Aikido is one of the most effective forms of martial arts currently available. Aikido uses your opponent’s motions against him. If somebody lunges towards you and their center of gravity shifts a certain way, you just manipulate and re-direct their center of gravity so that they fall. Interestingly enough, aikido’s principles also apply to blogging.
Internet transparency and competition research
Believe it or not, much of your homework and many of the crucial research you need to do to become successful in your blogging efforts have been done by others. Who are these people? They are your competitors. By its very nature, the internet is not a closed system. Many search engines and many link detection systems and many free tools allow you to peek behind the curtains of your competitor’s blogs. Do not get too excited because they can peek behind yours as well. Be that as it may, this transparency allows upstarts and beginners such as yourself a great advantage because you can build your online publishing business on the shoulders of your competition instead of the ground floor.
Profit from your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
Put it another way, for you to reach greater heights instead of you building a large tower or pulling out an expensive heavy ladder, you can simply climb up the backs of your competitors and sit on their shoulders to reach that higher height. This guide allows you to reverse engineer your competition in that a lot of the heavy lifting of finding the exact keywords to blog about, to identifying the key categories to focus on and isolating opportunities that your competitors may have overlooked. Finally, this guide helps you to use your competition wisely. It is not enough to simply reverse engineer what they have built. You also have to be very strategic. Just because your competition has done something does not necessarily mean you have to blindly copy what they did or else you not only would have to be content with the results that they are getting, but also have to deal with the fact that you are at a disadvantage since you started later.
Reverse engineering the competition: Finding Competitors
Your competition is your friend. There is no two ways about it. Since they have started ahead of you, they have already tried out the waters of the content category and subject matter you wish to blog about. They have taken the lumps of going out there and meeting the challenges. Your job at this juncture is to learn from their successes and avoid their mistakes. Thankfully, this information can be obtained through completely ethical and transparent means. There are quite a few tools out there that allow you to type in a domain name and figure out the keywords that they are ranking for. Notice that we wrote “ranking for” instead of “targeting.”
Find out which keywords your competitors are targeting
If you just wish to figure out what your competition is targeting, all you need to do is open your Firefox browser, load their domain, go through each and every page and click control U for each page. You will see the keywords they are shooting for at the title and/or meta description section of each page. If they use old school methods of search engine optimization, they would also fill out the keywords meta-tag section and fully list out the keywords that they are interested in. This is as simple as it gets. However, the reality is the keywords that they are getting are not the keywords that they are successful with. Right now, your focus should be finding out which keywords they are successful with and figuring out why. Also, you’d want to know why are targeting certain keywords and whether it make sense for you to target those keywords as well.
Finding competitors to reverse engineer
Finding competitors is quite easy. Just type in your list of keywords into Google. Keep in mind that if you are trying to find competitors based on geographic region, (for example: you want only competitors ranking in US searches) you have to go through a few extra steps depending on where you are located. If you are looking for US traffic and you are in the U.S., you do not have to do anything else, just go to Google and then type in your keywords and you will see resulting web pages and sites. If you are based overseas, you have to use a United States proxy (there are many of them available online – just do a simple search) and load Google on to the proxies and do your search from there. The key here is to find U.S. results, not international results because if the target you are looking for is specific to the United States or specific to a geographic region, then you must load the version of Google that caters to that region.
Now that you have listed all your competitor’s keywords, list them out. At the top, put your target keyword and put the URLs of the results. List the first 15. Indicate whether the result is in the top level of the domain meaning if you click the link you go to the home page of the website, or if it is an internal page. If it is an internal page, you click the link and you go into a URL that is listed as domain name forward slash and the name of the page. This means it is an internal page. Make certain to identify which are top level domain results and which are internal pages. Put a star next to the internal pages. This indicates relatively weaker competitors. These are easier to knock off than the top level/domain results. However, with enough practice and effort you will learn how to knock loose top level results as well.
Find Your Competitor’s Strengths and Weaknesses
Now that you have listed the websites that rank for your target keywords, you will need to use a tool like SEOmoz, semrush or spyfu. These tools are not free. You have to get a membership at these sites. From time to time they offer free limited time memberships. Regardless, you need to get a membership and the pricing is very reasonable. Most are below $50 and do not consider this a hassle because this is an investment in your blogging business. Up to this time, you probably have not spent much money doing the self-assessment phase of strategic and systematic blogging. At this stage, you probably will need to spend a little bit of money in order for you to get data that you need to make informed choices in building your blog.
Cherry pick your competition’s existing keyword inventory
Using the SEO tools above, you plug in your competitor’s domain names and they will isolate which keywords your competitor is ranking for. You need to download these results so you can map out which keywords your competitors are doing well on and which keywords that they are targeting and they are not ranking on. Once you have listed out this data, run a search for all the keywords through Google’s keyword selector tool. Remember to keep the settings at “exact” match. Look for traffic levels. Look for cost per click. Once you have all this information, it would become very clear to you where your competitors are strong, how much value their strong areas have and you can also identify areas of opportunity for yourself.
Keep in mind search volume. The principle here is not to focus so much on the amount of money the keywords bring. The focus should be on a holistic view. What you should be looking for is identifying using your competitor’s information the keywords that have decent search volume, decent monetary value and low to manageable levels of competition. Run competitive analysis on all the keywords your competitors have targeted.
Stay focused on the big picture – holistic analysis
After you have all these numbers, you can then start to organize this information into two sub-lists per competitor. The first sub-list is strong areas. These areas are keywords where your competitor ranks highly for. The second sub-list is for areas of opportunity. These are keywords that they are targeting, but they do not rank for and these keywords have a decent amount of search volume, priced moderately and have minimal or manageable competition. All these keywords must have those factors–decent search volume, manageable competition and decent monetary value. Using this system, you can analyze competitor after competitor. Following this process allows you to let your competition “do your homework for you.” They are effectively compiling your list of winning keywords. You are benefiting from their strengths as well as their weaknesses. You are avoiding fruitless SEO battles where they are strong and you are identifying their weak areas so you can establish a traffic foothold.
Finding Gray Areas Your Competitors Have Missed
The prior analysis works with data that your competitors have furnished you directly. These pieces of information come from their web pages or from their search rankings and other online behavior. Finding gray areas that your competitors may have missed is a little bit more tricky because it is in essence figuring out keywords that your competition did not think of. The best tool to use for this stage of reverse engineering your competition is spyfu. Hands down, Spyfu spits out all sorts of information that can truly help you beat your competition.
Learn to fight in the shadows – identifying Gray Area keywords
Beating your competition, like in aikido, involves using their strength against them, but it also means figuring out their weaknesses and launching an attack from there. To paraphrase Sun-Tzu in his famous strategy epic The Art of War, you need to run away from your enemy where he is strong and attack him where he is weak. Your competitors’ “gray area” is the list of keywords and topics which your competitors aren’t targeting. They are weak precisely because of this absence of targeting. The hard part is they will not supply this information to you because they don’t have it. Their pages will not have this information because they are not targeting these keywords and topics.
Using Spyfu, you can find related keywords that your competitors are not targeting. You will then need to run a lot of analysis for these keywords because you will get tons and tons of keywords. You need to have a very effective tool to filter these quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, you may just have to invest a lot of time in analyzing this massive data dump. While this might sound like a headache, it is a headache that is well worth it because it may lead to you establishing a solid foundation from which you can then beat your competition. It is like invading a beach. You have to get a foot hold at a certain part of the beach for the rest of your forces to fully invade the surrounding landscape. Gray areas are the perfect strategic points to establish a beach head against your competitors.
Filter matrix for gray area keywords
Once again when filtering keywords, apply this filter matrix (a combination of the following factors): the amount of competing pages so you can get the level of competition, the amount of searches the keyword gets within any single month (remember to use “exact” search), your amount of interest/passion in the keyword’s subject matter, and monetary value. We cannot emphasize monetary value enough because you do not want all of your keywords to be low-value keywords. If you can only be realistically rewarded a few pennies per click and it takes a lot of effort to get that click, you might get discouraged and you might stop blogging. Monetary value plays a key role. Making money may not be your primary motive, but every cent helps to keep you motivated. Revenue figures are very crucial pieces of data that many people consciously or subconsciously consider when trying to assess their level of success. Do not overlook the monetary value of your keywords.
Filter based on relevance
Once you have filtered the gray area keywords, the next stage of the analysis is to figure out relevance. Certainly your competitors may have inadvertently given you ideas for related keywords that they are not targeting and these keywords may be worth quite a bit of money. They may also get decent traffic and you are passionate about them. However, they do not thematically match your topic. That is the next level of analysis–filtering your gray area keywords based on relevance to your existing topic list or category. The keywords must fit in closely with your overall category or else you are just wasting your time.
Chasing off-topic keyword terms is not a good strategy because it takes away focus from your blog. With “mixed” keywords, your blogging efforts may become a wild goose chase. From a purely personal standpoint, it may sap a little bit of your motivation because you are off focus. This stage of analysis involves eliminating keywords based on topical relevance.
Once you have filtered your list, clearly identify remaining items as gray area keywords. This will be your first level of priority because your competition is not targeting them. Our strategy is to focus solidly on these and then once we have established a beachhead with these keywords, branch out into those keywords that your competition is targeting and/or ranking for, and engage them there.
Deliver Where Your Competition Fails
Finding gray areas and soft spots in your competition’s blogging strategy are not enough to make your blog a success. The bottom line is you have to deliver something that they fail to deliver. You need to go back to your list of competitors and this time your focus is on the actual websites themselves and not their keywords. Take out a notebook or a blank text document in your computer and spend several minutes, if not more, looking over your competitors.
Competitor Quality Assessment
Pay careful attention to the following factors: What is the quality of their content? Is it very readable? Is it written in such a way that it speaks to the needs of the target audience? Does your competitor’s blog or website clearly identify who its target audience is based on the word choice and based on the textual clues the blog has? How is the blog organized? Is it easy to navigate? Is it easy to find information on the blog? Are the tags reliable? Are the categories reliable? In terms of readability, is there a pattern among your competitors regarding a format for each article? Do you feel that this format is effective? Or do you think they are just copying each other and that there are serious flaws in their chosen format structure? Does your competitor use a lot of pictures and how are the pictures tagged? How direct are the pictures? Are they specific examples? Are they infographics that show diagrams, flow charts or other devices that illustrate an idea? Are they purely placeholders? Where do your competitors source their pictures? What keywords are used in the tags for the pictures?
The list of questions is endless. Use the questions above as mere starting points, but by no means end with them. You need to come up with your own questions. The key point of this exercise is to get your mind going so that you can break down your competitor’s websites analytically and systematically. You have to scratch beneath the surface to truly fully see the content depth, the content structure and the strategy behind your competition. Only once you get a full appreciation and full understanding or these factors can you completely wrap your mind around what you need to do in order to beat your competition.
Finding and evaluating your competition’s “type” and “anti-type”
Now that you have “shredded” your competition’s content and blog presentation, now is the time to read your notes and come up with a type and an anti-type. The type is a compiled version of all the features your competitors seem to have. These are common features. You can feel free to take as much time as you need to do this step because it is crucial. What you are doing is you are creating master blue print of what the conventional wisdom is regarding the subject matter or topic category you plan to blog about.
On the other hand, the anti-type is a list of unique, innovative or just eccentric methods or ways your competition presents their content or go about their blogging. In essence, this is clustering of different approaches from the general type. Now that you have the type and the anti-type listed and clustered, take some time to double check and make sure that this material is accurate.
Analyzing the traffic success of types and anti-types
Once you are sure that your data is accurate, you then should look at your keyword ranking results for your competitors and rank them just based on the number of one or first page results in the matter of success. This will take some time because there is going to be much number crunching involve, but definitely go through this process because this will allow you to compare your blog type with indicators of success. Do the same with the anti-type.
After you’ve done keyword traffic search analysis, load the complete domains of your competitors into Alexa and see their overall traffic volume. This is less reliable than specific keyword traffic volume analysis but it does provide circumstantial evidence regarding the overall success rate of your competitors’ sites.
After all this process, a clear picture should emerge. You should be able to see features that your competitors are doing that meet with success. On the other hand, you should also be able to see features that fail.
The Bottom Line
Using your competitors’ strength against them and delivering where they fail are essential strategies that will help boost your own chances of blogging success. These steps can be quite involved, complicated and definitely include quite a bit of number crunching. Regardless, you need to go through these processes so you can have the information that you need in order to formulate a winning strategy that is based on reality. Again, you should focus less on hunches and base your decisions on cold hard numbers.
Part 3: Unleashing WordPress Content Handling and Traffic Generation Power
