Competitive Intelligence Session

Speakers:
John Andrews – JohnOn.com
Todd Malicoat – Market Motive / Stuntdubl
Moderator–Lisa Williams

Summary:
Learn what your competitors are doing to drive their online businesses, how to emulate their successes, and exploit their weaknesses.

Todd: Competitive Analysis and SEO Campaigns Planning Using KOB Score

The difference between the snake oil salesmen and legit SEOs is the ability to set & manage, and then delivery on expectations.

Overarching SEO Process:

Understanding the Business Model as it applies to search traffic
Understanding Intent of user queries – successfully identifying commercial intent
Prioritizing keywords accordingly
Evaluating SERP competition

KOB Analysis provides a framework for this:

Keyword + Opposition + Benefit
Cost/Benefit analysis for SEO

Understanding query type & commercial intent

80% informations, 10% transactional, 10% navigational
High CPCs are the best predictor of high profit transaction customers…see what things cost in AdWords
Wordtracker, SpyFu, SEMRush, SERPs

Opposition:

KEI was an OK solution for this, but looked at total results, not competitiveness of top 10.

Factors in opposition:

Age/Anchor text (Archive.org)
On-page optimization
Global Link Popularity (total links/PR)
Local Set Links (Pinnacle Phrase single word, Hubfinder, Touchgraph)…most difficult to calculate
Unique LD (Link Harvester, now SEOmoz toolbar or SEOQuake)
Exact match domain bonus
Social signals (Quarkbase for social data points)

Easy way to do opposition: SEOmoz difficulty score or SEO for Firefox

Think about how much depth do you need?

Benefit: Search Volume x CPC

Opposition / Benefit = KOB score

See the Matrix! Understand the Top 10

Cost/Benefit is for suckers, execution is for winners…pushing forward after analysis

Impacts:

On-page SEO
Content creation
Link dev strategy
New domain v. Directory
Power/organization/timeline

4 Types of Marketing Warfare

Defensive
Offensive
Flanking
Guerrila

John: SEO and Search for Competitive Intelligence

SEO is competitive intelligence

Information that has been analyzed to the point of decision making
Tool to alert management
Means to deliver reasonable, actionable assessments
Way to improve bottom line, part of best-practice companies, seeing outside yourself, short v. long term

Competitive Intelligence is NOT:

pretexting
spying

Competitive research findings

+ other market rssearch

+ SEO persepective

+ advanced technical wisdom

Good way to learn requirements for competing in a space, to learn competitive status of a player, relative to others.

“Ability to learn fast than the competition is your only sustainable competitive advantage” (source?)

Ways to follow along as colleagues and associates advance in your field via social media

Follow associate + competitors …skills, connections, etc.
Competitors are broadcasting their tactics, secrets, goals
Following Twitter favorites
Who are their customers? Who are the unhappy customers? … Who are their brand evangelists? Do they respond to comments? Where are their priorities?
Wiki of social monitoring solutions: wiki.kenburbary.com

“Singularity is almost always a clue. The more commonplace & featureless a crume the more difficult it is to bring it home” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Anything deliberate suggests a purpose…we can find meaning

Matt Cutts favorited Benyw (frmr G search engineer) post on Bing copying Google…interesting perspective on “fairness”

What they do, what they say, what they reveal

What’s on pages?
How did they design?
Infrastructure
Domain name
Server config
CMS, editorial
Interfaces, syndication, connections
Source code is full of clues – Analytics, customized
Competitive aspects in footprints

“Competition is at the core of the success or failure of firms” – Michael E. Porter, 1st sentence of Competitive Advantage.

Analytics & Google AdSense IDs connect owned sites
Blekko query /adsense=nnnnnnnnnnnnn / analytics=nnnnnnnnnnnnn
ReverseInternet.com (fee)

Google is your friend for search:

brand
brand + sucks
new + brand
brand + vs.
brand + reviews
is better than + brand…

Scenario planning…Google as if you’re a competitor, save and repeat

Discover owned domains
DomainTools.com (fee)
Google specific whois contact info of one of known domains +site:Domaintools.com
ReverseInternet.com (fee)
SpyFu.com (fee)
ReverseInternet:
IP addresses
Domains
AdSense ads: essentially a customer list

You need to be as good or better as they are to really “see” with competitive analysis eyes.

“It is best to keep one’s own state intact. To crush an enemy’s state is only second best” – Sun Tzu

If you’re competitive, THEN augment with competitive analysis.

Counter Intelligence measures:

Tool vendors resell your activity to others, including your competitors
Tools are designed to retain customers, by maintaining data stores
Google’s keyword suggestions…reselling competitive data
Don’t get hooked…
Block the Bots
Strong analytics
Secure disconnected accounts
Judicious use of tools

Recommended tools:

SEO Book
Raven
80legs (programmable, for advanced, build your own)

Q&A:

Using auto-complete/Google suggest…John suggests scrapebox (bot?)

Using CPC for Benefit — which match type do you pay attention to…Todd usually uses Broad

Recs for folks getting started with CI:

John: look at the search results…do the top 10 all do the same thing?

Todd: understanding basic ranking factors, understanding links as equity

Learn a lot before paying for tools. More than just does it provide data…Can you make decisions? Does it help you execute? What data points do you need…pick your tool based on that.

Search competitors aren’t always the same as the company’s identified competitors.

Good SEO should be able to explain WHY each of the top 10 are there

What’s the % of importance as far as 1. strategy, 2. tool

Todd: Tools help you build your case, justify your efforts (70-80% of SEO time?)

John: Big toolbox doesn’t help, knowing how to use key tools does