Rob Garner (@robgarner), iCrossing’s vice president of strategy and member of the SEMPO board of directors, joined the panel, SEO Competitive Analysis on Tuesday, March 20 at 2:45 pm EST. This session explored on-site competitive analysis, off-site competitive analysis and competitor monitoring to improve overall SEO strategy.

1. Competitive Assessment
Direct, Indirect, and Internal
Rob Garner
VP Strategy, iCrossing
@robgarner
Speaker Logo Here New York | March 19–23

2. Competitive research
Your logo here
New York | March 19–23

3. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Think
• Evaluate past and current marketing programs
• Perform SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
• Set goals
• Identify primary and secondary metrics
• Perform in-depth keyword and market research
• Analyze market research and identify opportunities
• Evaluate and customize dashboards and analytics platforms to accommodate new metrics
Your logo here @robgarner

4. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Your competitors are direct, indirect, and internal
• Direct: Your typical business competitors
• Indirect: Those sites that dominate in search, for a variety of reasons
• Internal: Your organization – who is going to help, and who is going to impede progress?
Your logo here @robgarner

5. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Are rankings the best thing to measure?
• Don’t get hung on competitor’s rankings
• You don’t know if they convert
• Competitive ranking data is directional at best
• Personalization, social search, universal, etc. have
scrambled the SERPs
Your logo here @robgarner

6. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
A company’s biggest SEO competitor is itself
• Some companies are overly obsessed with their pet rankings
• Educate on the value and returns of SEO
• Implement the proper tools and analytics for measuring what you get from SEO
• Break down barriers that prevent effective SEO
• Focus on growing the good things that result from SEO, and reinvesting in SEO
• Know your site’s SEO and content value inside and out
Your logo here @robgarner

7. Content
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New York | March 19–23

8. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Content audit – Internal competitive research
1) Finding out what you have
2) Finding out what you don’t have
Your logo here @robgarner

9. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
How well do you know the content of your own site?
• How many unique pages reside within your domain, or
domains?
• How many pages within your site match a given phrase,
or set of phrases?
• How much of your site’s content is duplicated or
repurposed in other parts of your site, or on other sites
outside of your domain?
• How well your content inventory matches up to your
targeted keyword lists (in other words, does your content
literally support your keywords, at the page and site
theme levels)?
Your logo here @robgarner

10. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
How well do you know the content of your own site?
• Is your site optimized for search engines, and also
optimized for social networks (shareable, portable,
keyword-friendly and researched, etc.)?
• How fresh is your content, and at what time
frequency do you publish?
• How many backlinks does your site have at the
domain level?
• When checking your analytics and log files, do you
notice any distinct patterns of declining or
increasing traffic? Why or why not?
• Does your site push content out via RSS and XML
feeds?
Your logo here @robgarner

11. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
You have to have at least one page in the game to
compete
Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”
Your logo here @robgarner

12. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Or many pages
Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”
Your logo here @robgarner

13. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Depth of content is directly proportional to what you
will get from natural search
Site:www.domain.com
Site:subdomain.domain.com
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14. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Example of direct and indirect competition
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15. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Characteristics of highly visible sites
• Well-written, and well-edited.
• Significant word counts at both the page-level, and site level.
• Provides substantial content that backs up the theme of the site, as it relates to the respective
keyword set.
• The content is generally engaging, and good enough that people would want to link and share
it without being asked.
• Each site has a high number of high-quality unique pages within the domain.
Your logo here @robgarner

16. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Recap
• Don’t become obsessed with rankings
• Focus on the three types of competitors: direct, indirect, and internal
• Know your own site(s) inside and out
• Shoot for broader goals, such as content depth, external linkage and social signals
Your logo here @robgarner