Search Engine Competitive Intelligence

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If you've been involved in search engine marketing for a while, you know all about the battle of wits,

the cat and mouse game, the contest of strategies that goes on between you, the search engines, and your competitors. This contest of strategies is like a long drawn out chess game . . . and you wish you were a Grandmaster!

SEORecon™ helps you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. It also gives you keyphrase-specific guidelines for optimizing your pages and for more targeted quality link building.  

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The need for more sophisticated online marketing intelligence

Search engines have become very sophisticated in the way they determine the relevancy of pages to keyphrases and the way they rank those pages.  This has created the need for methods just as sophisticated in optimizing web pages for target keyphrases in order to improve the quality and quantity of visitors to your web pages from search engine traffic.

There are a myriad of insights that can be gathered from the use of quantitative, qualitative, and multivariate analysis when utilized in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) research.   These methods of analysis comprise what is called a Competitive Intelligence (CI) approach to SEO research.

• Multivariate Analysis is a much more informative measurement of a web page’s strength relative to its competitors than using search engine ranking alone.  This will be even more important as the personalization of search has an increasing influence on search results.
• The Quality of in-bound links trumps in importance the Quantity of in-bound links the majority of the time.  Qualitative analysis is vital for determining the quality of a link.
• Achieving high ranking across search engines depends on scoring well with regard to the most important SEO factors for each search engine.  Only multivariate analysis can reveal the relative importance of these factors.
• Different keywords require different – sometimes very different – metrics (ordering of importance and acceptable ranges).  A “one size fits all” approach to SEO will not bring long-term success.
• The quality of inbound links can be both quantified relative to one another and compared in importance with other important web page measurements.
• Personalization of search is a serious problem for traditional SEO, but the CI approach to SEO makes the necessary analysis manageable.  CI reveals the true strength of a page relative to its competitors even if its ranking position becomes indiscernible due to shuffling of the ranks from personalization.
• Data visualization makes web page competitive analysis possible, despite the enormous complexities involved with the way search engines index billions of pages.

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The scientific basis and business case for the principles behind the CI approach

There are two very important questions about a competitive intelligence approach to SEO. 

• How legitimate is the scientific basis for CI?
• Is there a business case for the effectiveness of the underlying principles?

In this CI approach, Mike Marshall has basically used quantitative analysis in researching a company's online competition, specifically those who are competing for traffic in the search engines for important keyphrases.  You could call him a Quant for search engine optimization (SEO) or Internet marketing research.

>> Add SEO Competitive Intelligence to your arsenal Now

>> Have Competitive Reports ran for you!