**by Aaron Wall**
With how much information SEO's have available to them, it is easy to
get lost in analysis paralysis. The opportunities are virtually
endless. The only limits are time and capital. And markets keep
shifting.
Given that, sometimes seeing a visual abstract of the market can help
you better understand your market position (or at least allow C-level
executives understand it better).
Web analytics
The first place to start is always your own web analytics. It shows
you what is working for your site, how well it is working, and where
you might want to focus more energy. It also helps alert you to when
new trends emerge, and historical information to guide next year's
performance. The powerful thing about this data is it is proprietary
(so others typically can't access it) and it is specific to your site.
There are lots of ways to slice and dice web analytics from an SEO
perspective:
overall site traffic & traffic trends
average rank for a keyword
traffic associated with the rank
the number of pages pulling in unique visitors
the pages which pull in the most traffic
how each of those data points relates to your business
Where it gets really meaningful is when you tie these types of data
in with other tools. In aggregate, the data allows you to score your
site against the rest of the market.
Want to see how much traffic your site is compared to a competing
website?
Compete.com makes it easy to quickly compare website traffic profiles
against each other.
Some other cool features Compete includes:
listing top keywords on a per site basis
listing estimated traffic percentages from top traffic sources
listing traffic distribution per keyword on a broad match or exact
match basis
Is the data perfect? No. But if you compare it against your analytics
data, it can give you a good idea how strong competing sites are and
where they might be beating you. And a bunch of other services like
Google AdPlanner, Quantcast, and Alexa keep leveraging sharing more
data to try to win marketshare in the competitive market.
Which site is ranking for more valuable keywords?
SEM Rush provides historical charts
<http://www.semrush.com/info/history/index.html>
of the number of keywords in their database that a site ranks for,
and estimated value of those rankings.
Once again, this data may have major sampling issues and it is quite
hard to estimate the value of the ranking without knowing the business
model behind the site, but they are still great graphs for helping to
visualize how your site competes against other sites in your industry.
Which site has more links?
For now, Yahoo! is providing link data, but when that goes away, we
will likely still be able to get data from MajesticSEO, Linkscape, and
perhaps a few other tools that will be on the market by the time that
happens. But what is more important than raw link counts, is how many
domains are linking at a given website. MajesticSEO shares that
datapoint in our SEO toolbar and provides slick historical link graphs
<https://www.majesticseo.com/comparedomainbacklinkhistory.php>
:
Again, they will have some sampling errors due to crawling variances,
pages being removed from the web, etc. But in aggregate, over time, it
is quite a useful measuring stick, and you can compare the month to
month growth of sites against each other.
If a competitor had one month of solid link growth, you can then try
to search Google news and the search results from that time frame to
see what they did to get all those links. You can't beat them just by
following them, but you can always draw inspiration from ideas and
greatly improve upon them!
Many of you are going to be surprised at which pattern you end up
choosing for your business.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Aaron Wall <http://searchengineland.com/author/aaron-wall/>
is the author of SEO Book <http://www.seobook.com/>
. He also works with Clientside SEM <http://www.clientsidesem.com/>
to help large corporate clients improve their search engine
rankings. The 100% Organic
<http://searchengineland.com/lands/100-organic.php>
column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land
<http://searchengineland.com>
.
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