It is important as you are developing and analyzing your search marketing plan that you know what your competition is doing.
 Having the information about your competition can help you have an edge over your rivals. In addition you will know how much money to spend on your search marketing budget as well as where your SEO efforts should be on different sites. You would not close your eyes if you had a shoe store in a mall with another shoes store right across the hall. You would be looking at what they were selling and for what price.
 In this article you will learn some strategies for knowing what your competition is doing and using it to your advantage.
 What is my Competition spending on marketing?
 Typical there are two different budgets for marketing. The first is SEO or organic search. The second type is a paid search. These have two different budgets. The budget used for SEO is usually drawn from agency fees. In the case of paid searches this budget is usually a combination of agency and media fees. It may be difficult to find out exactly how much a particular agency is paying their agency but there some ways to extrapolate a rough estimate.
 The website SpyFu.com is good place to start. This site provides estimates of paid search spending, and you can download Excel files that can help you forecast and analyze your competition’s spending habits.
 Is your competition easily seen in a SERP?
 A search engine results page, or SERP, is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. You can make a guess of their visibility by the number of pages a site has indexed you will need to actually do a search and see whether the pages come up in a SERP. There is an easier way than manually performing searches to determine your competitor’s visibility. http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/ is good website to use to make these types of searches. You can enter a phrase and the top ten sites will displayed. You can also compare your site in terms of a variety of key SEO factors, such as inbound links, and URL age.
 Determining your competitors inbound link scheme.
 In SEO searches one of the most important factors are how many sites are providing inbound links for a particular site. This may be difficult to determine on your own so there is a tool that can help you. It can be found at Marketleap.com. Find the Link Popularity Check. This tool lets you see how your site ranks against your competitors in terms of external links across Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This tool also helps you get a relative rank of how you’re doing in your particular space.
Determine what edge your competition has.
 Sometimes a site has a blog or a wikipedia link attached to it. This can help increase the ranking a particular site has. You may need to research to find out what exactly a competitions edge is. There is a tool that can help you in your quest. It can be found at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html. You will need to use the firefox browser to utilize this tool. When you use it in your browser you can the SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.
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