Let me start by asking you this.  What makes your site:

1. Different?
2. Remarkable?

In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself.  Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy. We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them. Are you feeling confident?

We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc.  We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable.  Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product.

We’re going to slice and dice the competitors in a couple of different ways, and like most of what we’ve covered so far, you should feel free to do any kind of research or use any tools that work for you – you don’t need to do exactly what is shown here. I highly encourage getting creative and breaking out your own competitor template and/or build on top of these examples,

TEMPLATIZING COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

If you’ve read the previous steps in this SEO Strategy series you know I’m an Excel junkie and you probably know what I’m about to say next, don’t you?  That’s right! We’re going to open up Excel and make tabs!

This time we’re making a competitive research template that you can use for any of your SEO competitive research projects.   The tabs we’ll create for this example will be:

• Features
• Sentiment
• On-Page
• Inlinks
• Traffic

I know I don’t need to say it again (but I will) – this is just an example. You can do whatever you feel is right here.  The idea is to get a good big-picture look at what our competitors are doing, not just in their title tags and inlinks, but what features, tools and social visibility do they have? What is it that’s making them rank so well, and what is it that’s making people like them, want to share their content, want to link to them, etc.   We’re not just counting inlinks and looking at the anchor text.  We’re comparing product offerings. We’re looking for what makes a site naturally popular.

It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics.  If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally. And if that’s what our competitors are doing, then we want to peek into their properties and see how we can do even better, or at least do great at the parts they’re slacking on (finding or refining our niche).

We’ll create one of these Competitive Template worksheets for each category we’re comparing (from the categories you defined in Step 2 and/or the Gaps and Opportunities you want to target from Step 3).  This way we’re looking at our competitors in each niche, rather than just for the site as a whole, since they oftentimes are very different.

GET IN THE MINDSET

Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Based on what I’m learning by looking at my competitors’ offerings, what specific things should be built into this product in order for it to have a good chance at outranking them?”  Remember in high school when you wanted to be cool like the popular girl so you studied how she acted, what she said, who she hung out with, what she wore, etc?  It’s sort of like that except you don’t want to be like her, you want to be even AWESOMER.  You want to be the one who has the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the best parties in town that everybody wants to go to and cant stop talking about. 

So I encourage you to be as specific and thorough as possible in your research, but also be realistic.   If you just can’t afford to be that cool for example, then can you be the coolest kid in town for a specific group of people (aka can you be the best and most relevant site for a specific niche or subgroup/subtopic)?  Think creatively and always keep in mind who you’re targeting and what you can bring to the table. 

Now that my cliché high school movie clique speech is out of the way, I’ll  share some examples of research you can do, but feel free to compare whatever features you feel are important.

REMEMBER YOUR TARGET MARKET AND THEIR GOALS

If you’ve done some persona research or defined target markets in Step 1, keep that in your mind for this Step.  Remember that you’re looking at these site features and content from your target market’s perspective, and you’ll want to check that whatever goals they are trying to reach are available on your site and the competitors’ sites, and how easy those goals are to find and to achieve. 

For example, let’s say I have a music site, and I defined a persona in Step 1 that I named Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy is a Rolling Stone reader and music aficionado who likes to impress his friends with his endless wealth of music industry knowledge.  Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy likes to stay on top of the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll news, so he’s looking for the best site online to get breaking rock ‘n’ roll news and fresh perspectives in his RSS feed and maybe could be swayed into a newsletter.

I would have created a music news keyword category just for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy in Step 2.  I found out who my competitors are for music news keywords in Step 4.  Now, when I dig into these competitor’s sites, I can poke around and look at everything they’ve got going on, but I also want to pay special attention to the task(s) at hand for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy.  Does my site and/or my competitors’ sites offer what he’s looking for? Is it easy to find? Are steps to conversion simple and user-friendly? How does my conversion process compare to my competitors? What product is Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy more likely to subscribe to, come back to, share with his Rock ‘n’ Roll friends, etc?

Putting this lens on allows you to catch things you might not have noticed by just comparing inlinks and tags. If you’re intrigued by this process, check out my favorite industry book to hit the shelves recently - Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google. It goes into this kind of stuff in more detail – you’ll love it.

Now let’s get into some spywork, shall we?

TAB 1: FEATURE & CONTENT COMPARISON

I’ll usually compare at least these three types of things in my feature & content comparisons:

• Content & Landing Pages
• Resources, Widgets, Tools
• Social Presence & promotion

I’ll create a matrix with my site and 1-5 of my top competitor sites (that we defined in Step 4) in the rows, and the aspects I’m comparing in the columns.   So it might look something like this:

The stuff I compare is different every time I do one of these.  Think about what you want to compare that would be important to visitors and/or your targets, and put that in there.  I’ll usually end up adding things as I go along.  For example if I find out that one of my competitors provides a calculator tool and I hadn’t thought about that, I’ll add it to the feature comparisons.

Once you’ve done this, step back and take a good look at what sets these sites apart.  Ask yourself some of these questions:

• What features/content do my competitors have that I don’t?
• Does this content serve a need my target markets are looking to fulfill?
• Could/should I provide those features/this content? Could I make them even (more comprehensive, easier to use, more valuable to my visitors, provide it faster, easier, cheaper, etc)?
• How active are they in social networks where my target markets might be?
• How are they promoting their content through social sharing functions on their sites?
• Do they have proper targeted landing pages for the terms I care about?
• Are there calls-to-action on the landing pages? How apparent are they?
• Are there features of the site (tools, calendars, calculators, communities, etc) that might encourage repeat visits to the site?

I could go on, but the idea is to get a good feel for what’s going on in this competitive space, and start to form some recommendations based on this comparison that you’ll put in your Recommendations section of your Strategy document.  Take notes on this and start to form your recommendations now.  You can iron them out and make them sound good later, but you don’t want to forget, so make sure to get these thoughts while their still fresh in your head.

TAB 2: SENTIMENT (LIKES/ DISLIKES):

This one can be a crap shoot, but if you can get any insights out of it – excellent.

First, if you happen to have any good social monitoring tools that are half decent at determining sentiment (I’m a huge fan of NetBase for larger shops) use these to determine what people like about your competitors products and features, and what they don’t like about yours (if applicable).  Also check out what they wish someone provided, or what they want or need or are looking for that they haven’t been able to find online. 

If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search!  Search for any variation of things like:

• “like” + [your brand name]
• “love” + [a feature you provide]
• “I wish” + [a feature you provide]
• “sucks” + [an author or blogger on your site or your competitor sites]
• “hate” + [your competitors’ brand names or features]

What you find may or may not be useful, and remember, we’re not just looking for SEO-related stuff here – we’re not looking for whether people love or hate our SEO – we’re looking for what people love or hate or how they feel about your product and your competitor products.  We want to know why they like the popular girl more than the other girls.  Or more specifically, we want to know why they visit, revisit, link to, share, email, bookmark, or talk about that product.

If whatever you find is relevant and insightful, make a note of it.  The insights you gain from here will go into your Recommendations in the next step.

TAB 3: SEO ON-PAGE COMPARISON

On-page comparisons can be automated, and there are a few good tools that provide usable data.  But of course the best on-page comparisons come with a touch of SEO know-how to not only show where there might be a flag, but of course determine 1) if the flag is actually a concern, 2) the level of concern/priority for each flag, and 3) the actions to take to fix it.

Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools that you can use any combination of to compare yourself against competitors:

• SEOmoz Crawl Test
• SearchCLU
• Website Grader
• Covario

Of course there are lots more out there – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments. But remember, automated tools are not SEO consultants.  They can only do so much. Use this as a base to compare some of the on-page features, and add your own analysis to what’s working or not working for you vs. your competitors for these on-page factors.

Make notes of the things you consider flags - not all of it has to be noted or used in your recommendations.  In fact, I usually only note a few things here that stand out.  For everything else, I point to regular canned SEO best practices from the Recommendations section of the Strategy document.  This isn’t a best practices document; this is a custom analysis with specific insights and recommendations (which is why you’re worth so much).  ;) 

TAB 4: INLINK COMPARISON

I’ll keep this one light and simple – you guys know how to do link research by now. You can use some of the inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links in this tab.  If you do, be sure to graph the results. 

What I’ll often do with inlinks too, is create a grid to see if I can determine who’s possibly link-shacking with who.  Take your top x sites, including your own, and put each site in a cell across a couple of columns of your Excel tab.  Put the same sites in rows in the cell tab that you’ll cross-check with the columns. 

Then do this search in Yahoo Search:

Site:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com

This will return any pages from site 1 that are linking to site 2 (and indexed in Yahoo). For example, here are the pages on Wikipedia.org that link to seomoz.org: 

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awikipedia.org+linkdomain%3Aseomoz.org

Do this for each site (both directions).  Keep in mind some of these links might have nofollows on them (use the SEOmoz toolbar to easily see nofollows).  Sometimes you’ll see some sites with heavy cross-linking.  This might mean a partnership, network, or paid links.  Whether or not any of this cross-linking info is useful is questionable, but I like to see it if I have time to do the work. 

Use this tab for any link comparisons you feel are important to explore.  Because I’m skimping on this section a little, I expect you guys to share your competitive inlink practices in the comments.  If you gain any good insights from what you find in your competitive inlink research in this tab, make a note of it for your Recommendations that we’ll build out in the next step in this series.

TAB 5: TRAFFIC COMPARISON

We know who our competitors are in search results.  I also like to look at overall traffic to get an idea of who’s killing it beyond just Search.  If your competitors are getting a lot of traffic in general, they’re doing something right.  Also what are their traffic trends?

Here are some tools you can use to look at traffic and traffic trends:

• Compete
• Alexa
• AttentionMeter
• comScore
• Nielsen
• HitWise

This is another one of those things that I like to look at, but usually isn’t extremely actionable for SEO.  I like to know the trends and the overall popularity of my competitors.  I might gain some insight from looking at these, like if any competitors are losing ground or gaining fast (many times this could be due to search traffic since search often drives a large percentage of traffic to many sites).

TAB 6+: YOURS

What else do you want to compare?  Add as many tabs as you like.  This isn’t necessarily something you have to give to your client (although you could add it on as an appendix), this is a space for you to use to explore the competitive landscape.  Add what you feel you want to dig into, and take notes on what you find that is useful for your recommendations along the way.  We’ll be creating that part of the Strategy document next.

WHAT YOU NEED IN THE END

You need specifics. You need competitive insights that go beyond title tag comparisons.  You need to know everything about the popular girls.  The most important tab for me in this whole process is usually the features & content comparison.  This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular (as long as I’m comparing the right things) and it’s the stuff that can affect some of the other tabs like inlinks and traffic.  I use the insights I gain on this tab almost every time.  I may not find any really good insights in the rest of the research, but I almost always find some juicy nuggets in the feature & content comparisons.

You should now have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively, and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets.  Combine that with Gaps & Opportunities we found in Step 3, and categories and keywords of interest you found in Step 2, and you should have a nice set of notes that you can use to form some solid, specific recommendations in the next step.

Go to any of the 8 steps:

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs

Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research

Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities

Step 4: Define Competitors

Step 5: Spying On (and Learning From) Your Competitors

Step 6: Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations

Step 7: Must-have SEO Recommendations

Step 8: Prioritize and Summarize