Everyone needs an Internet marketing strategy and an SEO plan, but you cannot be effective with either of these without competitive intelligence.
Understanding Your Competition’s Online Visibility and Marketing Strategies
When you hire an SEO company or SEO consultant competitive intelligence should be a major priority for them and should be one of things they discuss with you on day one! Some of the factors we look at include:
- How are your competitors’ websites ranking and how are their individual pages ranking in comparison to yours?
- How are is your competition ranking for the keywords you are hoping to rank highly for? How are you ranking in comparison?
- If your competitors are ranking well how are they doing it? A good SEO should be able to tell you why and how!
- Backlink analysis is crucial in competitive intelligence – # of backlinks, quality of backlinks, anchor text and more help us determine your competitors’ luck and/or strategy(ies).
- The online visibility and reputation of each competitor needs to be evaluated and compared to yours.
- Site structures and usability, you vs. them!
The factors I just described and the data collected regarding them can help you take over your competitors online in great and effective ways. You do need a qualified SEO team to help you do that. Competitive Intelligence is not easy and it requires years of experience and knowledge. Someone looking at a computer screen and guessing has no clue – this is not competitive Intelligence.
Real SEO’s, Internet Marketers and/or Web Advertising Companies Do More & Strive for More Knowledge
To the outside world there is very little that differentiates real SEO companies from those that offer “SEO Services”. To those of us in the SEO, Internet marketing and Social Media industries it is very obvious when someone has no clue about the services they offer. It really makes me angry to see every advertising agency, every consultant etc. offering SEO, social media and web design services. I don’t say that I can handle TV commercials because I have no knowledge or experience. However, I could optimize for it and probably get a lot of traffic that would believe that I do know about it – just because I said I did. If I did this I would not only be lying to people, I would be stealing their money.
At some point businesses need to take a hard look at the services they offer and ask themselves if all the services should be listed. If you are NOT an expert or you do not have a staff that includes experts for every service you offer PLEASE consider removing that service(s) and contacting a qualified company that can offer your clients the services you have no expertise in.
If You Are A Business Owner, You Need to Research and Really Think About Who You Hire
Anyone can promise to use “keywords”, but that is not SEO and if anyone presents SEO as “keywords” they don’t know what they are doing. Competitive Intelligence is ONE aspect of what an SEO does. It is very important and crucial to the overall strategy, but it is only one part of the equation. SEO is not simple, it is not easy and it cannot be learned by someone reading the net for an afternoon.
Melissa Fach – Owner of SEO Aware
Competitive intelligences is huge, its very important to know our clients competitors and what is driving their online success in order for us to make the most effective decisions for our clients.
Nick Stamoulis