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Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis

  • aarondicks


    So on SEOmoz you can create a profile page with followed links (after 200 points), just as you can do on Google Profiles. I'd like to build a strong backlink profile which features some of these highest links that my competitors will not have the time or effort to do. I'm working hard to answer questions on SEOmoz and to be a helpful part of the community, and have published some Google Knols for the Google profile building. My question is; are there any other sites that allow the same type of responsible profile building, preferably SEO related as this is my area of expertise. Thanks Aaron Solar Monster Ltd

    | aarondicks
    0
  • Daan01


    Hi Mozzers, I've made a script that uses the Google Adwords API to insert big lists of keywords ideas and their monthly search volume into our database. It would be awesome to be able to also automatically get a difficulty score for those keywords from a tool like the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool. Sadly this tool doesn't seem to be in the SEOmoz API. Google does provide a competition score in the AdWords API, but that's only based on the competitiveness of the AdWords auction for that keyword. So my question is: does anyone know another keyword difficulty tool, that does have an API? Thanks! Daan

    | Daan01
    3
  • Chas-295721


    This is a strange one, and I hope a few local experts are out there. My client basically has one major competitor in the market. The competitor is closer to downtown and he is out about 27 miles. A couple of months ago, if you searched on "biplane rides in atlanta" the places map in the SERPS would show two - my client and his competitor. Now, the initial local in-line serp just shows his competitor, zoomed in. If go to Google Maps and type in the same search, he is listed, but you first have to click show more results. Then, he's listed twice - one his airport address (which is the real one) and one his business registered address (his house). How would I go about straightening this out? My client is #1 in the natural SERPS, it's just this local thing drives us crazy. If anyone can figure this out, you may walk away with a biplane ride next time you're in Atlanta! Thanks, Charles

    | Chas-295721
    0
  • JordanGreve


    I have been doing manual keyword research for some time now, but I am looking for something that can dig deep. I used to use the SEMrush API when i was a raven tools subscriber and it was great for identifying organic rankings for domains. Has anyone had a good experience with this software strictly for keyword research?

    | JordanGreve
    0
  • liors


    Hi There, I am looking for a tool that will allow me to learn about the new links our competitors get each month. Do you know a tool that lets you know each time your competitor has a new link?

    | liors
    0
  • Cincinnati_WebTec


    Hey everyone, I am a web programmer and have been fooling around with SEO for about a year now and just started to get pretty serious about it so I signed up for SEOmoz.  We just launched our new site about 4 months ago (http://www.cincinnatiwebtec.com) and Google just started ranking us about a month ago.  I believe we have done everything right with H1 tags, H2 tags, Title tags, alt tags, inbound links, url structure, etc. but yet we still can't even seem to get to the 1st or 2nd page of Google for "Cincinnati Web Design".  I know it's going to be a competitive keyword because the people fighting for it are the SEO experts, but if you were to compare a person on page 2 or 3 to us, some of them have nothing to do with Cincinnati web design and I highly doubt they even bother with SEO, but yet they are ranked higher than us. i.e. http://www.hollandadvertising.com/ - the only place I see Cincinnati is the address at the bottom and they have only 30 inbound links according to yahoo.  On top of that, they are an advertising firm, not a web design firm! I was wondering if you guys would take a look at our site above and offer some suggestions.  Do you think we are spreading the keywords too thin? I mean I just can't think of why a company like the Holland Advertising example above would rank higher than us.  We clearly have a more SEO optimized site, more inbound links, more quality links, 0 errors, 0 warnings, etc.  I am just at a loss.  Hope you guys can help. Thanks guys, Chris

    | Cincinnati_WebTec
    0
  • SEO_ACSI


    Hi, Our site www.suncamp.nl has, for language reasons, 2 redirects So : www.suncamp.nl is redirected with a 301 to www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl and is than redirected 301 to http://www.suncamp.nl/nl/nl/home/uc19-l1-n804/ My question is; is this bad for our SEO? Recently we've been doing a lot of linkbuilding and SEO copywriting, but in comparison with our competitors were lagging behind. So I'm looking for other bottlenecks. Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek My email: dennis@acsi.eu ACSI

    | SEO_ACSI
    0
  • RikkiD22


    Hello, Im gathering data to complete the spreadsheet found here http://seomoz.box.net/shared/g3vz0kxbbp (using Ben's). A lot of the data can be gathered from open site explorer, the moz tool bar or via the key previded but where is the quickest place to gather the below info or is a lot of it manual gathering? Lk RDs KW Usage LDA Score Xct Anc. Txt Links Xct Anc. Txt RDs Part Anc. Txt Links Part. Anc Txt RDs Domain # Linking RDs Tweets FB Shares Blog Links

    | RikkiD22
    0
  • GOYMedia48


    Hello everyone, my first post - ahhh I'm investigating a niche and there is a site that should have no right being there in my view. It's no. 3 Google UK for 'company formation' with a small site with 65 weak links from only 7 domains and hosted in the US. But more importantly, the Open Site Explorer says there is not 1 link with that term in its anchor text.  This I find crazy and makes me suspicious. But before I go back to my client saying "oh they must be black hat" I would like your expert views.  I'm not sure whether to tut or congratulate them and for the first time I'm not sure what reasons to give for their amazing performance! What's your views?

    | GOYMedia48
    0
  • stevenmusumeche


    I'm looking to do some competitive research on the top ranking sites in my niche.  How can I get a list of the number of backlinks that come from distinct C-Class IP addresses?  I don't see this anywhere in the OSE data.  Thanks.

    | stevenmusumeche
    0
  • cmaddison


    I've built a couple of small tools that I use personally, maybe 2 or 3 times per day. Both tools scrape the top 10 results from Google and provide more details about each domain (like the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool). Google seem to have banned my IP address for automated searches... can anyone tell me a safe way of scraping the google results? Is there a suitable API for this? How do SEO Moz do this on such a huge scale?

    | cmaddison
    0
  • JerDoggMckoy


    Hello, we have been working with this customer for a few years, doing their PPC, organic marketing, and we had established one google places listing for them as well. I guess the owner got sold on having someone else work with us to do google places for an additional office location they recently set up, and for whatever reason, they bypassed having us do it. This company never gained FTP access to the website. And despite heavy competition (apparantly), they have that new location listed in the #1 - A spot, without making any changes to the website. And, to top it off, when you review the Google places performance, there is a weird result I had never before seen labeled as "* loc:". You can see what I'm talking in both screen shots. Is there any guidance you can offer, first as to what that listing label means, and second, do you have any ideas how to 'reverse engineer' how they were able to get top listing so quickly for our customer like that? local_results.jpg local_analytics.jpg

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0
  • krishrun


    Hi, I am offered a paid link to the following site www.alliancedownunder09.com/ which has a Page Rank 6. I checked blekko/yahoo/bing but the number of backlinks do not match the page rank. Also the posts on the site itself are very short and seem spammy ? Then why does google grant it PR = 6 or is there some trick used ?

    | krishrun
    0
  • 87ROB


    Hello, I am looking at my competitors back link analysis and comparing a range of link based metrics from the top 10 SERPS. I am then putting this data into excel and comparing our back link profiles. When looking at the anchor text distribution i am not sure whether to look at exact match anchor or phrase match anchor. For example, one of the companies I am looking at holds positions 3 and 4 in the SERPS. Looking at their linking profile I can see that only 1.7% of their links use the exact match anchor 'widget'. Looking at their phrase match anchor is an entirely different story, 93.5% of anchor links contain 'widget' somewhere. i.e. 'cheap widgets', 'widget sale', 'buy widgets at www.examplewidget.co.uk' etc. Obviously their exact match and phrase match anchor distribution tell a completely different story. THIS IS TRUE FOR MANY OF THE TOP 10 SERPS. Therefore, should I be looking at phrase match anchors instead of exact? Side note: would people recommend targeting anchors with 'brandname widget' based on predictions of Google giving weighted anchor more weight. Robert.

    | 87ROB
    0
  • perfectweb


    Hi Guys, Have you ever come across government sites that are cluttering up SERP's that you're trying to rank for? For a new site that I'm working on one of the keyword terms is "driving test cancellations" and is in the UK. 3 of the top 4 results are government related sites which have verry little (if not nothing) to do with the keywords. Whilst these government sites are (very) loosley related to the keyword terms, and understandably have high pa/da, what would be the best way to try and rrank higher than these sites. I'm in the process of building links and social profiles - I'm really just wondering if there's something I'm missing that is an "easy fix" for jumping ahead of these sites - or getting them removed due to their lack of relevence. Gary...

    | perfectweb
    0
  • electrik


    When using google.com.au and searching for "travel to france", www.frenchtravel.com.au is the 3rd organic result. (the 1st two are not travel businesses, they are non profit travel  guides) My client, who runs www.visituk.com.au, an Australian site that organises tours of the UK, said "so we just need to add these sort of words to the site?" I said, yes, but it doesn't end there. The real task is to have a link to your site on other sites surrounded with the words "travel"  and "UK". He asked if he could see a list of the sites the french site was being referred by relevant to the search phrase. Is there an SEOmoz tool for this? Or is there another way I can generate that list? Thanks Simon

    | electrik
    0
  • irvingw


    Anyone have any insight or comments? We’ve been negatively impacted by the last Google algorithm update - not by a penalization of our site but because another site is now grabbing the top 3-4 search results for long tail physician name searches thereby pushing us lower in the rankings.  Being that we’ve never seen this happen with unbranded search terms, we’re not sure how to address it. To see an example, click http://www.google.com/search?q=dr.+elizabeth+eads.  You’ll notice that the top 4 results are all from 1 site - HealthGrades - with 2-3 of the 4 pages being canned, pre-written templates without any unique content (see malpractice & sanction pages).  It seems that they are doing this by paginating their information into separate pages, thus appearing in multiple search results, instead of putting all the information on 1 page, as we do and Google’s best practices suggest. Any advice or comments would really be appreciated.

    | irvingw
    0
  • wbruceis-237271


    Hi All, I operate a weather website, and our link building strategy has been to offer weather services to domains with high ranking homepages in return for links from those homepages. The researching of 'high ranking pages' is obviously a big part of the link building process, and up until now we have been using Google's PageRank (PR), in the form of a Chrome extension to determine a pages authority. Now that there is an SEOMoz Chrome extension with Page Authority (PA)...and mozRank/mozTrust, should we switch to PA instead of PR when determining which pages to link from? Thanks.

    | wbruceis-237271
    0
  • rmteamseo


    Is there a tool that could list all high PR pages of a domain? Ideally, non subscripton based but if the tool is awesome then I wouldn't hesitate forking out for it.

    | rmteamseo
    0
  • jcolman


    What metrics tell you the most when you're looking at your competitors across the search landscape? PageRank/MozRank Inbound links Keyword rankings Alexa/QuantCast/etc. Pages indexed Something else entirely? What numbers speak volumes to you when you want to get an idea of how you benchmark against your competitors?  And how do you communicate these results?

    | jcolman
    2
  • Nicknak


    I'm looking to create a website selling a specific niche range of products. For example 'hair extensions.' Using opensite explorer it's fairly easy to guage the competition for similar websites focused on this niche only e.g www.hairextensionsworld.com  - I just look at their authority, number of incoming links, anchortext links etc. However, I'm finding it more difficult to guage the competition if a large merchant, for example Amazon, has a page ranking for a specific keyphrase I'm after.  Often the large merchant doesn't have a lot of external links to the specific page, but nonetheless it has power from being on the domain of the large merchant. Are there any good tools / metrics for guaging the competition of such pages? Page authority I guess is one? Thanks

    | Nicknak
    0
  • FastCashOnlineInc


    Is the any report that will show the reciprocal vs one-way inbound links?

    | FastCashOnlineInc
    0
  • anuraag


    I have an e-learning website called www.graduatetestprep.com and we provide university students preparation for the GRE examination. This is an entrance exam required for admittance to graduate school across the US. I was wondering what is the best way to find the best keywords focus on to optimize on google and the other search engines. I feel I can't use "on-page" on pro-dashboard properly unless I have the right keywords to focus on. Thanks

    | anuraag
    0
  • jkenyon


    When running Open Site Explorer on a particular URL, I get a list of linking pages. Many of these pages have a high Page Authority. I am assuming that this is a list of pages that presumably link to the URL I entered. First, is this correct? Next, when I click on an entry in the list I don't see any reference to the URL on the page, even viewing the page source. What does this mean and why is the link in the list?

    | jkenyon
    1
  • ZeroGrav


    I'm building a site on a virtual host and now it's ready to go online, but i still have to choose a domain name. One of the main keywords i want to rank for is a 3-word keyword phrase with 9000+ exact match searches per month. Here's an example to better understand my question: 'Guitar training lessons' My main competitor's domain is only 5 months old but it does have the full keyword phrase in it with  '4u' added at the end:  www.guitartraininglessons4u.com I wanted to go with www.guitartrainingcenter.com (notice that 'lessons' is left out of the domain name) but i'm wondering if my main competitor would have a big advantage by having the full keyword phrase in his domain. How much weight does google give to sites that have the exact search query in their domain name? Does a domain still qualify as 'exact match' if a word (info) is added to it? How much harder would it be to outrank this domain as apposed to a site that doesn't have the keywords in its domain name? Thanks in advance Freek

    | ZeroGrav
    1
  • GregMoore


    (1) Can I use OSE to see the number of links per month a site acauired over the past year (month by month)?  For example, I might be interested if I see a competitor acquired a surprisingly high number of links during December, 2010. (2) Can I use OSE to see the a list of links a site acquired during a specific time, such as December of 2010?  For example, if I see a competitor suddenly acquired an unusually high number of links in December, 2010, I'd like to see a list of those links, to figure out how they acquired those links. Thanks!

    | GregMoore
    0

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