The internet is a level playing field. This means that every company has an equal opportunity to get their message found by potential customers online. In the retail world if you’re located in the ‘big mall’ you have a competitive advantage over your competition, not true on the Internet. But that also means that your site is competing head to head with your business competitors for traffic in search engines and social media. Your competitors might be generating a lot of traffic from keywords, linking sites and Search Engine Optimization that you haven't implemented. It’s easy enough, through Google Keywords, to find out how many people are searching for businesses like yours in your city every month, and you know how much business is coming in through your website. So if your website isn’t bringing you new business each month what do you have to change to get your website working for you? In this article I’m going to tell you how to find out how your website is performing compared to your competition.
How does your page ranking, inbound links & search engine rank compare to your competitors' websites?
What keywords is your competitor using to optimize his pages and achieve better results?
How does your Internet penetration compare to your competitors?
How does your page ranking, inbound links & search engine rank compare to your competitors' websites?
You need to first install a Google page rank bar onto your browser. This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to see the page ranking of every website that you visit. It also allows you to see how many relevant links Google recognizes and when the page was last audited by Google. Follow the instructions at this link to install the Google Rank Bar. (http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie/index.html)
Once you have it installed it will show you a Page Ranking of NR (not rated) to 10. Click on the arrow to the right of the bar to find relevant links and when the page was last Cached or audited. This will give you an easy way to see how your site compares in the basics.
To compare Search Engine rankings go to www.seocentro.com. In the second box on the left side, SEO Tools, click on Rank Checker. Now enter your keyword (your profession and your city), and your domain name and your top competitors domain name. Submit
This will give you your search page rank on Google, Yahoo and Bing for the key words that you entered. The first listings will be for the map insert which Google offers, followed by the rankings of the WebPages.
What keywords is competitor using to optimize his pages and achieving better results?
Now you know who’s beating you at Internet marketing, now let’s find out how their doing it. Staying in SEOCentro, in the SEO Tools box go to Keyword Analyzer. Enter the same Keywords you used above and your domain name. These results will show you how efficiently you are using these keywords.
Now do the same thing with your competitors’ domain name.
This exercise should tell you whether your website is optimized or not; you can have a well optimized website and still not appear in the top of search if the competition has established a better penetration on the Internet. But you can’t get to the top of search no matter what your Internet penetration without good SEO.
How does your Internet penetration compare to your competitors?
Internet penetration is all about back-links and text links. Still on SEOCentro, click on Link Popularity. Enter your information and Submit. This is humbling, here your going to see all the work that goes into making a top producing website. You’ll see how many links you have over the Internet and how many the various services recognize as relevant.
If you’ve entered your competitor’s domain you’ll see how many relevant links you’re going to have to produce to compete with them for top search rankings.
Let’s look at the real world to see if getting to the top of search is worth the cost and effort. Let’s assume you’re a Personal Injury Lawyer in Boston; Google Keywords tells me that Google had 3,280 matching searches in July. Based on Google doing 67% of all search we can assume that there were 4,895 total searches last month for Personal Injury Lawyer in Boston.
Joel H. Schwartz’s website appears on the top of Google Search, he has a Page Rank of 3 and he has 85 relevant links. Joel had 4,378 visitors to his website in July; 3,333 unique visits (up from 221 in February). 34% of his search visits came from the keywords personal injury lawyer, 21.75% from car accident and 16.89% from slip and fall. Joel also got some of his traffic from his links and direct traffic.
If you’re really interested run the comparison on www.alicata.com . Arthur F. Licata’s site has a page rank of 3 and 141 relevant links (56 more then Joel) but appears on page 9 of Google Search. Do you know why?
Compare this to your business; where do you appear on search and how long does it take you get your message in front of 3,333 interested prospects?
If you’re a professional and you’d like to turn your website into a marketing tool, maybe we should talk.
Kerry J. Grinkmeyer
kj@bestofus.com
205 956 4329
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