What I Learned from Scraping SEOmoz's Active User Base
One day I decided to scrape all the publicly available profile data from SEOmoz's active user base and provide a little bit of ultra transparency. Check out what I found!
Competitive Research
Competitive research in SEO means, in a nutshell, stealing your competitors’ rankings and traffic.
Well, not exactly stealing.
But it does involve reverse-engineering what's working for your competitors, and using that information to your advantage!
Competitive research typically follows a few common lines of inquiry: identifying competitors, keyword research, content gap analysis, and backlink exploration . If you're not sure where to start when it comes to establishing your competitors, check out the True Competitor feature in Moz Pro, and start building your competitive strategy.
In addition, we've listed some companion resources on competitive research and analysis for SEO.
How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO : A terrific introduction to SEO competitive analysis with a free template to copy for your own campaigns.
The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide : An effective competitive research process starts with keywords, and this guide outlines a step-by-step process you can implement today to identify keyword opportunities.
Link Gap Analysis for SEO : Identify opportunities to increase your authority based on your competitors’ backlink strategy.
SEO Competitive Analysis Certification : Learn how to confidently build an SEO competitive analysis plan and get certified with this 6-part series. This certification combines on-demand video lessons with tasks and quizzes to affirm your understanding.
Most Recent Articles on Competitive Research
How to Carve Out Marketing Strategies by Mining Your Competitors' Backlinks
You can do your own Watergate-style investigation, learning the secrets of your competitors' marketing strategies by scrutinizing their backlinks. Pivot tables in Excel can help you make sense of all that data, and this post will show you how.
Competitive Link Analysis: Link Intersect in Excel
Without a doubt, one of the main steps in creating an SEO strategy is the competitive analysis. Competitor backlinks can offer information on their link building strategies, as well as giving you opportunities to strengthen your own link profile. Read on to learn how you can build your own competitive link analysis in Excel, including a template to help you start right away.
How To Use Twitter Data for Really Targeted Outreach
At this year's MozCon, I explained that with the help of a few tools, you can leverage Twitter and Excel to give you a detailed breakdown of the content your target audience is sharing. Here's how.
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Competitor Research In An Inbound Marketing World
As more marketers are shifting from strict SEO to inbound marketing, competitor analysis is changing. In today's post, John Doherty touches on a few key areas of inbound marketing where you should revisit your competitor analysis to yield larger returns.
Cheap Parlor Tricks for Competitive Analysis by SERP Weighting
I've found that, more and more, my time spent analyzing a competitive search results page can be both incredibly revealing and valuable. In most cases I'm looking at a SERP either to research what level of effort might be required to either increase or establish rankings on the results for one of our clients. I'm also finding that it is common that I find competitors obviously breaking webmaster guidelines simply by reviewing their positioning.
5 Steps to use Competitive Research as a Foundation for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Instead of flying blind, it’s important to perform competitive research in order to search for patterns and commonalities in your industry. This information should give you the hard evidence necessary to create an effective online marketing strategy.
The Impact of Authoritative Links, Mentions, and Shares on Rankings
Today I want to share with you some interesting details about research that I've done recently and which I have also presented at SMX Advanced Seattle.
Why the Marketing World Needs More Correlation Research
Do more tweets of a URL lead to higher search rankings on Google? Do longer articles get more shares on Facebook? Do emails that contain images have lower open rates? These, and hundreds of other questions marketers are constantly asking, can be answered mathematically through correlation data. Yet, it seems there's an unfortunate bias against correlations, specifically...
Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking With the New Domain and Page Authorities
With the updated SEOmoz Domain and Page Authorities, we thought it would be helpful to provide not only new benchmarks for sites with different authorities, but also a couple of processes for benchmarking yourself against your competitors.
6 Cool Ways to Supplement Your Open Site Explorer Data
There are a heap of Yahoo Site Explorer alternatives, with arguably more powerful features available than Y!SE ever had. Today, we’re going to take some fresh link data from your favourite link information mining tool of choice and supplement the hell out of it with even more data. Yey – let’s build a better Yahoo Site Explorer replacement.
Which Type of Link Anchor Text is the Most Effective? [An Experiment]
Cyrus Shepard's Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text Whiteboard Friday back at the start of September inspired me to run an experiment. Cyrus pointed out, that there has been some evidence to suggest that the exact match anchor text link may not be the holy-grail it ...
Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity
What I'm going to share today is a tool I've built that automates a process to evaluate a domains link profile looked and whether it stands out against other domains in its niche. I'm going to show you the real data I saw for a client who I knew had bought links and how you can use the same tool to identify domains that have maybe bought links or other anomalous link profiles. It all works via Google Docs and the Linkscape API and only takes a couple of minutes to run the full report.
Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs
Faced with a new client, and having established a list of keywords they need to target, you want to evaluate the competition to find out what sites are dominating the SERPs for these keywords. However... being an SEO you're a busy guy (or gal), and you need it done right now. I've built a Google Docs tool to automagically do exactly that and this post will walk you through it. The ...