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Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis

  • Imagination


    Hello. I have a question. I currently have a client who is exploring the option of changing his domain name to one which includes a key word and his company name. Currently he is using a domain name which does not include a keyword and does not include his company name. I understand that with proper redirects we can keep a significant amount of the juice behind it and we aren't so concerned about the domain name change. However my clients only concern is this. His company and new domain have the words Best Buy in it. He is concerned about the words best buy being in the domain name as it would be directly competing with the electronics giants. Should this even be a concern? He isn't in the electronics business and the remaining of the domain would include a keyword which directly relates to his business. Any input would be appreciated.

    | Imagination
    0
  • raja29


    Hey Mozzers How Are You All? Hope You Are Doing Well. 🙂 I need your help. I have been having a very bad experience with Google. 😞 Do you know what is "Google Dance"? Somewhere I have heard about this. I don't have even clearance about Google Dance. BTW, the problem is that i have an adult video site about a porns tar. I was ranking at 3-6 position on a "particular keyword" on google. But about 20 days ago when i searched my "keyword term", I could not find it anywhere even on page 50 in Google search. 😄 My heartbeat was gone faster. As i was getting 25k visitors from google of that keyword. 🙂 Then i looked at my webmaster tools to check "manual spam action". There was no issue with spam or anything related to it. Then i checked my google analytics i was getting visitors from google but not from the 'particular keyword'. I was sure it was not "google hit or penalized". I could not find the exact reason why did it happen. I checked my sites everything seems to be fine. Then i did "fetch as google" and the strange thing was happened, my site pop up again in google on "that keyword". But this not the end. From that day my search keyword was getting vanish within 24 hours or more in google. And i do google fetch and it again comes to search results. 😄 I tried moz tools. no such issue. Though i cannot sort out the whole matter. What’s wrong going with google. Its an adult site, otherwise I would provide my site url and the keyword. By the way, I have attached some screenshots. I am waiting for your help. Thanks to all. 🙂 gyKIRVW

    | raja29
    0
  • Krackle


    Hi All, I am currently mid development of a website (no testing page yet) and want to make sure I am doing my due diligence in regards to SEO. Are there best practices to always complete while a website is being built? If so what are they? I've gotten to the stage where I've read every blog on the planet and now maybe too much info. I am also focusing my Keyword Analysis around competitor research to write great copy from, but seem to be falling down a rabbit hole of way too many keywords. Is there agencies/services that would just be hired to do Keyword Research for my needs? Thanks a lot!

    | Krackle
    0
  • Hondaspeder


    What is the best tool or method to find the highest ranking posts and content on a message board or forum? What is the best tool or method for finding the highest ranking keywords for a message board or forum?

    | Hondaspeder
    0
  • eyeflow


    If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be? *I also asked this question on the inbound forms.

    | eyeflow
    0
  • MonsterWeb28


    Right now we are using xml-sitemaps.com however it looks like it isn't generating an accurate or lengthy sitemap. Do you have any recommendations?

    | MonsterWeb28
    0
  • CJ5


    I'm using Open Site Explorer to look at backlinks and referring pages to my site. I'm seeing 3 links coming from http://j.mp/XXXXXX (not actual link) which is a bitly shortened URL. It shows as a 301 redirect, and I'm trying to figure out if there is any way to find where that link is originating from? When I try to search for the exact j.mp url in google it brings up one result which is the page the link redirects to. Any Ideas? Thanks a lot.

    | CJ5
    0
  • Angelos_Savvaidis


    I am having a problem adding a competitor at one of my campaigns... I am not sure if I should add the link of my competitor so I wont 🙂 the link is with a /path competitorlink.gr/magazine Anyone knows what should I do?

    | Angelos_Savvaidis
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    I want to find a tool where I can put in a url: www.site.com and it will tell me all the people that site links to. If this is in the Moz tool set, then I apologize. I couldn't find it. I can only find tools that tell me who links to a site, but not the other way around. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • eatyourveggies


    I have a site in the UK, with these metrics: 15 years old 500 pages in sitemap, but Majestic says 186,000 indexed URLs ? DA of 45, PR of 3 1000 links from 200 linking root domains, across from 150 IP's (from OSE) 33,000 links in OSE when I use the compare tool and look at the "links to this root domain" section 24,000 external links according to Majestic 350 shares, 2,000 tweets, 60 +1's Median PA of linking root domains (from OSE export) = 20 no Moz on-page errors, or webmaster tools issues The above metrics are better than 2 competitors who have only just launched, have fewer links, lower DA, etc, and are ranking for keywords like "wedding entertainment", "corporate entertainers" Our site is www.superted.com Why doesn't OSE show 33,000 links when I select "links to this root domain". Why will those links only be shown when I do a domain comparison in OSE? I'm thinking our anchor text distribution is the problem. We have very few links containing the keywords want. Also maybe our sitemap is an issue as it only lists 500 of our pages? But given our domain age, DA, etc... surely anchor text / site map isn't the only issue here? Any hints would be awesome.

    | eatyourveggies
    0
  • inhouseseo


    I have been using OSE, and I have come across a few sites that rank within the top 5 for VERY competitive keywords and seem to have NO inbound links to the page. Am I overlooking something? For example, Keyword: floor lamps Page: www.lampsplus.com/products/floor-lamps/

    | inhouseseo
    0
  • bobanna


    Hi, A while back I used link detective to scan through our OSE reports. However, it seems that the site is no longer maintained and the system no longer seems to work, ie I upload the CSV file and then when i check back it leads to a blank screen. I wonder if anyone knows of a similar software as its functionality was very useful. Thanks

    | bobanna
    1
  • Zippy-Bungle


    To get round the 'not provided' issue I've just generated a list of the 5000+ keywords that people have used to visit my site over the last 7+ years. I want to do a one off SERPS check for all these keywords and export into excel where I'll tie it up with lots of analytics and moz based data I was going to use the queries report on analytics but my data only goes back as far as May this year, so I'll use that if I have to (and probably will anyway for the impressions and CTR) but I'd prefer to cover everything so I can see any opportunities in my very long tail

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0
  • SamRaskin


    Hi There, I'm new to SeoMoz but ive been using it for the past month and I've been using the tools to try to optimize my site but for some reason even though my metrics are showing that my rank and authority are rising past my competitor they still rank higher in the searches. my website is the site on the far left with the domain authority @27. the competitor that keeps outranking me is the third from the left with a domain authority of 12. If anyone can advise as to why I'm being outranked that would be very helpful. I'm stumped here. Thanks guys! eYtMRr9.png

    | SamRaskin
    1
  • followuk


    Hi, How risky is link building nowadays? I have a site which has been left on its own and over time has generated links which is great, its a resource type of site so works well in that department. The reason it picks up links by itself is because I have spent time on it and in the past I could just leave and the links it would pick up would maintain its rankings. Over the last 6 months a lot of marketers have noticed this large traffic, and have produced 1 page sites going directly for my main term - then putting adsense all over it. So problem is, my site can't build links by itself as fast as these marketers are doing manually. Don't get me wrong I can do what they are doing but they don't care about their 1 pager as much as I do about my site - a lot of work has gone into it. Can I link build without running a 'big' risk of having my site hit by Google? how does one build links the way Google is ok with? Thanks.

    | followuk
    0
  • andzon


    For example, I would like to comment on a do follow blog with my link inserted in the comment. The blog post is relevant with the link i inserted however there are too many spammy links on the comment. Will this affect my website in terms of "link neighborhood" even my site is relevant to the blog? how do you judge whether the blog is worth commenting and putting your link on it? Does link building on blog comments actually hurt the page rank of websites if it go wrong such as spammy sites?

    | andzon
    0
  • andzon


    Hi just wondering if there is any good free wordpress plugin for social liking that follows you even when you scroll down to read the article on the side? and one silly question which i cant get answer to, are facebook social plugin for commenting on blogs a do follow? can you add anchor text into facebook comment on blogs?

    | andzon
    1
  • allseasonshire


    Hello all, My colleague and I have been doing a lot of work to optimise our companies site (www.allseasonshire.eu/). The project is still massively work in progress. While we've been analysing the SERPs for KW's we're trying to rank for we've noticed two sites that are outranking us and we can't work out why. The sites in question are www(dot)nationwide-boilerhire(dot)co(dot)uk & and www(dot)nationwideboilerhire(dot)com. They're both very small sites, with hardly any content and basically zero external links pointing to them. When we compare the root domains in OSE our site comes out on top on every single competitive metric as well, most of them by a long shot. I'm just wondering if anyone can help shed some light on why these two sites would be appearing so high in SERPs and why they would be outranking us? Any input anyone has is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ryan Edit: Keyword in question is 'boiler hire'. Thanks for your answer Nishadha, would that alone really be enough though?

    | allseasonshire
    0
  • webguru2014


    We are in a very competitive industry for adwords and would like to know what is the best way to find low searched keywords with a low cpc - it is the low cpc we are really after. Thanks

    | webguru2014
    0
  • Jantaro


    One of our blog posts (http://dress.yournextshoes.com/celebrities-dresses-skirts-wind/) used to rank well for "windy skirt", but we're not ranking anymore. When I search for "windy skirt", all the top 10 results are Youtube videos. Is anyone else seeing this? gs1eVsn

    | Jantaro
    0
  • jbeals


    Is there any way to find out what keywords my competitors are ranking for? I would like ideas for blogs, website content, etc. to drive traffic and am curious as to what topics my competitors are focusing on. I am able to see my competitors' rankings for keywords which I am currently tracking but I would like to see keywords they are ranking for that I am not tracking if possible. Any suggestions? Josh

    | jbeals
    0
  • Shalin.TJ


    Hi, We are currently planning upon starting a website that’s targeted towards people looking for government jobs in India. Here are the primary / base keywords that we are targeting: Sarkari Naukri Government Jobs / Govt Jobs Latest Government jobs Banking Jobs Bank jobs Railway jobs Employment News IBPS SSC We’re confused that how should we go about ranking on top for these / long tail keywords around it? Because, we think that this is not a domain where you can write long and information-oriented posts (1400-1500 words) to crack SEO. People come to websites under this domain to look for latest jobs and that might or might not be around the high-traffic keywords mentioned above. Secondly, it might not be possible to write a lot of long & information-oriented content around these newer job posts. How do we go about building a high-traffic website in this domain? Thanks...

    | Shalin.TJ
    0
  • allstatetransmission


    As most of us are, I am working on pushing my page rank up and in that I have been looking at some of the pages ahead of me to see what they may be doing. I noticed one of my main competitors has some different sitemaps than I am using. My sitemaps consist of:
    Using Yoast WP PLugin:
    Posts
    Pages
    QA/FAQs
    Testimonials
    Categories
    and FAQ Categories Using Google Images Sitemap WP Plugin:
    Images Sitemap http://1stimpressions.com/sitemap_index.xml Their sitemap has:
    Posts
    Pages
    Attachment
    Portfolio (Next Gen Gallery)
    Category
    Post Tags
    Next Gen Gallery (NGG) Tags
    Portfolio Type Sitemap
    Author Sitemap http://smartwrap.com/sitemap_index.xml Could adding in some of these sitemaps help in page rank? I have looked at their links and on page optimization and we are just about par in comparison if not ahead of them, but they still are a whole page ahead of us in google searches for phoenix vehicle wraps, or car wraps phoenix and related searches. Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it. 🙂 Cheers! (edited spelling)

    | allstatetransmission
    0
  • A_Q


    Hi all, I'm currently working on some competitor analysis and estimating website traffic based on rankings and estimated search volume for approximately 500 keywords. I'm then estimating based on click through rate from Webmaster tools. I think this will give me a relatively accurate estimation but was wondering how everyone else does this? Any other methods out there? Thanks, Elias

    | A_Q
    0
  • CleanEdisonInc


    I'm wanting to build a in-depth profile for my company's typical site visitor and I was wondering if there is anyway to view other websites that visitors are searching for online to get an idea of their hobbies/interests and how they spend their free time. I'm not sure if I'm asking the right questions in Google because the results are very broad and are more about reading analytics for your own company. Can anyone point me to a website or software that allows for this sort of thing?

    | CleanEdisonInc
    0
  • Exscape


    This page has a high moz domain authority but compared to the other one abouve and bellow ranking for the keyword "audio pc" i dont see the factor why its ranking on #2 in germany in google serp. http://www.musicstore.de/de_DE/EUR/cat-COMPUTER-PCMDESKTOP what would you do if you would be on the places 1 or 2 or 3 bellow?

    | Exscape
    0
  • Gordon_Hall


    I'm currently doing some keyword research, and on favourable keywords such as: "weekend breaks in lake district" (320 searches per month with 39% keyword difficulty), I see that all of the first page SERPS are from larger companies (last minute, centerparcs etc) How likely will it be that I can get on that first page, assuming I am focusing my page on that particular keyword. Sparse info I know, but I didn't want to spend hours going down a dead end street. Is it simply that these larger companies are in the top 10 because there are no specific pages targeting that keyword, or do I have little chance?

    | Gordon_Hall
    1
  • realmccoy101


    Ok, I have a pretty good Alexa Ranking of 159K and have been online for less than a year.  What my question is why is my Alexa Ranking so much better than all of my competitors who get way more traffic and have been online for years.  The only thing that seems to be going slow is my page rank is still barely .98, while competitors are higher although they have lower Alexa Rank. What am I doing right to get good Alexa  Rank?? What can I do to rais my PR and Domain Rank? Competitors for example

    | realmccoy101
    0
  • lawfirm


    For http://www. I am ranking for particular KW's/phrases However, when I search just http:// - I am unranked. The http://  301's to the http://www. Is this normal? Thank you

    | lawfirm
    0
  • boyackp


    Ok I am at a loss. Our client is trying to rank for keywords like "dental assistant programs utah", but they are still on the bottom of page 1/top of page 2. The guys in the top 3 have terrible SEO. No links, newer domains, etc. I looked into it extensively and learned about the "honeymoon period" people talk about but we are long past that. I've looked through webmaster tools to see if there are any issues, and I can't find a thing. Anyone have an idea of what we could be doing wrong that is making us be put down so far on the page? Before I got here the SEO guys were doing older tactics which I think was starting to hurt them with penguin and what not so I tried my best to delete the crap content and clean everything up on the website. thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it.

    | boyackp
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    Is there someone to tell if a competitor has a KML Geositemap or not? Would it be in the source code on their homepage? or can I just put their url in a "Open Site Explorer" type product to find out? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • urkeman


    We are analysing why our website ranks so low (currently position 8 in serp). We beat our competitors in most areas. Also we produce by far the most useful content. Do not buy links or do any other malpractice. We have been for a long time ranked in top 3 (well mostly 1-2) positions. In the last year we have seen a decline to position 8-10 and we are not sure why this is the case. Can anyone suggest what we should be focusing on? We are clueless. All the practices we used to "know" now seem obsolete. m8qIeyC,Kf1LLei#0

    | urkeman
    0
  • co.mc


    Hi everyone, is there a way (tools) to see the "history" of any given website in terms of Page or Domain Authority? Like if I went to Alexa and typed in www.angieslist.com it tells me the site ranks #**2,691 **Globally and #670 in the USA. But, is there a way to see how the rank has gone up over time, or where it was a year, two or more ago? Thanks

    | co.mc
    0
  • Jasonalanmagic


    Hello everyone.  I asked a similar question but still find myself a bit confused.  I am a magician who is trying to improve my web presence.  I found a list of keywords which I will list below.  The results read from left to right the search results in the United States, and in Ohio ( where I am from).  I found these results using google planner. Magician 14800     390 Magicians 5400    170 Corporate Magician 170    10 Comedy Magician 140     10 Here is my question.  Lets use the word Magician as an example.  I see that there are 390 results in Ohio for the search term Magician.  Would I want to key the phrase "magician" or "Ohio Magician".  How does google work with this?  If I key just the word "magician" and someone in Ohio google searches for Ohio Magicians or something similar, will it detect their location and put me on there radar?  When I key in " Ohio Magician" in the planner the results that come back are 0 or less than 10. I'm curious if google works on location and if I'm wasting my time keying in all of these cities that are showing no results.  I began targeting "Cleveland Magician" "Columbus Magician" etc.  Should I just stick with the main term Magician?

    | Jasonalanmagic
    0
  • mm916157


    I need to estimate the traffic patterns for the last year at a minimum...preferably 2 or 3 years for this deep link: http://www.amazon.com/Boating-Water-Sports-Outdoors/b/ref=sa_menu_btwt?ie=UTF8&node=3421331 I have ran a url comparison in open site explorer against amazon.com but want to put some traffic estimates around this. Is there a tool in moz to do this?

    | mm916157
    0
  • SocialStreets.Co


    My client runs a very small business hiring out space in a single warehouse and rarely adds content to his incredibly badly optimised wordpress site. Can anyone make any wild guesses as to why my client has 2.9 million root domains linking to root domains? He also has a domain authority of 100. Strange when the number one competitor in warehouse space in this part of the world is Gumtree (equivalent of Craig's List) and that only has 9.25k root domains linking to root domains and site authority of 80. Is there any way of finding out where these links are coming from via Moz? Thanks

    | SocialStreets.Co
    0
  • dsinger


    Does anyone know of a way to get monthly visitor data for a subdomain that I do not manage?  I would normally use SEMRush or Compete, but they only provide domain level data.

    | dsinger
    0
  • fikhir


    I am following some keywords for my website on google. About a month, on the first page of these keywords, there are a lot of changes on ranking. 3-4 website has been falling to 2.3.page and new 3-4 website are shown on 1.page. But these new sites has 0 pagerank and there are no backlinks..These are new websites. What is the reason is there any update on Google search results ?

    | fikhir
    0
  • Jasonalanmagic


    Hello everyone.  Was talking to my "competition" the other day and they mentioned the amount of traffic they are getting from google.  It's double what I currently am receiving.  I feel like I am not targeting the correct keywords.  What is the best way to research competitions keywords?  Anyway to find out what is driving traffic their direction?

    | Jasonalanmagic
    0
  • qiherbs.com


    Is there a way within SEOMoz to uncover the keywords your competitors rank for and their respective SERPs? Thx

    | qiherbs.com
    1
  • Jasonalanmagic


    Hello everyone.  Looking at the competitive metrics section and I realize, I know nothing about this.  Is there a tutorial to explain these?  I noticed that my Domain Authority has dropped in the past week.  Curious of why and exactly what this means?

    | Jasonalanmagic
    0
  • SebastianP


    Hello Moz members, Quick Question for today !!
    Please, who is involved in backlinking processes/White hat SEO these kind of things pm me, I really appreciate some great responses to this specific thread. I have a blog 3 months old with quality articles on it (600 to 1000 words each article+fotos+videos+infographics), and the keyword targeted that is on the homepage have that 26 kW competitiveness keyword. What I really need to focus on if I want to be number 1 for that term? somehow on social media more?
    My competition seems to have little to no backlinks, but they have a domain or PA bigger than 30. How can I increase my domain and page authority faster?I still have 30 backlinks and PA/DA and also PR = 0. I want to know specifically which tasks I need to Master if I want to be number 1 in Google for a keyword that have JUST 26 Keyword competitiveness in MOZ.
    I mean, this is a very easy keyword to rank for but I didn't rank yet. Maybe from my description you can give me some gold nuggets here Thank you so much ! Regards,
    Sebastian Papp

    | SebastianP
    0
  • co.mc


    I was just thinking... wouldn't the best types of backlinks for any small local business be from "their own competitors" ? Weird, I know... but it would NOT get any more relevant than that. I mean wouldn't an Italian restaurant in New York gain credibility and higher ranks on SE's if "other" 'Italian restaurants in New York' linked back to them? Problem... yeap! It would be really hard to convince your "competition" to link back to ya! no matter how good your content piece is! Thoughts?

    | co.mc
    0
  • ivankrm


    Hi, Recently I've started a competitor research (aka competitive analysis). A few hours after I began, I've started to feel that maybe I'm doing too much unnecessary work. What I've been doing so far is analyzing the competitor's links (using the Dr Pete's Link Profiling excel and some other things), and their site optimization. The on-site optimization analysis has been very light, just to see if the competitors are doing something really well, or not. But still, I think that maybe I'm doing too much work. So, I'd like to see your thoughs: How much work is necessary when doing competitor analysis? What things do you analyse? And how much do you report to the clients? Thank you all in advance! Ivan

    | ivankrm
    0
  • iSTORM-New-Media


    Does anybody know of a research tool that can track the amount of subdomains on a root domain? Maybe there is a way to manipulate a Google search to display the different subdomains that are indexed?

    | iSTORM-New-Media
    0
  • bogdan_c


    One of my clients has a travel site and is syndicating apartment listings to the likes of tripadvisor and flipkey. I've just done an SEO audit for them and noticed that when searching for snippets of text from within an apartment listing, these aggregator sites outrank my client by miles (which is the original creator of the content). How would you suggest tackling this issue? We can't give up the aggregator sites as they're bringing in sales. The first solution that comes to mind is send different descriptions to aggregator sites than the content on our site, however this would mean rewriting a ton of content. Any other suggestions on how to treat aggregator/comparison shopping sites?

    | bogdan_c
    0
  • co.mc


    Don't miss interpret this... I DON'T mean hidden backlinks that you would stick on a page using html/css. What I am trying to figure out is if it's possible to create backlinks from sites that aren't visible by crawlers or SEO tools like Moz?... Does that make sense? Another words, let's say I place a visible/genuine/follow backlink to any external website from my blog. Is there a way to keep crawlers like Moz or other SEO tools from "seeing it"?

    | co.mc
    0
  • cyrjm


    I'm not sure how or why this has happened but from a span of a week my client's site went from 518 total external links to 97.  I also saw a dramatic decrease in traffic for that week as well.  I'm new to the SEO game but I have not made any changes to their content other than importing old blog posts that did not get migrated to their new host. Any thoughts?  www.cobbcountyattorneys.com Thanks! JC

    | cyrjm
    0
  • fablau


    Hello,
    I have a question for you. I have noticed that many music sites that appear in the first top results for keywords our users search for, include all the same ads that deceive people by inviting them to "Download"  or get the "Full Album" of what people may be search for. Look at the following websites that are often displayed at the first spots for keywords like "Christmas Sheet Music" (just an example): [....] They all have, most of the times, the same ads. Look at the following screenshots taken from the sites above (the ads are at the top of the page): http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot1.jpg
    http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot2.jpg Those deceptive ads could engage users more than legitimate websites not showing those ads or not showing ads at all, making Google think that people are more engaged on those website showing those deceptive ads. If it is quality that Google is looking for, shouldn't they do something to avoid having sites ranking well just because of some deceptive ads that take users into action, but without any useful result? I am eager to know your ideas on this issue. Thanks! Fab.

    | fablau
    0
  • Ebtec


    I use sites such as expireddomains.com and Snap Name sin searching for expired domains. All these sites let you do a keyword search based on the domain name, but does anyone know a site that lets you search by the CONTENT of the site rather than just the name? Thanks, Kevin

    | Ebtec
    0

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