2. @billhunt 2
“If you are ignorant of both your
enemy and yourself, then you are
a fool and certain to be defeated in
every battle.” – Sun Tzu
3. @billhunt 3
4 C’s of Competitive Intel
• Collecting the right information
• Converting to Intelligence
• Communicate the Intelligence
• Countering the Competitor Actions
4. @billhunt 4
Who is your competition?
• Named Competitors
– Typically management only cares about that compete with you on
sales and market share.
– Who are your biggest direct competitors IBM vs. HP
– The larger the company typically the poorer they do in SEO
5. @billhunt 5
Who is your real competition?
• Search Results Competitors
– These are the companies that rank in the top positions of search
engines and may not be a direct competitor – like Wikipedia or a
Trade Journal or even a partner
– Need to understand “why they are ranking” and if you can
leverage their ranking via advertising or links
7. @billhunt 7
What do you need to know?
• PPC Advertising Spend & Cycles
– Insight on what your competition is spending on paid search
– Do they have “dark cycles” or “strategic spends”
– What keywords do they seem be be performing well for?
– What ad messages are they using?
• Business & Actionability Value
– Justify spending increases on media and resources
– Alignment of competitive ads
– Hijacking keywords and messages
– Understand strategic initiatives
8. @billhunt 8
What do you need to know?
• Keyword Lists
– What keywords are they focused on using in PPC and/or ranking
well for in SEO
– How are they performing for various keywords?
– What pages are ranking well – home page or deep pages
• Business & Actionability Value
– How are we doing for similar strategic keywords
– Where are we seeing change in performance?
– Competitive Message alignment and focus
12. @billhunt 12
What do you need to know?
• Team Size and Bench Strength
– How do they manage program? In-house, agency
– How many team members? Skills?
– How big is the agency and their reputation?
• Business & Actionability Value
– Leverage their team size to increase mine
– Expect lack or quality performance based on team
13. 13@billhunt
Search Team Size
13
US Comp1 Comp2 Comp3 Comp4 Comp4
Structure Central Central/BU Central/BU BU/Central BU Central/BU
Paid
Approach
Agency In-House Hybrid Hybrid Agency In-House
Earned
Approach
In-House In-House In-House In-House In-House In-House
Global SEM
Manager
No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Team Size 4 32 25 15* 14 16
Paid 0.7* 18 8 5 2 8
Earned 3.5 8 12 5 6 5
Owned 0 3 2 1 3 1
Analytics 0 3 3 1 3 2
14. @billhunt 14
What do you want to know?
• Inbound Links
– What quality and relevant sites are linking to them?
– What is the velocity of link acquisition?
– What practices are they using?
• Business & Actionability Value
– Leverage their link research to get my links
– Justify resources for link acquisition
15. 15@billhunt
Competitive Research
Takeaways
1. Care about competitors once your house is in order
2. Monitor performance against your baselines
3. Use multiple tools to “Monitor” competition but don’t
obsess over it
4. Spend time diagnosing site performance
5. Share any and all findings with wider audience!
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