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When comparing how you're doing against competitors in Google are you winning,
losing or just holding your own?
Don't know? Doesn't surprise me.
For awhile I didn't know either. Sure I was keeping an eye on what I THOUGHT
was my prime competitor. Only thing is before I started keeping track, I didn't
realize he was more or less drifting off into the sunset. Or that there were
two newer sites I should have been watching. Ooops.
So yes. Most of us have no clue if they're winning the Google rankings battle
much less the war. Yet I've discovered keeping score is so simple. Here's all
you do.
Identify the Competition
Track Page Rank
Ferret Out How Many Pages in Google
Gauge Both Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Track Traffic
Keep an Eye on Them
That's it. That's all that counts really. To start...
Identify Your Competitors
Not hard. Just identify the top 5 competitors in your niche that you want to
outrank.
One way to do that, is to take the five or six keyword phrases you are looking
to rank well for and see who is in the top 10 for each. Since anyone can rank
well for one keyword, doing this for multiple keywords will spotlight those
who show up repeatedly. This highlights them as the stiffer competition.
Then repeat this every three or four months to make sure no one new has slipped
in under the radar.
Track Page Rank (PR)
Once again take those same five or six "must-win" keywords you want
to come out on top for.
Use the Google toolbar <http://toolbar.google.com> to track the PR of
competitors' pages optimized for those prime keywords.
Google Toolbar Tip: I realize some have no clue how to coax Google's tool bar
to give up Page Rank. So here's all you do. Simply hold your cursor in the green
bar area itself. Get it in just the right spot and a little pop up box will
come up that says:
"Page Rank is Google's measure of the importance of this page (4/10)"
In this case the PR is 4.
Note the target keywords and the PR for pages featuring them on a spreadsheet.
How Many Pages in Google?
Again pretty simple if you have this tool: <http://www.neutralize.com/cmsvp/index.htm>
In the left hand column you'll see it asks "How well optimized is your
website?"
Now I don't give a rat's behind about mine, necessarily. But I do care about
those pesky competitors.
Enter the competitor's URL.
Stick in a guess-timate for how many pages are on their site.
Hit the "check now" button.
The result will show you how many pages they've got in Google, FAST, altaVista,
and Inktomi. While I track all of them - at least track the number of pages
in Google.
Gauge Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Not all links are created equal in Google's eyes. Links from High PR sites are
worth more. So you want a read on both the quantity and quality of your prime
competition's inbound links.
Since it's more inclusive you want to use FAST to find out the total number
or quantity of inbound links.
Here's how. Using FAST <http://www.alltheweb.com> put:
link:www.competitor.com
in the search box. All pages linking to www.competitor.com will be returned.
You'll see "1 - 10 of 135 Results for link:www.competitor.com" at
the top of the page of FAST listings. Which tells you there are 135 sites that
link to that site.
Google on the other hand will only reveal in bound links from PR 4 sites or
higher. BAM! There's your take on quality.
While you can do the same with Google as you did with FAST, Google makes it
even easier.
Go to the advanced search page <http://www.google.com/advanced_search>
Scroll down until you see a heading that says "Page-Specific Search".
Stick www.competitor.com into the search box labeled: "Links Find pages
that link to the page". Click "Search".
At the top of the page of search results you'll see
"Searched for pages linking to www.competitor.com.
Results 1 - 10 of about 21."
That says they have 21 high quality links. Subtract the internal links from
pages within the web site in question to get how many high quality sites link
to them.
Record the count of all links plus high quality external links on your spreadsheet.
Track Traffic
Use either Alexa's Toolbar <http://download.alexa.com> or visit Alexa
<http://www.alexa.com> to grab traffic stats.
While far from perfect since it can be manipulated, you can still get a decent
estimate of traffic as measured by users with the Alexa toolbar visiting the
sites.
To keep it simple just track the Alexa traffic rank.
Then to close the loop.
Keep an Eye on Them
Use a page monitoring service to watch competitor sites like a hawk. And here's
the free tool to use that makes this process automatic.
Change Detect < http://www.changedetect.com> will email you whenever
a site it's monitoring for you changes.
This gives you yet one more way to track if the webmaster is actively improving
their site or asleep at the switch.
Okay, now the easiest way to recognize trends is to graph what's going on.
You'll be able to see right away if the trend is your friend or not.
If any competitor is getting more of anything you're going to have to match
them or risk falling behind.
Look. Don't be blindsided like a frog in water on the stove. Who will boil
to death because he doesn't detect what's going on.
** Track your closest rivals.
** Compare your stats to theirs.
** Act or react accordingly.
It's easy and doesn't take more than 20-30 minutes a week given the tools revealed.
Yet doing so gives you the marketing intelligence you need to improve your Google
ranking. Or at least hold your own no matter what your competitors are doing.
About the Author:
John Gergye
john@traffic-test-tube.com
How much is more traffic worth to your business?
Take John Gergye's Search Engine Quiz and get a special report "Coming
Out On Top" with 49 tools that make it easy to get more traffic. http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml |
