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In a post at the SEOmoz blog, Laura Lippay asks, “What makes your site different? Remarkable?”
Stumped? Well, one great way to determine how your site stacks up against the competition is to analyze what your competitors are doing right, Lippay says. She offers some guidelines on how best to snoop: “We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable. Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product,” she says.
Lippay suggests you compare these key competitor site attributes with those of your own:
Features. Compare content, landing pages, resources, widgets, tools, social presence and promotion, she advises. “This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular, and it’s the stuff that can affect inlinks and traffic,” she notes.
Sentiment. Use social monitoring tools (such as NetBase for larger shops) to determine what people like about your competitors’ products and features, and what they like—or may not like—about yours.
On-Page SEO. Lippay suggests you employ any of these on-page SEO comparison tools: SEOmoz Crawl Test, SearchCLU, Website Grader, Covario.
Inlinks. Use inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links, she advises. Also examine who is link-sharing with whom.
Traffic. Lippay suggests trying out these tools and services for monitoring site traffic and traffic trends: Compete, Alexa, AttentionMeter, comScore, Nielsen or Hitwise.
Once you’ve completed this exercise, you “should have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets,” Lippay concludes.
The Po!nt: Watch and learn! Employ the latest tools to determine what makes your competitors’ sites remarkable; you can then use that info to work on topping them.
Source: SEOmoz. Read the full post.
Looking for great search marketing data? MarketingProfs reviewed hundreds of research sources to create our most recent Search Engine Marketing Factbook (May 2010). With 121 pages and 81 charts, it is full of relevant search marketing stats and trends. The Search Marketing Factbook is Part 2 of the complete Digital Marketing Factbook (our 296-page full report).
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