Tools for Competitive Intelligence Session – PubCon 2010

A quick recap of content from a competitive analysis session of PubCon 2010 with Matt Siltala, Michael Streko, Michael Gray, and Andy Beal.

Matt Siltala

Things to identify about the competition:

Hubs. Check PRWeb search, Digg, or article site search to see what’s being said about your competition, what they’re doing, and even which keywords they’re going after. You can make a spreadsheet of keywords that are being targeted by your competitors. Check local review sites to see which specials are being offered.

Tools. Use AuthorityLabs to put competitors side by side with keywords and identify areas to attack.

Social Media. You can use Social Media For Firefox plugin, Knowem, Who’s Talkin, Twitter Search/Lists, Image Search, SEO For Firefox plugin to identify.

Do “link:www.competitor.com” together with the Social Media For Firefox plugin  to identify the best content.

Identify competitor keywords. What your competitors may be using may be converting better than your keywords. Test with Adsense. Make sure you’ve got enough good content on your site around your competitors’ keywords.

Michael Streko

Ways to find the “Next Move” of the company you’re looking at:

Search their code.Check out their Robots.txt. You could find a test site, pictures, a new product or domain, etc.Google search for possible partners.Check http://dotheyfolloweachother.com to see who people in your competitors’ organization are close to.Follow their company on LinkedIn.com Fan the Facebook page. If someone leaves, call them right away and find out why.Know Who Links To ThemRead their content, don’t be afraid to email a site linking to a page that has out-of-date content and request a new link to your better version of content. Use incompetence to your advantage.Become an affiliate of your competitors’ sites, find out “earnings per click” to get a good idea of traffic.Non-Internet Bonus Tactic: call your competitor and walk through the process.

Michael Gray

Using Blekk0.com – use “/adsense=XXXXXXXX” with the Adsense code or analytics code and get a list of competitor sites.Use Tineye.com to see where an individual has other profiles and whether they are legitimate.Quarkbase will show popularity of content.Use a Google search for “submitted on” OR “submitted by” OR “discovered by” OR “posted by” to determine which content is being submitted and by whom. Identify the pattern of content “sneezers” when new content is being promoted/submitted. Try to get into the circle. TwitterCircles.com will help you identify who competitors are connecting with.

Andy Beal

Look for customer rants. Poach clients, promote your alternative, improve your own products and services to avoid these same issues.Look for any negativity coming from competitor employees or clients. Blow on the spark that lights the fuse.Use Twitter. Use custom parameters at search.twitter.com and set up competitive searches. If X employee talks to Y employee about Z keyword, track it. Export as RSS. Take advantage of private Twitter lists.DomainTools.com/Registrant-Alert/ and /Mark-Alert will let you spy on competitors to find out when they’re registering new domains.Oodle.com/job helps spy on job listings. Look up competitors’ name and create an RSS feed then aggregate multiple competitors.

Tags: Competitive Analysis, pubcon 2010

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Content Marketing Optimization Session with Lee Odden – PubCon 2010

If content can be searched, it can be optimized.

What are your customers’ content preferences? How do they discover? Consume? Share? Create a profile of your audience(s).

Use tools to create personas of data

Demographic info from Quantcast, CompeteKeyword info from SEMRush, GoogleEngagement info from PostRankSocial network info from Flowtown, Rapleaf

Create an editorial spreadsheet to plan all content that includes:

TopicKeywordsMedia TypePlaces Repost/Repurpose Content (Newsletter, Slideshare)Places to Promote (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

The SEO Content Cycle

Create & promote optimized contentContent is noticed, shared, & visibility growsExposure attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, linksIncrease links and exposure grows search & referral trafficTraffic & community provides data that you can research, develop to further grow social networks for content & SEO

Repurposing Content Example

Upload video to YouTubeEmbed in a blog post with show notesPost screen shots from video to FlickrUpload images and text as a story in a PowerPoint or PDF, upload to .docstoc, Scribd, etc.

Takeaways

Develop & optimize content with customers personas in mindThink like a publisher and create an editorial planDevelop channels of distribution & social linksLeverage both web & social media analytics

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Why Multiple Domains are Mostly Bad for SEO

It happens all the time, and causes me to scratch my head in complete confusion every time: Someone I’m working with on SEO will own multiple domains for the same business. I don’t mean that they have a couple related domains, I mean the same business and same offerings or services on more than one domain.

I usually find out about these domains in one of two ways: I find them through poking around and investigating the site (and the client usually acts like it’s some sort of dirty secret), or, they come to me about the domains and want more than one site to show up at the top of the search results.

I’ll be honest, I’m not usually a happy camper when I get this news; mostly because the secondary domains tend to have duplicate content (if you’re not aware, duplicate content is a bad thing). That being said, however, there is such thing as effectively using multiple domains (although I don’t recommend it). There are two main tactics commonly employed with owning multiple domains. Keep in mind that I’m going to keep an SEO perspective on these and only lightly touch on other marketing sectors.

Some businesses are worried that competitors will buy keyword oriented domains thereby pushing their own site into obscurity. This can lead to a panic shopping spree of domains. The idea is that as long as they own the available domains, there is less chance of a competitor beating them in the rankings. While there is some merit to this tactic, it will have no effect on your SEO at all. Nor do I believe that it will really have much effect in blocking out your competitors. You can’t think of all the domain variations and buy them all, and if you buy too many, it can get expensive just to maintain them. Any competitor can rank better by offering better content and getting more links regardless of domain name.

As a side note, if you do this tactic, you had better make sure that all of your domains are redirected toward your main domain using a 301 redirect.

In buying multiple domains, some companies want to simply dominate the search results. Buy having multiple sites on the first page, you can get that much more traffic, right? In theory, yes, and it has on occasion happened. However, there are some fairly serious drawbacks to this:

Doesn’t work on brick-and-mortar stores — If you have  a single physical location, it’s not a good idea to have multiple websites. You’ll confuse your visitors and customers, and I personally avoid having two websites with the same address. Google doesn’t want to have multiple sites from the same business (as it doesn’t provide good results) and I consider this to be one short step away from spam. Duplicate content woes — Because you can’t use the content from another site, you will have to write all new content. Considering how hard it is to write content for sites as it is, not to mention the allocation of resources to get it written, I wish luck to anyone writing content for a whole new site.Double branding all the way! — You have branding issues with two sites. Does one site become higher-end and the lower-end? Do you keep the prices the same? For that matter, what names are you even going to use on the site? If you have a phone number, how do you answer the phone? While there are certainly going to be exceptions (such as targeting different demographics), such a chaotic and divisive branding effort comes with a lot of risks and extra work.

This is less of a tactic, and more of a “must do,” and is therefore my exception to multiple domains. It’s an exception because all of the problems above do not apply when you get into other countries. In fact, in order to have the best results in international SEO, you’ll need to have a country specific TLD (or top level domain). For example, if you’re doing business in England, you will have a hard time ranking without a .co.uk domain. You can still rank without a country level TLD, but it’s an uphill battle. And by uphill, I mean Rocky Mountains-type uphill.

One final (and big) point to that I would like to reiterate. If you really intend to own and run multiple domains and get these sites to show up in the search results, you will have to double your SEO work. There are no shortcuts, freebies, or quick rankings that you can get, even if you are already ranking well for your main domain. In fact, a new domain and site will be significantly harder to rank than a site that has history and some authority already built. I highly recommend that indented listings (or secondary pages for the same site showing up underneath the first main listing) be the primary goal before attempting to achieve multiple domains in the same search.

Tags: Multiple Domains, seo

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An Over-Optimizing Nightmare: Staying Off Google’s Naughty List

Disclaimer: The below post illustrates a personal experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of SEO.com or the work performed with their clients.

For the most part, link building is pretty straight forward and simple. You can publish your articles, request some directory listings, bookmark links, guest blog posts, request links from other webmasters or even purchase links if you’re feeling particularly rebellious. But keep in mind if you don’t have a strategy behind it, you might fall face-first into a ditch filled with sorrow and regret.

Many times so many of us start a website in hopes that in 5-6 months we might start seeing some decent cash rolling in. Because you need link building to attain those rankings, you need to make sure the links you’re acquiring match the progress that your website is currently at. Let me explain.

Most experienced search engine optimization professionals understand that you need a healthy balance of links. Building links in moderation and keeping a proper anchor text to non-anchor text ratio is crucial. If your entire backlink portfolio consists of anchor text links, it isn’t going to look natural to the search engines. Same can be said if everything is a directory link, bookmark link and especially a comment link.

If you are submitting articles, make sure that you are using your anchor text but also make sure that some of those links back to your site are strictly the URL or business name. If your site is brand new, the number of anchor text to branded links should probably be a 50:50 ratio so your backlinks don’t look unnatural.

However, the same cannot be said about large, established websites. Odds are that if your site has 40,000 backlinks, submitting higher ratio of anchor text links aren’t going to hurt you or your rankings. For example, if you pointed 1000+ spammy, anchor text filled comment links to YouTube, do you think it’s going to make a difference? On the other hand, if you did the same to a brand new site with no reputation or authority, you’ll probably get a penalty very quickly.

I’d like to share a personal experience with this. On one of my personal websites I wasn’t following my own advice. I got in the habit of submitting content using my anchor text. There was variation of the anchor text but I never threw in my URL to make it appear more natural.

For a couple months all I saw was an increase, and for two of my main keywords I even attained first page rankings. I was very happy and hopeful that this website might actually bring in some money. Then, on one fateful day, Google dropped the hammer…

As expected, I was very perturbed to say the least. After looking through my backlinks I found that I clearly wasn’t following best practice. I wasn’t building enough natural looking, credible links. Instead I got caught up in my fantastic rankings and continued submitting content, directories, bookmarks and other links using only my anchor text.

Because I was a new site with a limited online existence, building these links worked for almost two months, but it caught up with me. If I was a site with some authority and a very healthy, natural looking backlink portfolio, this probably wouldn’t have happened.

Just remember that the links that you are pointing back to your website need to vary when it comes to your anchor text and method of link being built. I think the same analogy (for the most part) applies to life, “too much or too little of anything, is a bad thing. Keep everything in moderation.”

Tags: Link Building

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Few Brave SEOs Conquered ‘Movember’

To the chagrin of the rest of the office (and to their respective wives) seven of SEO.com’s best talent kept their upper lips away from the bite of a razor blade through Movember November — except for Christian. He’s the guy on the right with the weak-sauce ‘stache that he had to shave last week for some family photo. Seriously, priorities …

Anyway, the bold and brave souls called on their mustaches to power them for four weeks, and even made it through Thanksgiving without losing a turkey leg inside their grisly, nasty facial hair.

Nathan Blair (second photo down) won the Movember contest with his oily black handle bars. Cheers to you Nathan Blair, mustaches around the world are proud.

Tags: Movember

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Few Brave SEOs Conquered ‘Movember’

To the chagrin of the rest of the office (and to their respective wives) seven of SEO.com’s best talent kept their upper lips away from the bite of a razor blade through Movember November — except for Christian. He’s the guy on the right with the weak-sauce ‘stache that he had to shave last week for some family photo. Seriously, priorities …

Anyway, the bold and brave souls called on their mustaches to power them for four weeks, and even made it through Thanksgiving without losing a turkey leg inside their grisly, nasty facial hair.

Nathan Blair (second photo down) won the Movember contest with his oily black handle bars. Cheers to you Nathan Blair, mustaches around the world are proud.

Tags: Movember

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After Cancellation Notice, Offshore SEO Company Threatens Negative Reputation Management Campaign

A company received a smear campaign threat from its outsourced SEO firm because the firm knows Google’s algorithm improperly ranks negative results, which Google claims helps to show an impartial view of the Web.

Reference this e-mail and tell me if you’d rather hire offshore to save a few dollars or go with a reputable SEO company that can provide you with skilled SEO link builders and an on-going professional relationship.

This is in response to a request to cancel services for a month-to-month service offering:

Click to Enlarge

The legal nature of these tactics is questionable in the United States, but hiring an offshore firm doesn’t provide you the same protection from a “Negative Reputation Campaign.”

It’s unbelievable that an SEO company would put its own reputation on the line with such an e-mail because a client has decided to go with another SEO firm. I’ve seen these tactics for more than a decade in both Web design/development and SEO, and its extremely unfortunate.

A couple weeks ago, Google tweaked their algorithm to penalize DecorMyEyes.com after the NY Times published an article discussing their alleged fraudulent business practices that resulted in supposed increased Google rankings.

Bottom line: Google took action! They need to continue that effort with sites like RipOffReport.com, ComplaintsBoard.com, Scam.com and other sites that obtain very high positions in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and seem to be favored by Google’s algorithm.

When searching for brand names, you often see negative complaints published on these URLs at the top of the SERPs. I would understand seeing these URLs with negative information showing up in the SERPs for searches like:

Brand name scamBrand name sucksBrand name complaintsBrand name problemsAnd other keyword combinations based around negative terms

But when a brand name is the sole keyword and a complaint site URL is showing up #2, there is most likely an imbalance of credibility with Google’s algorithm that gives the complaint site the advantage.

Keep in mind the backlink portfolio to the URLs listed do not warrant a #2 ranking, nor does Google agree that a similarly credible website should rank for every brand in the world with little more than a brand name displayed in a page title, header tag and content body. At least Google’s love affair with Wikipedia can be argued that Wikipedia’s deep pages obtain thousands of links individually and therefore deserve a top ranking.

What did I miss in this post and plea to Google to do the right thing? Please comment and share.

Tags: Offshore SEO Company, Online reputation, orm, Outsourced SEO, Reputation Management

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