The following interview was conducted at PubCon Las Vegas and it focused on StepForth competitor analysis/competitor intelligence services. In hindsight I didn’t give much away in the terms of competitive analysis and frankly the interview could have gone better (what with the sun glare and a lil’memory loss). So feel free to view this and then follow it up with my notes below where I will provide a couple examples of the strategies/resources used in our basic and advanced competitor intelligence reports.

Additional Competitor Analysis Tips
We provide a listing of our recommended competitor research tools which Mike McDonald kindly previewed the link to but let me give you a few more tips… it is the least I can do if you watched my interview 😉

  • Use Technorati to determine the networks that publish your competitors content. Often I identify some great sites that are more than happy to publish the material my client has… which in turn can build valuable links.
  • Use Compete.com (the one I forgot in the interview) to get a hint of the keywords your competitors may be focusing on and to gauge their success in each one. Please note, however, that I definitely do not recommend accepting everything from Compete.com as writ; accept it with a grain of salt because their intelligence network is far from flawless.
  • Use OptiLink to create a maximum list of backlinks for each competitor using Yahoo and have the system fetch PageRank and Alexa ratings. Then copy the results into Excel and then sort the results from highest Alexa rating to lowest first and then highest PR to lowest as the secondary sort rule . Now you will have the beginnings of a very useful list of likely respectable sites. Review each to determine which ones may accept your content/links as well.Note: I sort by Alexa first because Google’s paid-link PR penalty has caused many high quality resources to falsely look like low quality ones.

Here is more information on StepForth’s SEO research services that focus on competitor analysis.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
Celebrating 10 Years of Web Marketing Excellence