6. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Think
• Evaluate past and current marketing programs
• Perform SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
• Set goals
• Identify primary and secondary metrics
• Perform in-depth keyword and market research
• Analyze market research and identify opportunities
• Evaluate and customize dashboards and analytics platforms to accommodate new metrics
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7. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Your competitors are direct, indirect, and internal
• Direct: Your typical business competitors
• Indirect: Those sites that dominate in search, for a variety of reasons
• Internal: Your organization – who is going to help, and who is going to impede progress?
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8. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Are rankings the best thing to measure?
• Don’t get hung on competitor’s rankings
• You don’t know if they convert
• Competitive ranking data is directional at best
• Personalization, social search, universal, etc. have
scrambled the SERPs
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9. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
A company’s biggest SEO competitor is itself
• Some companies are overly obsessed with their pet rankings
• Educate on the value and returns of SEO
• Implement the proper tools and analytics for measuring what you get from SEO
• Break down barriers that prevent effective SEO
• Focus on growing the good things that result from SEO, and reinvesting in SEO
• Know your site’s SEO and content value inside and out
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10. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Content
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11. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Content audit – Internal competitive research
1) Finding out what you have
2) Finding out what you don’t have
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12. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
How well do you know the content of your own site?
• How many unique pages reside within your domain, or
domains?
• How many pages within your site match a given
phrase, or set of phrases?
• How much of your site’s content is duplicated or
repurposed in other parts of your site, or on other sites
outside of your domain?
• How well your content inventory matches up to your
targeted keyword lists (in other words, does your content
literally support your keywords, at the page and site
theme levels)?
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13. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
How well do you know the content of your own site?
• Is your site optimized for search engines, and also
optimized for social networks
(shareable, portable, keyword-friendly and
researched, etc.)?
• How fresh is your content, and at what time
frequency do you publish?
• How many backlinks does your site have at the
domain level?
• When checking your analytics and log files, do you
notice any distinct patterns of declining or
increasing traffic? Why or why not?
• Does your site push content out via RSS and XML
feeds?
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14. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
You have to have at least one page in the game to
compete
Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”
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15. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Or many pages
Site:yourdomain.com intitle:”keyword phrase here”
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16. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Depth of content is directly proportional to what you
will get from natural search
Site:www.domain.com
Site:subdomain.domain.com
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17. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Example of direct and indirect competition
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18. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Characteristics of highly visible sites
• Well-written, and well-edited.
• Significant word counts at both the page-level, and site level.
• Provides substantial content that backs up the theme of the site, as it relates to the respective
keyword set.
• The content is generally engaging, and good enough that people would want to link and share
it without being asked.
• Each site has a high number of high-quality unique pages within the domain.
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19. New York | March 19–23, 2012 | #sesny
Recap
• Don’t become obsessed with rankings
• Focus on the three types of competitors: direct, indirect, and internal
• Know your own site(s) inside and out
• Shoot for broader goals, such as content depth, external linkage and social signals
Your logo here @robgarner