Continuing to read through WebsiteMagazine.com — I stumbled upon this article that Heather Lutze wrote – Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it: Know Thy Competitor, printed issue November 2009.
Heather mentions that as a website owner you wear many hats
Webmaster
Content Writer
E-mail Manager
Marketing Guru
and Many More!
Heather wants to let us know about “how to “spy” on your competitors, as well as highlight some competitive tools to help position your company for ultimate findability.”
1. Seek out your competitors through Google results
2. As a business owner, know who your REAL competition is
3. Review through these competitors and find what they websites are doing better, equal or worse
Heather recommends for More Information: Want to know your Findability Score – visit FindabilityFormula.com to see the criteria for Findability Score assessments.
The company that Heather was reviewing, she noticed a poor PPC Campaign, bad SEO design, lack of a blog and social media efforts.
Action Plan – Heather suggests:
Gather Competitive Intelligence
- Tool #1: SEOmoz.org – measures strength of pages, blogs and entire domains based on factors inherent to popularity, influence and ranking ability – measures your impact compared against others in your industry
- SEO Domain Strength Tool (SEOmoz’s Trifecta)
- Tool #2: WebsiteGrader.com – FREE SEO tool from HubSpot – score that incorporates website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors – provides some basic advice on how a website can be improved from a marketing perspective
- Website Grader Tool – organic findability
- Tool #3: SpyFu.com – FREE PPC tool gives great intelligence on how competitive certain keywords are in Google – gives insight on CPC and average number of clicks per day, and displays ad text for competitors
- Competitors offer special incentives to click on their ad – tells you what ads your competitors are running and the keywords’ competitive level
- Seek out your keyphrase with the less amount of competiton and try to differentiate your business from your competitors
- Example: They offer low prices – you state Best Quality or Free Shipping
Continue reading… This article is quite interesting isn’t it!
The Solution?
Heather brings these solutions to the table:
- Tip #1: Blog as if your company depended on it
- If you have a blog that is off-site you receive no search engine credit for it – put a blog on your website so it is included in the sitemap and use core keywords in blog posts
- Use del.icio.us bookmarks too!
- Tip #2: Have the best pick-up lines for your PPC
- One of the keys to running a successful PPC campaign, Heather mentions – having solid ad text – use the four-line entry that will display on the results page in the area of the page called Sponsored Links
- Tip #3: Selecting Your Spy Team
- Do you have Google News Mentions? If you rank lower than your competitors – get a Press Release distributed about your company and the products or services you offer. [You can use the SEOmoz tool to determine your Google News Mentions ranking]
WHAT IS IN YOUR SPY KIT?
Request for updates to be sent to you regarding keywords from the following:
Google.com/Alerts – from Google
Alerts.Yahoo.com – from Yahoo!
Alerts.Live.com – from Windows Live
Heather concludes with… Remember, for successful findability you must understand the findability of your competitors and adjust your campaigns accordingly. By matching and beating PPC, SEO and social media offerings of your competitors, you are setting yourself up to succeed on your Internet marketing mission.
Heather Lutze is the author of “The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing.” You can visit FindabilityFormula.com for tools and resources to increase your site’s findability.
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