Competition Analysis Explained

What is Competition Analysis?

A video will explain competition analysis probably better than a wall of text. I apologise it is an older video with sound quality that is not brilliant.

What Did That Mean Again?

It’s a method of looking at the key metrics which I use to decide whether a niche, keyword or key phrase is a viable target for a “churn and burn” internet marketing campaign. Whether a site is a tough competitor for a keyword or key-phrase or not.

We’ll run through these pretty quickly here as well as a little bit of detail as to the numeric ranking system I suggest you use.

First put the main keywords into Google and see what comes up.

There are some markets you don’t want to touch with a barge pole. Here is an example of a Google search result for one such market.

Search results that point to an extremely competitive niche

Firstly, there is a “shop” strip at the top. This means that Google explicitly understand that this is a commercial term. There are big players here. Your competition analysis radar should immediately be beeping a warning that this is a very tough market. My instant instinct if I see this is to turn around and walk away. It may be that the product itself is marketable by small internet marketers using long tail tactics

In the case of the Ipad for instance, many in I.M got visitors interested in the product, and a general flow of targeted traffic by appending terms like “jailbreak”, “crack” or “homebrew” to a long tail term. So although I would say leave a niche like this well alone, if you are determined to go for it – think outside the box.

Back to the image. More signs that it is going to be really tough. There are sponsored adwords ads both above the natural search results and to the side. In fact there are only 5 natural results on the first page, and 4 of those are information pages (Wiki, Cnet etc).

On the other hand, if you come across a page with little or no advertising, no video, image or sales strip and a full 7 (or sometimes still even 10) natural search results. You are possibly on to a winner.

WHOIS Results

Watched the video? Ok. You know the age of your competitors site. When its hosting was renewed, if it is coming up for renewal again. Might even be a chance to buy the domain in the near future? You never know. www.whois.net

Importantly take the number of months old the site is and give it one point per month up to a maximum of 60 (for a site 5 years old). A 5 year old site is well established. Yes, 10 is better, but it gets marginal after 5 years and we are going for a rough and ready calculation. There is no perfect science in evaluating a competitor, and if you need to appraise 10 keywords with 5-7 sites on page one currently for each, you need to be able to process this information quickly and repeatedly.

Possible points 0-60

Trust and Citation Results

Again, it’s on the video. A free resource at https://majestic.com/

There needs to be a balance between trust and citation.

Citation is a meta term for the amount of inbound links the site has with a weighting on these links. Really though, it is just a link count.

Trust is the value, context and integrity of these links.

A massive citation with a very low trust might well point to a site that has been link spammed and is at risk of being banned, slapped or penalized in some way.

The calculation is;

1 point per point of trust but ONLY if trust is greater than or equal to citation/3

In other words is citation is greater than 3x trust – then trust counts for nothing. It is a site that has likely been spammed or the subject of negative SEO (Google’s own “spam for cash” invention)

Possible points 0-100

On Site Competition Analysis

I change which free resource I use for on-site analysis quite often. My current go to is the Majestic one linked above.

I like it because it already has a marking system that seems quite robust and that dove-tails into the points system I’m using here quite nicely

Analyser points system

In this case we are just using the “Overview” total. Divide the total here by 2.5 and round down to the nearest whole number. In the case above the answer would be 25 – close to 26

Possible points 0-40

What Next?

You will have a score out of 200. My take is, if that score is greater than 120? It’s a tough site to beat. If it’s greater than 140 – you almost definitely will not beat it, at least not for years and without a considerable investment of time and effort.

However, if there are seven sites on page one for this keywords, don’t be put off by one or two of them being tough during the competition analysis phase. you don’t have to finish first in every race. If there are 2 or 3 very weak sites on page one (with scores under 100 – even better under 75) then you have a chance.

If there is only 1 weak site on page one, then it might be an anomaly. A redirect, a strange one, a “Google favourite” (they have them) that’s a tough call. I’ve seen individual weak sites cling to page one for a decent term for months, even years. However if there are 2 or more poor sites hogging page one spots, then your chances or kicking one off and replacing it are a good deal better.

Why Is Onsite So Low?

When I first devised a system similar to this competition analysis method I weighted onsite factors much higher. I might have given the whole percentage as reported as the onsite score (making 100 points possible) or at most divided the score by 2 rather than 2.5 (thus, in the case above, giving 32 points rather than 25).

However, almost all onsite issues are so easily fixed. Setting up a cache, getting some more content and sorting out the alt tags on a a page is likely little more than an hours work for someone who knows what they are doing. Remember it is an individual URL that ranks, not a site. So getting that URL fixed might be 30 minutes work for your competitor webmaster.

A site that scores low onsite but great elsewhere can fix most of the issues almost immediately, and in my experience, in commercial niches, they do just that.

Google Is Largely Inscrutable

Another reason is just how variable Google is when it comes to interpreting onsite factors. There are too many sites that don’t use Alt Tags, have low flesch text ratings, load in slower than the mean expected time and break other basic onsite rules – yet dominate commercial niches.

Onsite is very important, but it’s also very flexible and possibly misleading if you weight it too highly. The whole process is entirely under the webmasters control. If they want more content, better tags and fewer images, a quick redesign and it’s done. Issues can be fixed in minutes. Basing your niche choices on weaknesses in the oppositions site that can be corrected that quickly is not ideal.

The same can’t be said of getting high quality, high trust links, or of accruing site age. You might struggle to game those anywhere near as easily. The age metric .. well, you can’t game that at all.

Other Onsite Tools

Over time this free resource is more than likely going to alter, be removed or take away the facility for a free examination. That’s a shame, but it does happen. The point then is to replace it with another free resource and scale the points system accordingly.

I’ve tested this one and it seems fine for 20+ enquiries a day, enough to test 4 keywords across 5 competitors or similar. It would probably allow you more. Remember, you can use the same result and not re-test if the same URL (URL – not site) ranks for different keywords in the general niche. No need to repeat the test on the same page.

For my part I will keep an eye on this resource, and if it changes or becomes unusable, I’ll post an update with a replacement.

Also worth bearing in mind, if you are going into this “big time” then actually paying for a tool to make this process a lot quicker is certainly an option. There are some one-off priced tools that do pretty good competition analysis and can be used over and over again with no worries about IP bans.

Words Or Phrases

A few points here. Don’t go into a niche looking to rank for one specific phrase only. A sensible minimum is 5, and if you can get more than 10 even better.

Ideally you’d perform these checks for every site  on page one for every keyword or phrase you hoped to rank for. That’s why it’s important that the method is quick and simple.

There are no absolutes in this though. No guarantees. Age, trust, on site factors are an excellent pointer but sometimes oddities occur. The idea behind churn and burn is that you are creating multiple sites, looking to target perhaps hundreds of keywords and expecting success across a broad range of those.

Do not expect a 100% win rate, that isn’t what churn and burn is all about.

So What Should I Do?

While that is entirely up to you. Here’s my take. If you pick a niche where, after performing competition analysis, most key phrases have several sites currently ranking on page with scores 100 or under then I’d say go for it.

80-100 is quite tough – but then this is churn and burn, and we are going to hit the niche hard. I know I’ve said it before, but this isn’t “micro site” marketing or some weak assed “sniper” rubbish. If that was the case then scores of under 50 would be almost obligatory. A good range is 80 of you are new to marketing to 100, if you know the ropes and have a better handle on things.

Don’t Forget The Long Tail

While the example I show is very tough, there well be side markets that revolve around long tail versions of the keyword. For instance in the case of a tech product, your competition analysis may show the product itself as extremely tough. but services and peripherals that are associated with the product may have much easier SEO markets to crack. Get the keyword tool open and check out the long tail, up to 5 words in length if required.

In short – We want tough – but gettable niches

A little higher? Then it depends. It the subject a passion of yours, one you want to write a ton about and create a lot of media before because you just love it? If so, feel free to have a go. Is it really lucrative, so much that just a couple of spots low on page one for just one or two key terms would rake in a considerable sum. Again, asses your own skills and your expected ROI and realistic time frame and make that decision.

My rough rule is, if there aren’t at least two sites on page one for a phrase with a score under 100, I don’t do it. It might be a job for an authority site, but it’s not “churn and burn” territory, and that’s what this course is all about.

Originally published on demondemon dot com by Paul Rone-Clarke