8 Essential Resources for Competitive Analysis in B2B Online Marketing. The elements of competitive analysis in focus included: Competitive keyword visibility (keywords ranking, position, search volume, etc) Competitive brand visibility (inbound links, social shares, etc) Content marketing (content types, social media tactics, etc) Site architecture (SEO properties and best practices like tagging, URL’s, etc) While much of what I wrote still remains true, the tools and resources continue to evolve and improve. In this article, I’ll detail eight resources I find essential when tackling competitive analysis and uncovering opportunities to better aid our client’s SEO programs; particularly those in B2B markets. BuzzSumo provides insight into social media performance and content marketing tactics, across websites and domains. Ghostery is a free Chrome extension that provides insight into the tracking, advertising, and analytics programs a website deploys. Moz Keyword Explorer provides a view of individual keyword data, including search estimates, potential difficulty (IE, competitiveness), and the types of results in organic search. I use Moz Keyword Explorer for assessing the type of results that appear for a given keyword target as well as uncovering comparable keyword opportunities. Three specific Google search tools I find important for competitive analysis include: Why Google Search Tools are essential: Both mobile friendly and structured data testing tools provide rapid insight into the effectiveness of a competitor’s website architecture. While I find these resources invaluable for competitive analysis, I’m sure there are comparable tools; free and with commercial licenses. The key is in how effective these resources are for uncovering critical components of a competitor’s online marketing strategy.
Competitive analysis is a crucial component of every SEO program. While we always use some level of competitive review when starting new programs, this analysis is incredibly valuable for ongoing work as well.
Competitive analysis helps our teams understand a market, target audiences, and uncover various SEO and online marketing tactics being executed. We learn a lot by assessing a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in keyword strategy, site architecture, content marketing, link building and social media.
I wrote a Search Engine Land column a while back that detailed how to tackle competitive analysis in a typical client engagement.
The elements of competitive analysis in focus included:
- Competitive keyword visibility (keywords ranking, position, search volume, etc)
- Competitive brand visibility (inbound links, social shares, etc)
- Content marketing (content types, social media tactics, etc)
- Site architecture (SEO properties and best practices like tagging, URL’s, etc)
While much of what I wrote still remains true, the tools and resources continue to evolve and improve.
In this article, I’ll detail eight resources I find essential when tackling competitive analysis and uncovering opportunities to better aid our client’s SEO programs; particularly those in B2B markets.
SEMRush is a software platform that provides insight into organic and paid search keywords, link building, and display advertising. The commercial variation of the software also allows marketers to create projects, storing reports on keyword positioning in particular, and keeping track of ongoing performance.
Why SEMRush is essential
While SEMRush provides insight into almost every aspect of competitive analysis outlined above, the critical aspects I apply are in association to keyword research and discovery. The functionality in SEMRush to uncover keywords, organic and paid, that an organization ranks or advertising for, can be critical in refining SEO initiatives.
BuzzSumo provides insight into social media performance and content marketing tactics, across websites and domains. Marketers with the commercial license have more thorough access to social share data, in addition to analysis associated with an organization’s content marketing strategy, and third party backlink/influencer relationships.
Why Buzzsumo is essential
Buzzsumo provides three functions important to competitive analysis, specific to brand visibility and content marketing.
- Buzzsumo’s backlink report provides marketers with a view on inbound links acquired over defined periods of time.
- The content analysis report offers insight into the type of content marketing assets that are successful for any given organization or domain.
- Buzzsumo’s most shared report indicates the social sharing volume of an organization’s content marketing assets as well as insight what individuals and influencers contributed to this volume.
Ghostery is a free Chrome extension that provides insight into the tracking, advertising, and analytics programs a website deploys. Beyond marketing, Ghostery also provides the ability for users to restrict/block tracking and…
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