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Competitive Analysis of Your Industry’s Social Media Use

So your business has started dabbling in social media because you have heard that there is all sorts of opportunity, and you are right.  You have a blog, a Facebook Page and  a Twitter account, which you have been updating, but will admit you don’t have a clear social media strategy to increase business or boost engagement with your audiences.  You figure competitive research will be useful and you are right again! In Part 3 of our Competitive Smackdown Series, we will show  you how to research your competitors’, industry influencers’ and indirect competitors’ social media strategies.

The first thing we need to do for basic social media competitor research is clarify what we are looking for, and then you can be the judge of what you want to include in your social media strategy.  It’s not just about the social media outlets that your direct competitors or industry influencers are using, but also the content that they use to keep people engaged and interested.  Here is a breakdown of what you should be looking for and analyzing:

• Competitors – You know your direct competitors, but we really need to identify who the indirect competitors and industry personalities are in your social media space.
• Channels – Which social media outlets are being used in your industry to communicate and engage – Blogs, YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Content – What type of communication or content is effective in getting people engaged?  Is it the articles, news, videos, tips, industry links, deals, promotions, contests, tools, presentations or something else?

Direct Competitors – You know who your direct competitors are in your industry.  Check their website to find where they have a presence in social media and how they are using that presence.  Also search for your competitors directly through the search function in the more commonly used social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare), since a lot of companies fail to properly promote their social media accounts on their website.

Keep a list to compare channel use and content types used in each social media channel.  Identify content trends across competitors. Keep reading for more on content later in this post.

Industry Personalities, Influencers and Indirect Social Media Competitors – You may be in an industry that does not have a lot of direct competitors participating in social media. Or, you may have a strong list of direct competitors that you just prepared. Either way, you will also want to research industry personalities, influencers and indirect competitors, since these will also play a big factor in guiding your social media strategy.

For instance, Home Depot would consider Lowe’s a direct competitor, but Bob Villa would be an industry personality or influencer. It will help Home Depot develop a full and effective social media strategy to analyze both what Lowe’s and Bob Villa are doing in social media. Industry influencers are a great guide to see what type of content your audiences are  responding to.

So how do you find your indirect competitors and industry leaders in social media? Here are a few good social media tools to help you find them and save you some time:

Twitter

• http://www.twellow.com – A yellow pages type search to find most popular profiles on Twitter.
• http://wefollow.com/ – Profiles by tags, basically your competition will be organized and labeled by your core keywords.
• http://refollow.com/ – Ability to find who follows who, a great tool for sniffing out who the lead personalities in an industry are and who they follow.
• http://search.twitter.com/advanced – much better than the typical Twitter search.

Facebook

• Facebook Search – The search functionality of Facebook is sad. So, also try finding the link from a website, a friend on Facebook, a Twitter link, or somewhere else.

Blogs

• http://technorati.com/ -  Probably the best blog search engine.
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ – Google’s own search engine for Blogs, a good tool that could be better.
• http://www.icerocket.com/ – Blog search that can also find related Facebook, Twitter and video content.

Analyzing Content

At this point, you have done your research and have found a lot of great competitors in your social arena.  Now, you really have to sit down and find out what the common and popular content trends are for your industry.

Here are a few good questions to analyze your competitors’ social media content:

• What content is needed to satisfy your audiences and keep them coming back?
• What content is being used to establish authority?
• Are your competitors using presentations, whitepapers and articles effectively?
• What is the tone your successful competitors use to speak with your audience: are they more casual or are they very professional?  It varies through the different social media channels and industries, but the tone successful businesses use in most social media channels tends to be casual.
• How are your competitors getting people to engage: are they running promotions, and if so, what type (contests, polls, social games, personal engagement, controversial topics)?
• Do your competitors use video? is it effective?
• Are they promoting events? How?
• Do they provide links Flickr or other photo galleries?
• Are they blogging? What topics do they blog about?

If you are thinking, proper competitor social media research is going to take some time, you are right again. However, if you need some assistance please don’t forget The Loud Few can help, we are a full service interactive marketing firm in St.Louis that would be excited to help with your social media marketing strategy.

Ongoing Competitive Analysis

Since the internet doesn’t sleep and social media trends are always being created, we need to keep our finger on the pulse.  Leveraging even more social media tools is a great way to do that.

RSS Readers – Subscribe to industry related RSS feeds produced by your indirect and direct competitors, and you can keep up on your competition in one place.

• www.google.com/reader
• http://bloglines.com/

Google Alerts -http://www.google.com/alerts – Setup alerts for activity on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webpages related to certain search phrases.  Try setting up alerts for popular industry search terms, company names and personalities.  You will also notice options below the main sections of Google search for news, video and the new Google Realtime.

What other ways do you research your competitors’ and influencers’ social media usage? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

Competitive Smackdown Part 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Smackdown Part 2: Your Competitors’ Link Strategy & Indexed Content

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitor Research

About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.

Your email is overflowing, your To-Do list is atrociously long and that Google Reader is beyond full of articles you’ve been meaning to read. So, how do you fit social media marketing into this overwhelming mix of items you need to complete? Enter stage right: an editorial calendar to save some of your sanity!

No matter what social media channels you use– blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., an editorial calendar will provide you with a snapshot of your social media tactics, a schedule to keep you honest and a nice way to coordinate team social media efforts. We’ve created a free editorial calendar template to help you out with this. Read on for a quick guide on how to use an editorial calendar effectively for your organization’s blogging and other social media plans.

Where to begin?

1. Start with your social media strategy. If you haven’t already determined your social media strategy, bookmark this post and come back once you’ve laid out your plans. Your strategy should include goals, defined target audiences, which social media channels you will use, channel-specific tactics and measurement plans. If you need help with a social media marketing strategy for your organization, feel free to contact us.
2. Download our free editorial calendar template. We’ve made this calendar using a basic social media strategy that involves blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can add in additional social media channels that are involved in your strategy.

 

Now, let’s talk about how an editorial calendar helps you organize your social media plans in each of these channels:

Blogging

This is where an editorial calendar is literally indispensable. If you left your blogging up to just an item on your To-Do list, it’s going to get pushed off over and over again. Not to mention, your readers will abandon you if you only post sporadically. Everyone has a lot on their plates and trimming out RSS feeds that don’t consistently offer interesting content is common.

So, use our free editorial calendar template for blogging by scheduling out your post topics and who the author is going to be (if you have multiple authors for your blog).

Now that you have your editorial calendar lined up for your blog posts, be proactive! WordPress and other blogging platforms have scheduling capabilities that can save you a lot of time. If you are working with a team, distribute the editorial calendar at least one month ahead of time so that multiple authors can plan accordingly.

Twitter

If multiple people are manning Twitter at your organization, the calendar can clearly state who’s on duty which day. We’ve also included a weekly reminder to spend some time locating additional Influencers on Twitter.

LinkedIn

Using LinkedIn for business leads is easier when you are known as an authority and resource on your industry’s topics. The editorial calendar allows you to list the author and specifics of your planned LinkedIn interactions.

Facebook

What types of actions to schedule on an editorial calendar for Facebook are going vary from industry to industry. Restaurants and retail industries usually have a greater opportunity to post something daily to users that would offer value. But, business to business industries’ social media strategy might not lend itself to daily Facebook posts. You can customize the calendar based on your specific strategy.

Monthly Tasks

• Review Measurement Data Every month, you should sit down with your team and your analytics (you set these up, right?) and review the data. Since you defined goals and measurements in your social media strategy, you can use this to guide your monthly measurement review.
• Review Website Content for Accuracy Click through your website monthly to see if any of your pages are out of date or could be updated. Not only will fresh content help your SEO marketing, it can also help generate some future blog post topic ideas.

How Far Out Should I Plan my Editorial Calendar?

Scheduling 1-2  months out allows for you to tweak your efforts based on what you see in your measurement reviews and gives you ample time to prepare for upcoming activities amongst your team.

How far you schedule your calendar out will depend on what your industry is and what works best for your team.

What’s your process for keeping organization to your social media efforts? Do you use an editorial calendar for blogging only? Let’s keep this discussion going in the comments!

Related Posts:

Beyond the Cocktail Party: Making Social Media Work for Your Business

An Introduction to WordPress

About the Author

Lisa Keller is the Marketing Project Manager at The Loud Few and specializes in online marketing strategy and management. You can learn more about L3J here or follow Lisa on Twitter.

As you may have noticed, Google Instant was released last Wednesday and the online community has been buzzing about it ever since. As Google puts it, Instant is a “new search enhancement that shows results as you type.”

As with any new functionality or tools, how this affects people’s search behavior, search engine choices and the internet marketing industry remains to be seen. But, we have some initial thoughts on Google Instant– pros, cons and a few side notes. How will Google Instant affect SEO? How will it affect website and PPC analytics? We asked you what you thought as well; read on for these online marketing community views.

Google’s Big Announcement

During their live Search Event, Google announced Instant and demonstrated the new user interface of Google.com. When a user begins typing a word into the search box, results come up instantly below, as long as the word is not a Google censored word.

More on Google’s new censorship policies later.

Google says Instant will bring users three main benefits:

• Faster Searches Google says that since they are showing results before you even finish typing, they will save you 3-5 seconds per search.
• Smarter Predictions “Predictions help guide your search.” Matt Cutts explains that Instant will help users refine their search during their search process with the suggested links that come up as they type.
• Instant Results Although Instant on mobile has not released yet, Google Instant is supposed to enhance the mobile searching experience because you may not have to type the entire word before the result you are looking for comes up.

So that’s the Google explanation. This is how we see it so far:

A Better Ad Opportunity.

Google is a business, and at the heart of everything, they are an ad business. With Instant, they are able to serve many more ads to users and make more revenue. But, you can’t blame a business for trying to be profitable.

Early reporting is showing that Google Adwords accounts are seeing their ad impressions increase. Of course, this could also be a good thing for businesses doing PPC on Google, since their ads will have an increased chance of getting clicked on.

As @adamlefever tweeted, “So far, regarding Google #Instant & Adwords, nothing’s changed much. Slightly elevated impressions (about 15%), steady spend/conversion.”

Was Search Really Too Slow?

Google has certainly been focused on speed lately. In June 2010, they released their new search index update, Caffeine, which increased Google’s ability to index the web by 50%. With this, they also released Google Page Speed, which helps webmasters diagnose and fix their own website’s page loading issues.

We know that slow-loading pages are an irritating issue with a lot of websites. But was anyone complaining that searching on google.com took too long? Not that we’ve heard. So, while Caffeine and Page Speed seemed truly user-focused, Instant seems again to be more revenue-based.

We only heard one tweet about slow search, and it was actually about Instant. @UrbanBacon tweeted, “ehhhhh – it doesn’t load before I finish typing, so what’s the point?”

Unsuccessful Multi-Taskers, Sufferers of ADD, Users Over 50

One has to wonder if Google had any of these people in mind. While in some cases, searchers may not know exactly what they want to search, but this was an issue solved less intrusively with Google Suggest (which is the drop-down suggested searches that come up as you type in a search word.)

But, now with Instant results coming up that include pictures, videos, social media updates and more, falling down the rabbit hole of random clicking is even easier. “I actually find it more distracting than helpful.” is the judgment call from @hirejameson on Google Instant.

Erin “Loudfinity” Steinbruegge points out:

I find it somewhat distracting at this point – I don’t necessarily want to see all the results Google holds for each letter that I type into Google. If I want to search for “cute dog collars” then I want to see the results for cute dog collars. I do not want to be distracted by the results for Craigslist, currency converter, cute quotes, cute pdf, cute dresses, cute dog names, and BAM! finally I’m at cute dog collars.

Damage to the Long Tail

Long tail PPC and SEO refers to when businesses optimize their websites and run PPC ads for keyword phrases that contain more words, which often leads to more targeted traffic because the searcher has a clearer intent with their longer search. For instance, searchers that type in “good gifts for a 5 year old’s birthday” are going to be more targeted traffic for a kids’ toy company website than users that search “good gifts”.

It’s smart SEO and PPC practice to optimize for these searchers that are further into the buying cycle. So, Long tail keyword phrases are a great way for organizations running PPC and SEO campaigns to control costs and regulate ROI.

Aaron “Dr. Loudweiser” Stevens calls attention to the fact that now with Instant, not only will this strategy be less effective, it will be interesting to see what spammers try to optimize for. Chances are you may start to notice title tags of spammy websites changing to half-written words, as they try to rank their websites.

Alternate Search Options

As @danco tweeted about Google Instant, “I have barely encountered it. 99% of my searches come from the AwesomeBar or the search box”. We suspect there are quite a few people in this camp that rarely go to google.com and then type in their search. More commonly, users use the top right-hand search box on their browser to search, which does not have Google Instant capabilities.

However, as Google said, mobile users may find Instant more helpful on their smartphones, where typing can be a pain. Personally, I use the voice search option on my iPhone Google app, which eliminates typing altogether. And smartphones are usually slower, which could make waiting for Instant results irrelevant or irritating.

It will also be interesting to see how this affects the use of Bing. It would be a good thing for use of Bing to increase and come minutely closer to being a search competitor to Google. Monopolies of anything are never good, so leveling the search engine playing field is good for searchers, businesses and the internet marketing community.

Google Now Censors Results

One thing I am concerned about is that now censorship is acceptable with Google Instant. There have also been a lot of amusing tweets about what you can and cannot type into Google to receive Instant results. Online marketing industry expert, Michael Gray, tweeted from @graywolf, “so google gives instant results for [murder] and [how do i kill] but not [naked]” and “google instant ok with [underwear] [boxers] [thongs] not ok with [lingerie] [panties] it’s so arbitrary”.

It is troubling that Google is allowed to censor at free will what will and will not come up in Instant Search.

Follow the Cheese?

As we learned in the story Who Moved My Cheese?, change is often hard but necessary. So, The Loud Few jury on Google Instant is still out and these are just our first observations with the new functionality. This seems to be the case with a lot of users. As @rwbennet tweeted, “I think I’ll like it soon, but right now it’s annoying the crap out of me”.

What do you think? Please let us know in the comments!

Related Posts:

PPC Questions — Does Anyone Click Those Ads?

Pimp Your Search with Advanced Operators

About the Author

Lisa Keller is the Marketing Project Manager at The Loud Few and specializes in online marketing strategy and management. You can learn more about L3J here or follow Lisa on Twitter.

 

Agencies worldwide are taking off full-speed ahead toward
success by implementing an experiential marketing plan. Will you be on the next
flight?

In today's ever-changing and fast-paced world, the possibilities to impress your guests with new and advanced technology are endless. What kind of tools can you use to
enhance your event space or really allow your consumers to interact with your
brand or product or just simply be wowed by this technology? Here’s a list to
get you going:

 

·     
Siftables – “The toy
blocks that think.”

·     
SixthSense
– A wearable, gestural interface that augments our physical world with digital
information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that
information.

·     
Multitouch screens –
Interfaces that project an image through acrylic or glass, and then black-light
the image with LEDs.

·     
Touchmode
– Interactive foil that can be applied directly to a glass sheet; a rear
projection screen or LCD can then be mounted behind it to create a through
touch glass experience.

·     
Touchbiance
– An interactive experience that allows users to control an image or animation
with their motions.

·     
Audience Measurement –
face recognition technology that allows for content and video to play for
specific audiences

·     
Holocube – a box that
contains holographic video footage.

 

Once you’ve figured out what your mission is and how you’re
going to achieve that, you can really start delving into the ever-changing
world of technology – take advantage of it and let your consumers leave your
experiential marketing event with an unforgettable feeling of “HOLY COW! That
was awesome!” It’s a winning situation for everyone.

 

In Is Social Media Right or My Business? Part I, we talked about what to think about before  jumping into social media for your business and some general  guidelines for the common social networks. In Part II, we will look at common industries and how they are using social media and online marketing.

The key is that social media is not just an ecommerce or “fun” business trend. Social media is another channel of communication and businesses are using this channel strategically to support their overall marketing goals. Social media is here to stay, and if it’s not being widely used among your regional competitors currently, chances are it will soon be a part of their online marketing.  St. Louis businesses are quickly growing their social media efforts, so if you are in the St. Louis area (or any city for that matter), we recommend putting your social media strategy in place to stay in line or ahead of your competition.

Below is a breakdown of some key industries. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments below for any industries that are not covered here.

Arts & Entertainment

The use of social media among those in the Arts & Entertainment industry is very high – generally because a common target market for this industry is a younger demographic.  Movie studios have already embraced social media heavily through online marketing promotions and specific tie-ins with social media platforms. The Arts & Entertainment industry routinely uses emerging media as part of their overall strategy, since their subject matter is often easily adaptable to the newer channels. For instance, the movie The Last Exorcism recently received a lot of buzz for using (and scaring people on) Chatroulette.

Independent artists, art galleries and musicians have also found a great deal of success in communicating with their fans through social media. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has nearly 90K followers on Twitter and use YouTube to share community events.

Community, Government & Education

Government organizations often face challenges in reaching and communicating with the community, especially as traditional channels such as newspapers and newsletters are disregarded. Focusing on the places where the community migrates and is ready to engage (think Twitter and Facebook) provide a unique opportunity. Facebooks fastest growing segment is Women over 55, meaning connecting with residents of a community online is become more viable each and every day.

Check out this article about cities using Twitter as a communication, profiling Mesa, Arizona and Killeen, Texas. These cities using Twitter to communicate quickly and directly with residents.

Service & Retail

Using social media as an online marketing strategy has significant benefits in the service and retail industries. Social media can be used to educate consumers on new product offerings, discounts, product news, customer support and, in many cases, can be used to facilitate interaction between consumers to help spread awareness of the brand.

Zappos is well-respected for their use of social media for educating customers on product specials, as well as using social channels as a customer support platform. State Farm, an insurance provider, uses social media to communicate with their clients on a daily basis.

Health & Medicine

The mix of social media and medicine is hotly debated topic, because unlike most industries, the health services field carries the ongoing high risk of exposing confidential information.  However, strategically executed social media can effectively share research and development progress, facility and product improvements, and general health and wellness updates.

For example, the St. Louis Children’s Hospital uses three Twitter accounts: @STLChildrens shares general Hospital updates, doctors’ blog posts and other helpful tips, @STL_Kids is run by nurses and gives out advice pertaining to kids’ health and @Childrens_Jobs posts the latest job openings and HR updates.

Industrial & Manufacturing

Some industrial and manufacturing companies consider social media channels low-priority when it comes to online marketing strategies. However, many companies are finding a great deal of success through the use of LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows companies to find new employees, partnerships, and share industry related information. YouTube can also be an effective means for educating distributors on product features and training.

A presentation on Social Media for Manufacturing outlines how social media can be leveraged in this industry.

Not-For-Profit & Organizations

Social media is a very effective way for Non-Profits to reach both existing supporters and to recruit new supporters. By providing a constant update of related news and events, social media allows you to keep in touch with supporters in a less-intrusive manner than traditional methods. In addition, through the proper execution of a social sharing campaign, a non-profit can leverage its existing supporters to spread the word about the program to help recruit new supporters.

Checkout this article, a 10-step guide for Not-For-Profits, before starting your social media campaign.

Restaurants

Using social media to promote your restaurant is a great way to connect with both new and long-term customers. By promoting your social media platforms in your restaurant and throughout your website, you give customers the opportunity to stay up-to-date on specials and events.  Also, through a social media marketing campaign, you can effectively use your customers to help spread the word about their experience and upcoming events. Location-based social networks, such as foursquare and the newly launched Facebook Places, also allow users to “check-in” to your restaurant and publish this check-in to their social media accounts. Businesses using foursquare can also create specials for customers that unlock when they check-in .

Whatever industry you are in, social media is a learning process for every organization. Finding the right resources, sending out the right message, and doing so on a consistent basis takes a concentrated, and sometimes trial-based, effort to get right. But with the right strategy it can prove beneficial for nearly every type of business.

What are some great examples of organizations in the industries above using social media effectively? Add to the list in the comments!

Related Posts:

Is Social Media Right for My Business? Part I

Beyond the Cocktail Party: Making Social Media Work for Your Business

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to speak at the first ISES STL “learning lunch” of 2010. ISES is an international organization of special events planners, so as you can imagine, the setup and coordination of this speaking engagement was handled flawlessly. Audio, video, blazing fast wireless connection, nametags, extra writing utensils, table décor, Oreo cookie cake – check. The topic of the presentation was how event planners can leverage social media for business, a topic ISES had identified as a growing interest amongst their members. ISES noted that many of their members were currently utilizing Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube or Twitter for their business; but felt that they needed some insight into how to build a marketing strategy around social media, and they were hungry for some social network-specific tips as well. We kicked off the meeting with a fun Social Media Personality Quiz that Lisa created to allow the attendees to gauge their social media personality (ranging from a Social Media Butterfly to a Fail Whale) based on their current level of engagement with social media. Wondering who you are at the Social Media Cocktail Party? Take the quiz for yourself:

Social Media Personality Questionnaire

We had a lot of fun with that exercise, and I offered some tips for each personality type to step up their social media game. Next, we moved into a section dedicated to dispelling some common social media myths, because I find that many businesses limit their potential with social media due to a few common misunderstandings. Specifically, we dispelled the following social media rumors:

• Blogs are dead
• Social media strategy only works for “fun” products or services
• Social media marketing is a “new thing” or “early mover” strategy
• Social Media isn’t measurable

After destroying those nasty rumors, we moved on to a discussion about content strategy, and why it is a core component of any successful social media plan. We were only able to cover the basics on this rather deep topic during the allotted timeframe, but I felt a couple “Ohhh…” moments during this discussion as the pieces started to fall into place as to why content strategy is so vital to success. To help ISES members build their content strategy and stay on track, we offered 7 steps to building your content strategy, and a free downloadable social media editorial calendar template. The final section of the presentation was focused on delivering a few delicious tips, tricks and examples for blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Based on audience feedback, I think the following social media tips were the biggest eye openers for this group:

• Most blogging platforms have time scheduling capabilities
• How and why businesses should get a Facebook vanity url
• Twitter is not the most efficient platform for managing Twitter
• You need to fill out your LinkedIn Profile 100%
• Remember to listen

And speaking of eye openers, after watching this video I realized I delivered a large amount of “ums” along with my social media tips. My public speaking teacher at Wash U is cringing right now. #notetoself Thanks again to ISES for the invitation to speak to such a fun and professional group, to Highlands Golf & Tennis Center for hosting the event and to Lisa for recording the session and giving me the old “cut throat” signal as I was approaching my time limit. What did you score on the Social Media Cocktail Party Quiz? What are some other rumors about social media you often hear? Tell us in comments!

About the Author Erin Steinbruegge is a Partner at The Loud Few who specializes in interactive marketing strategy. You can learn more about her here or follow her on twitter at twitter.com/steinburglar.

Be competitive with your online marketing efforts; even chess players harbor a little animosity for their opponents. You should know who you are up against, what makes them strong, and then work to be even less imperfect than them. In the second part of my Competitive Smackdown Series, I will show you how gauge the amount of content your competitors have indexed and how to analyze their backlinks.

This will help guide your own SEO, since making sure all of your valuable site content is indexed and then increasing the number of quality links to valuable pages on your site should account for most of your search engine optimization efforts. I suggest tracking the data you uncover for each competitor you investigate; a tracking spreadsheet works very nicely for this.

Note: If you need help building a list of competitors to analyze, see my first post in this series on competitor analysis. Or, feel free to contact us for help with a full interactive marketing strategy.

How to Find Your Competitor’s Number of Pages Indexed:

Finding the number of pages a competitor has indexed in the search engines gives you a rough estimate of how much content they have and how aware the search engines are of them. It will also help us identify, by comparing your pages indexed to their pages indexed, which competitors are going to be the more immediate adversaries.

To find a rough number of pages a site has indexed, use the search query, “site:domainname.com” in most search engines. In the last post I started my research into the home brewing industry, so I will continue where I left off. A Google search for “site:midwestsupplies.com” currently provides about 7,860 results.

Use this data you find on your competitors to set some basic goals for the number of pages you want the search engines to index from your own site.  if you haven’t started building your site, this might also give you an idea of how many content pages you may need.  There are several tactics to help get your content indexed in the search engines which I won’t get into at this point, but it’s something that should be a part of your SEO strategy.

How to Find the Number and Quality of Inbound Links to Your Competitors:

The number of inbound links is the biggest factor of how well you will rank in the search engines. It’s also crucial that you know it’s not only the number of links your site has to it, but also the quality of the links and the “anchor text” that actually links to your site.

To find the number of sites and which sites are linking to your competitors, count on Yahoo for the time being. Yahoo Site Explorer functionality will be transitioning to Bing soon, but this should work fine from there as well.  Yahoo seems to report backlink amounts much closer to the actual number than doing your search in Google.

Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and input the website you want to check. Press the top button for “Inlinks”, then select “Except for this domain” in the “Show Inlinks” drop-down field, and then choose “Entire Site” in the “To” drop-down field.:

In this case we see that midwestsupplies.com has somewhere in the neighborhood of 33,000 links from elsewhere. If you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-100 links to your own site, midwestsupplies.com is probably not the best competitor to compare yourself to. However, they can still provide you with great information; just keep their weight class in mind when you set objectives for link building.

Google’s “allinachor:”, “link:”, and “related:” commands can also assist in finding who is linking to your competitor as well, along with sites that are related (which gives you other indirect or direct competitors to research).

Now that you know how to get information on your competitor’s inbound links, you should capture that data, compare it other competitors, look for trends and learn from it. A quick search for ”link:www.midwestsupplies.com” in Google provides the results below and quickly provides several ideas on who I can make connections with and seek links from. Also, since it’s data from a top ranking competitor whose model is working, the information is more valuable.

There are several tools that help with this online marketing research so it doesn’t have to be all manual. Here are just a few SEO tools to help:

• SEO for Firefox
• Open Site Explorer
• SEO Elite also offers a nice paid tool
• UPDATE FROM USER COMMENTS – SEOMoz Linkscape is another paid tool I originally left out that rates the value of links

So our takeaways from this post should be:

• Find the number pages your competitors’ have indexed, and the value of that information to set content goals.
• Identify how many links your competitors have and, more importantly, trends of where you should be getting links.

How do you analyze your competitors’ content and backlinks? I would love to know your tips and feedback in the comments!

Related posts:

Competitive Smackdown Part 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Smackdown Part 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitive Research

About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist who specializes in online marketing strategy, SEO, St. Louis‘ competitive dart scene and brewing for The Loud Few.  You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.