vulnerable that competitor position is. In other words, positions 10 and 14 are the two most vulnerable positions from this perspective. The positions that have a red box around their numbers are actually the ones that are in hottest competition for 1st place. This means that 6, 7, 24, 25, and 29 are the top 5 competitors for 1st place. This brings up a good question. Why are positions 2, 3, and 4 not in more competition for 1st place, when compared to positions 6 and 7? Using weighted statistics, we can see that, out of the top 30, competitor positions 10 and 14 are the weakest. Yet, those aren’t interesting positions, especially when the level of difficulty index when competing for this keyword phrase is lower than 46 out of a difficult range of 0 – 100, 100 being the most difficult.

When Web Intelligence Sniper competes, we only compete for the position that each competitor wants! The one that brings the most traffic to your website! Focusing on that position will help us come up with both “on page” and “off page” resources which will get us into that position. The intelligence we gather at this stage of the game shows us the reality of which position we are capable of competing for. Sometimes the competitive edge that others have is so strong, that, even before we begin the battle, we have to concede to the customer that he doesn’t have the off page resources to compete for the position he would like.

Real Intelligence, Real Statistics – We Make It Look Subtle and Insubstantial

All of the analysis information that we have gathered here is public information. no deceit, no illegal espionage, no deceit. It’s pure competitor analysis.

This matrix only compares the first place competitor with it’s top 5 threats. The 19 parameters we analyze in this matrix are about 10% of the things that search engines look for. Left-most column with the titles corresponds with the first graphic above. Each row of data is weighted according to the chart above. As you can see, we find the minimum / maximum range for the search engine we queried, then we evaluate the competitor positions against these minimum / maximum values. In this matrix, a green number is within range, a red number is an outlier, meaning that may be able to take advantage of a weak position..

Each search engine has different minimum / maximum range values. We use these minimum / maximum shelf positions in our analysis when we build a page to compete with these 6 pages. Once the on-page factors are good, we move to the off page factors. As you can see, after a complete competitor analysis, there is no more guessing. No more trial and error for 6 months.

Having Competitor Analysis We Put Some Meat Around The Bone With An Example

Alright, the analysis is done. Now it’s time to take what we learned about your competitor and about your web page and put it to good use, calculating our simultaneous move against each competitor individually. We will take the first few rows of information and put together something that will help you understand the methods we use.

Title Count – As we see in the analysis matrix above, competitors have already defined the range of words for the title to be between 6 and 11 words with a keyword density of 41.18% – 100%. Understanding that the search engines don’t want us to spam keywords, this means that we have to have at least 6 words in the title with “child abuse prevention” being at least 3 of them. Let’s put together a couple of example title options:

<title>Child Abuse Prevention – Elementary Child Education Module</title>

Interpreted, this means that we have 7 words in the title. That’s between 6 and 11. To get the keyword density, we take the number of words that are in our keyword phrase Child (x2), + Abuse + Prevention that makes the ratio 4/11 or 0.36363. Does it fit? No! We’re below the minimum shelf of 41.18% keyword density. Let’s try again

<title>Child Abuse Prevention – Elementary Education Abuse Prevention Education Module</title>

Now we have 9 words, of which 5 are in the Keyword Phrase. This gives us a ratio of 5/9ths or 55.55%. This puts both the Title Word Count and the Title Keyword Density “into the green” range.

More later…

If you have any questions about our methods or how we can help you, please call us at 602-516-5513 today.