Shotgun Approach to Affiliate Competitive Analysis

Competitive Intelligence is still as vital as it always has been. Nothing can assist you more in attacking a market to figure out what your competitors are doing and how they are gaining success. But before you can really attack a competitor
By: simon birch
 
July 17, 2011 - PRLog -- Competitive Intelligence is still as vital as it always has been. Nothing can assist you more in attacking a market to figure out what your competitors are doing and how they are gaining success. But before you can really attack a competitor, you have to figure out which market you are going to get into. With the recent Panda update and the recession that seems to never want to go away, you should be looking into getting into at least one new market. It is smart. Regardless of how well you are doing right now. Things are shifting in markets like I have never seen them shift before.

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http://www.seomarketingforums.com/content/78-shotgun-approach-affiliate-competitive-analysis.html

The time to do this is right now, not later, but right now.

It does take the affiliate outlook on it. Now, if you aren’t an affiliate, this is still something you want to look at as it will greatly help your marketing strategy.

The first step is Keyword Spy which is a tool that I always use first to gauge the market. I like to find a domain to track that is either well known, or has a good amount of ranking keywords in their campaign. Why? That’s easy, I am going to hijack these keywords to make my “time to market” as fast as possible.

Once I find a good competitor, I go over to SpyFu and I can see their AdWords campaign. Often I take the complete campaign of the competitor and run it through AdWords after making a few adjustments to the ads they are running. This helps me determine which keywords are the ones that will convert well. The landing page is often a tweaked version of theirs using my Kitchen Table Copy method.

Once I find which keywords are converting well, I can go over to my Keyword Competition Tool and it will show me a table of the Top 10 results and how the keywords stack up with “allinanchor”, “allintitle” and “allintext”. These are the “Big Three” values I look at when determining if I can get into the Top 10 in less than 30 days and in the Top 3 in 90 days.

That is always my goal.

Basically, if I see five or more “hyphens” in the “allinanchor” column I know that with a good link campaign, I can get in the Top 10 in ten days or less. And from there it is a matter of analyzing what the “big guns” are doing and climb my way up the list week after week. Do this and in three months you should be in the Top 3 if not #1.

I should also mention that I also look at the number of links the competitor pages have to understand what it is going to take to bump them out. If the numbers are too high, I may just walk away from that keyword phrase and look for another to optimize for. The best way to do this is to use Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz. Don’t just look at the total number of links but click on the Anchor Text tab so you can see how many links show up for the keyword you are going after. Some large sites don’t do a great job in targeting the keyword, so if they have 500,000 total links but only a couple hundred for that keyword, you could sneak in and over take them quicker than you realize.

By nature, I’m a lazy marketer and I’d rather nail top listings for a few dozen or so less competitive phrases that collectively will bring me the traffic that big phrase will on its own. I want to ensure my time is not wasted trying to crack into the top of a highly competitive phrase. Plus, the conversions are what you want to focus on and I have never seen a big phrase convert well.

The reason I do this is simple. I know the keywords that are converting for the product I am marketing and instead of paying $4, $5 or $6 a click, I will use my skills as an SEO to get a top ranking and be able to take that budget and use it on something else. For example, if I am saving $3,000.00 a month on PPC because of my #2 ranking in the SERPs, I may take a portion of that “savings” and invest in more links or other promotions to move into the #1 spot, which should increase my traffic levels by at least 22%, if not 40%.

In the right market, that is significant and can literally change the landscape of your business overnight..
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Source:simon birch
Email:***@silynnie.karoo.co.uk Email Verified
Tags:Affiliate, Competitive, Analysis
Industry:Advertising, Marketing, Internet
Location:England
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