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Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis

  • shawn81


    Does anyone know of any good tools that display what keywords a competitor ranks for? I have many competitors that I know get a lot of traffic, but I'm not entirely sure where the traffic comes from so it would be nice to plug in their url and get a general overview of what keywords they rank for and what positions.

    | shawn81
    0
  • Charlessipe


    Do you have any suggestions if you are being outranked by competitors even though your page has way better content and better links?

    | Charlessipe
    0
  • conversiontactics


    Today  i am searching for backlinks in OSE but it cant go to result pages, can anyone help me why OSE cant work today.

    | conversiontactics
    0
  • Ric


    Hello,
    Do you know a tool where you can find other websites with the same Adsense code or Analytics Code? Thanks, Eric

    | Ric
    0
  • pauledwards


    Hi there what is the best type of domain name if i have a keyword im targetting. Lets use 'very cool' as an example: www.verycool.com www.verycool.co.uk www.very-cool.com www.very-cool.co.uk I am led to believe the .co.uk would be better in a UK index. I also got told - count as a space, therefore the best one above for Google UK is www.very-cool.co.uk ?

    | pauledwards
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    Could someone recommend a fast way to extract the admin email from blogs. Something that could potentially accept a CSV file extracted from opensiteexplorer. A lot of blogs obviously have this info hidden, but there must be a way to search/extract via a paid software or tool of some kind.

    | ilyaelbert
    0
  • tishimself


    Hi, It seems that SEOMOZ provides only link ranking comparison with competators.  I'm not conviced that this is valuable for my purposes as the comeption often has few links tool, probably the nature of the business.. First, is it worth trying to compare keyword ranking with competators?  I think it is, but I'm not that experienced with SEO, especially with Wordpress/Buddpress sites. Second, any recommenations for a tool that will make this easier? Larry

    | tishimself
    0
  • BrianJenkins


    I'm currently working on an entire website redesign and restructuring.  My current website is extremely spammy.  I really worked on it before I knew much about SEO.  Now that I have a better foundation I have been remaking my site to get rid of duplicate content and to have a much better UX.  With this said, I still depend on the current site to bring in my income while I'm working on getting my new site up. Google seems to constantly kick me out for about a month at a time and then let me back in.  The few other times I thought it was because the new site I have been working on is on a different domain and was exactly the same for a while (I don't want google to find this new domain it's just for testing purposes).  So I removed the new domain from google and in a couple weeks my main site was back in.  Problem is yesterday google hit me again.  I'm out of google for all my search terms.  Before I was ranking on the first page for just about every "keyword + city" phrase I was trying to rank for. I can find plenty of reasons why google would give me problems with my current site.  For example I have TONS of duplicate pages with just the keyword/city changed.  Pretty spammy.  I did buy about 5 links a year ago or so but they are pretty nothing sites. My question is if google's going to ban me why don't they just do it?  They keep taking me out and putting me back in.  No messages in webmaster tools.  My domain is below: http://yourmusiclessons.com Also when I just started out I got the idea of "keyword + city" from a competitor that ranks for EVERYTHING which is also found below: http://www.musikalessons.com All of the links I bought were the same links the above site bought.  I tried buying a link from classical.net which has a high page rank and links to musikalessons.com on each page of their site.  As soon as google found the links, I was kicked out.  I had them remove it.  My question is musika has basically the same "spammyness" as me just on a much larger scale and yet they never seem to be kicked out of google and still rank high. I've thought about reporting musika, but I'm afraid Google will ban me as well because my site is just as bad.  Again I'm working all day on fixing my site and doing a 180, it's just taking a long time and I can't launch quite yet.  I live off the income from my current site though, so it's very disheartening when this happens. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

    | BrianJenkins
    0
  • bronxpad


    Hello all, I am a local realtor that created my website with an idx feed. I am on page one but at the bottom. Question is how can a local real estate website rank better in the SERPS than the larger national brands? Any tips out there from those who have worked with real estate websites and seo? I'm trying to out rank the larger sites for my main keywords. Thanks all.

    | bronxpad
    0
  • bullionguru


    in my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???

    | bullionguru
    0
  • YNWA


    Hi, I am sure I read it on here. But is there a link to a resource whereby I can search Google for sites that accept things like guest bloggers, offer do follow links, do not no follow comments etc... It used things like "search term" blogs, eg "guest bloggers" websute Anyone help me out? Cheers Will

    | YNWA
    0
  • AdoptionHelp


    Keyword: "adoption agency" Site: http://www.opendooradoption.org These guys are ranked #2 for this very competitive term in all US regions. They're beating Bethany (and my company) who are orders of magnitude larger in both company size and link profile. Their domain authority is 40, and they have less than 200 links pointing to them with "adoption agency" in the anchor according to OSE. Their on-site is pretty much nonexistent. Does anyone have any theories as to how they accomplished this?

    | AdoptionHelp
    0
  • sajalsahay


    Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.

    | sajalsahay
    0
  • shanky1


    Hi there. I am worried a bit about static html pages or wordpress as an instance to write down open page content for our website. We are a product based website - primarily Saas based product. But with time we have seen that if we write more content people will be able to find us better,. Earlier our blog resided on blog.example.com now we are moving it to example.com/blog/ Issues - I really want to know that I need to generate lots of fresh content so I am using wordpress as the blog medium and content generation medium too. Basically the wordpress instance will be a content generated pages. I can also have static html page based content but then our content writers will always have to take the help of develoeprs to publish it to our sites. Whats the best way to go about this keeping SEO really crucial in mind? Thanks for your time and help!

    | shanky1
    0
  • georgesan


    Just registered, so please excuse my ignorance. How can you get your competitors' recent backlinks using OSE? Thank you!

    | georgesan
    0
  • bluehelmet


    Hi everyone, The thing  is pretty simple: I have a competitor who uses a different format of url, very similar to this: www.example.com - but he started to use a thing like this: example.mtv.com The problem is that every analysis that I make tell me something about mtv.com instead of the site I want. The url is redirected. Sorry about my english, but I think it is very clear. I want to know how to track something like this, because even in competitor analysis I'm getting info about the big site, and not the one I need. Thank you very much.

    | bluehelmet
    0
  • Gamer07


    Hi, I have been playing with Open Site Explorer for a while and have been trying to figure out how some of our competitors could rank with "not so great" articles. I don't want to sound harsh here but some of the articles outranking us are nothing but 6 images + 200-225 words from a press release and a Video. How exactly does Google justify this by ranking them higher than a 1500 word unique article that has been written in no less than 7 days? According to OpenSite Explorer, about the two pages compared, the difference is the number of LINKS. The sad part is, without 1 exception, all their links are coming from blog pages like *.wordpress.com *.typepad.com etc. I would have been just FINE if their links were NATURAL. You may ask me why I assume those blogs are created by them. Because every single post on those blogs are pointing to their domain... I don't think a normal blogger would keep pointing to the same domain. So what are we supposed to do here? Wait 3 months so people discover our articles and natural links will come? (It happens sometimes but then it may not...) Do what they do? Sorry about the ranting but I have one question if you don't want to read the rant. Is blogging to build links, considered black hat or not?

    | Gamer07
    0
  • shanky1


    We are an online Saas Based startup. Strongly 70% of our daily users come directly to us since they know us by the url . Now there these 30% who scout for software's like ours online. Get to us by some hook or crook and then maybe end up giving the trial a shot. Our Main site is only of say 5-6 pages. These pages have basic info about our product , pricing and contact etc. What I wish to understand is that when one says" getting those keywords to the top of the engines rankings" who do you mean  by these - I presume one means that get the keywords you want to compete for and then push in "Adwords" or better content pages? So If I want to rank well - then my websites should have good content pages you mean? Is that correct-? That means now I have to write good content on those keywords or around those keywords- without that there is no hope to come on good on engines right? Correct me here if I sway away from the actual meaning. Next I wish to have campaigns setup in google adwords keeping in mind those competitive keywords - here again does content on my website play a role? If I have no content and then have google adwords setup does that help? Please advice How long before I add good content pages and expect them to show up in my analytics etc? Thanks

    | shanky1
    0
  • shanky1


    I tried looking for traffic estimates - attached is a screenshot - http://imgur.com/rTlUw I need help in analyzing if the Daily Clicks which shows .08? what does this mean that not even 1 click can be accomplished for this keyword if I put it under the adwords campaign? Can anyone explain that to me please. Also how exactly do I keep track of CTR how will this influence my campaign

    | shanky1
    0
  • pageup555


    In All of my competiitors  appears Wordpress.com,  google.com, w3.org, yahoo.com and all of them have Domain Auth. 100. How is it possible? And how can in get links from domains like thath.

    | pageup555
    0
  • Notsy


    I'm trying out Market Samurai & OSE for gauging SEO competition. When I try both the tools for giving backlink count for a specific page then I'm seeing remarkable difference. Hence I need to know how OSE calculates "Total Links" for a page & how can we be sure that it is true?

    | Notsy
    0
  • musicforkids


    I was trying to optimize the keywords "music for kids" . This is a no brainer because my URL is "musicforkids"  My On-Page Report Card for "music for kids" gives my site a "A". The on page report card for the other site gets an "F". But the other site comes up number ONE in the organic Google search and my site comes up number three. The two sites above me receive a crappy on page Keyword report for the key words "music for kids" but they still come up above me for that search term. What's the deal?

    | musicforkids
    1
  • launch3


    Customers mainly find our site from searching very specific part numbers on google. My site is launch3telecom.com. Take for example these two parts:
    MT500A-81015 MR050-81045 Search only those parts in google - we rank 3rd for one of them and don't rank at all for another. Is there any way to check backlinks pointing to those pages? We even show up before big sites like ebay and such on one of them. Can anyone help me understand this?

    | launch3
    0
  • Petersen11


    SEMOZ have counted a numberous of errors (and some warnings as well) on our site: www.tryg.no But: How does these errors effect our ranking? I know that the errors are coming from the PRISSESSID (insurance
    calculator). Some keywords are registered with 11 different URLs, wich create errors like Duplicate page content and Duplicate Page title and warnings like Long URL. SEOmoz thinks this can affect my rankings because they assume that pages will end up competing with each other. But will Google "think" the same way? Vennlig hilsen Espen Vigeland
    Web Editor

    | Petersen11
    0
  • craigsmith333


    I've done extensive research into http://www.maggiesottero.com/  and cannot come up to any definitive conclusions as to why this site is ranking #1 for the term "wedding dresses."  The page is not optimized for the keyword. **Any thoughts? **

    | craigsmith333
    0
  • GRC


    Hello, Just wanted to see if there was an update on the horizon. The last update on my campaign shows 2/28/12. Am I not setting updates correctly on my dashboard? Thanks!

    | GRC
    0
  • Martin_S


    I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages. I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too. **What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? ** I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No? Thanks guys

    | Martin_S
    0
  • jgmayes


    Is there any method or way of improving these numbers? I have found a description of them but do not fully understand them either. My site currently has: MozRank: 4.7 MozTrust: 5.59 I am unclear if these are good numbers, average numbers, or what I can do to increase these vlaues. Is it simply a matter of time?

    | jgmayes
    0
  • iJeep


    We have a bundle product page with a unique title, description and image.  Other companies have similar items, but not a duplicate of what we offer.  There are a few key phrases that we are trying to target with this product because they describe the product perfectly by nature. There are other similar ranking conundrums on our site, but I chose to ask about this one because it is a fairly simple and straight forward case. Attached is the ranking difficulty tool results.  From this test, I don't see any reason why the number 1 ranking is better than our page in the SE's eyes.  We don't have any problems or warnings in WMT either. I'm open to ideas/suggestions on why our pages are ranked so much lower for a simple search term. I have tried tweaking the title, text and added internal/external links as well as built social indicators.  Nothing is making the difference I'm expecting.  Because this is a fairly non-competitive, low-income phrase, I figured it would be easy to move up the rankings. I'm almost thinking it has more to do with our site template/design than anything, but that's hard for me to say. [Our site is 19&20 in the report] 8MXHJ.png

    | iJeep
    0
  • Mcarle


    I just did a search for a recipe and saw something new. Google has  a sidebar that lets you toggle on/off ingredients... Pretty nifty, and interesting. I did not have the recipe toggle marked, I was just using regular search "everything"

    | Mcarle
    0
  • LTTVending74


    Hi, I'm new to link building. I have done some research of my competitors and have found that many of them are being linked to sites like this http://www.worldofwondersvu.com/ As you can see, this website looks like a business website, but if you view the content, it's spammed with external links. I'm just wondering what method they are going about to get these links, because most of the websites that are linking to them are simular to the one I posted above! Thanks 🙂

    | LTTVending74
    0
  • TheNorthernOffice79


    We are doing a Competitive Domain Analysis for a client and 2 of their competitors. The results from the Root Domain Metrics have been ok from the past months where in the results we are getting changes every time the website is re-crawled by SEOMOZ to update its analysis. However, in the past few weeks, the results we are getting for the Root Domain Metrics have remained the same even after three weeks. We have attempted a separate Open Site Explorer analysis for the client and their competitors but be are getting the same results. From the "Domain Authority" to the "No Followed Linking Root Domains", the results have remained the same for three weeks. Could anything be affecting the results or is it just the fact that the links have not changed (not a single one, for three websites) in the past three weeks. Hope you can help me clarify my issue. Thanks!

    | TheNorthernOffice79
    0
  • scoutzie


    I want to enter a domain name and see what keywords that domain is ranked at. Is it possible to do this with Moz?

    | scoutzie
    0
  • jgenesto


    I am not sure this is the right place to ask that question, but I would really love to have a few explanation of why, all of a sudden, one of our competitors is starting to out rank us on very competitive terms/queries. Up until a few weeks ago, we were #1 on a lot of queries "job etudiant <city>". (job etudiant = job student in french).  These keywords are considered competitive by SEOMoz (54% according to the ranking tool).</city> Very recently, a competing website started to systematically rank #1on each of these terms. What's really disturbing is that I don't see any obvious reason this competitor would rank above us (at least per SEOMoz's standards). For example, on "Job etudiant Paris", their page authority is 1 (ours is 43), the have 0 domain linkin root domains (vs. 6 for us), their domain authority is 46 (55 for us) and 144 domains linking to their domain (805 for us). I do not think we've been penalized in any way as our relative positions (compared to other websites) are unchanged. But I feel that this website is doing something obvious that we're missing. Can anyone tell us? I have performed a complete audit in the "ranking analysis" tool, and I'm happy to share more details if anyone wants them.

    | jgenesto
    0
  • tcolling


    Our site has had a link back to our site from Manta for a long time, but it's not appearing in our OSE results.  One of our competitors similarly has an inbound link from Manta and that link DOES appear in their OSE results. I'm not certain whether that matters for us.  Does it? But in any event, why would the one link appear but not the other? Thanks! Tim

    | tcolling
    0
  • escteam


    Which one is better: Have a ton of pages but accept crawl errors or; Have a lot less pages with no crawl errors. Let's say I have a product catalogue with 10 regular pages and 500 product pages (same page with content and title defined by url parameter like 'id'). It seems that even with a different product name, product description, price, color etc, I get dupplicate content crawl errors. I also know I could use a link tag with cannonical rel attribute to fix the crawl errors but I would lose indexing on 499 pages. In this case is it better SEO wise to have: 510 pages with 499 dupplicate content crawl errors or; 11 pages with 0 crawl errors?

    | escteam
    0
  • YGF


    I have been studying my competitor using a number of great tools suggested on this site, hubspot; opensiteexplorer,alexa and of course the competitive analysis tools here - and I really am getting confused about the results for one particular competitor. here is a sample of some of the strange results coming up for them - that the domain age is 42 years old; That they have 5 blogs associated- when in reality they have zero. That their blogs are getting reweeted multiple times. So the question is - how can I compete with this- or at this stage should I be looking at how they are doing this with a view to trying the same thing? Thanks,
    Sinead

    | YGF
    0
  • gazza777


    Hi all, I am familiar with the 301 redirect, but never actually got my hands dirty in this regard. I have a client who owns two stores in two different regions, but under the same brand name. They currently have two websites, for each store, the domain name dictating the region they are in. What they want to do now is create a 3rd domain, have it serve as a landing page to re-direct traffic to the existing regional domains. The question is, is this landing and re-directing good practice? Remember that each store has an online shopping cart, so running one domain servicing two stores/regions is not ideal. The last question is, they want to convert the existing/longest standing domain name into the landing page, and do a 301 re-direct to a brand new domain name.... I'd love to hear your comments and views on this one. Thanx Gary

    | gazza777
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, When building backlinks how important is the location of where the website resides? For example, if I was targeting a search term in Google UK, will link building from websites hosted on UK servers have a higher positive impact on rankings then building links from websites hosted on US servers? Lets say in the above UK hosted is better, what if you have 2 websites hosted in the UK but one with .com and one with .co.uk, I take it from a domain point of view the .co.uk will have a better impact on SERP's then the .com. Now looking at the above from a more wider scale lets say I have the following: A .co.uk website aimed at a search term in Google UK. Example: 1. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the US with .com extension. 2. 100 backlinks from websites hosted in the UK with .co.uk extension. Is it a FACT that number 2 will 100% be more beneficial in UK rankings? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    1
  • BenHuntLtd


    How on earth can http://www.plimun.com/ be at #6 for "web design", with only 15 total linking root domains, and no mention of the term in link text?! See: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.plimun.com This is one of the biggest anomalies I've ever seen.

    | BenHuntLtd
    1
  • YGF


    I'm finding this site great for getting at the information that I need but I am having trouble understanding what I see as conflicting Competitive Domain Analysis and keyword research results for companies in my sector. My company is new to the sector we are in and I am tracking two really well established leaders (Moma and Poppa bear) and one company that is new to the sector (baby Bear) too. When looking at the competitive domain analysis the Momma and Poppa Bear wipe the floor with baby bear (and of course me!) on every single criteria; but when I see who is actually ranking best for the most competitive keywords for our sector who wins...baby bear; I just dont understand it. What is the reason for the disparity between the domain analysis and actual performance? Many thanks, Sinead

    | YGF
    0
  • eyeflow


    Are there any tools where I can enter say 5 keywords and it will look at the top 10 sites for each of those keywords then return which sites show up the most.

    | eyeflow
    0
  • James77


    Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B. Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE. Many thanks

    | James77
    0
  • StreetwiseReports


    Is there a way to search for a piece of code on the internet to see what websites are displaying the code?

    | StreetwiseReports
    0
  • MirandaP


    Google tells me that my site is slower than 81% of the internet.Now this is a very large news website, so I would like to compare this against other very large news websites. Are there any tools that will be able to tell me the speed of a list of websites? I am looking for something a little more detailed than 'this site loaded in 1 second'. Also, do any of you fellow SEOs know of any good tools to analyse what is causing your site to slow down? Kind regards

    | MirandaP
    0
  • JHSpecialty


    So I noticed all the leading competitors in our market are using photos of people on their home pages to market products.. While we are using a simple but eye catching design with no photos of people but only produts.

    | JHSpecialty
    0
  • Optimise


    In Google Webmaster Tools I have well over 1000 links.  Now I appreciate that this will vary a lot compared to Open Site Explorer but that's showing just 45. Previously, before the last OSE update on the 28th I had 182 links so this is a big drop.  My competitors use similar software (vbulletin forum) and have all increased in links and my actual links haven't dropped at all according to Google Wemaster Tools.) My MozRank has dropped a lot, as has the authority and trust.  I know this is only a guide but it's very frustrating.  My PageRank has also dissapeared (although was only 1 a month or two ago) so really not sure what's going on. Does anyone have any ideas.  I haven't done anything that would penalise me in Google, just some tweaking of certain pages to try and help relevance and rankings. Cheers.

    | Optimise
    0
  • Timvroom


    I hope this isn't too basic of a question, but I am confused about something. If you use the Keyword Research tool and type in "Stained Concrete Flooring", the 3rd result (stainedconcrete.org) has the lowest numbers of any of the sites in the top 8-10... Is it because they have a large amount of traffic? or is there some other factor that I am missing?

    | Timvroom
    0
  • JustinWalmsley


    How do I go about getting rubbish backlinks on a clients websites removed? The links were created by a previous companies link building campaign, and I believe this (along with a few other things) could be the reason for their poor SERP's as they are an established website. Can I alert Google and get them to discredit the links, or do I manually have to try to make contact with the owners/webmasters of the websites to get the links removed? All help appreciated! Thanks

    | JustinWalmsley
    0
  • lilactree


    Hi!
    I'm sure this has been answered here already - I'm just not searching for the right words. I'm trying to find the ranking for a website for specific terms. Being that the search engine remembers what I search (I try to log out, privately browse, etc), everything matters and impacts my search. I'm trying to see what a website ranks for a person who has never visited that website before, or doesn't have other factors influencing the result. I tried the keyword research tool, and while that seems to deliver what I'm after, it only gives 1-10. Even though these are the coveted positions 😉 I'd like to know if a website isn't ranking there, and is further down. We track the progress made after work is done to a page, to see if it moves up, and what other tweaks we need to make to improve the rankings and attract clicks. Thanks!

    | lilactree
    0

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