Competitor Analysis: Research Their Marketing Strategy Sponsored by SpyFu Ep. 545

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram, your lead SEO strategist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of this podcast. If you're watching this, first, thank you for watching us and make sure you subscribe because you're probably watching on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, make a comment. But you might have noticed something different. Yeah, you're right, Matt. I should not be looking at the monitor screen. I should actually be looking at the camera. That's how you engage the audience who's actually checking in. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you click that notification bell. It's exciting, Matt. We're in the same room. We are. We're back in the studio. It feels like since the pandemic that we've been in the same room for a part. Yeah, that's what it was, actually. Man, we're excited to be back. You know what I miss the most? Beer. Also, yeah. A close second was the bobbleheads. Yeah, no. The bobbleheads. The bobbleheads. Yeah, we've got little bobbleheads that are representative of us, you know, actually interacting and, you know, being podcast hosts. Do you remember the bobblehead commercials? I do remember the bobblehead commercials. Those were great. Like, it is good to be back. We have a fun-filled edition of the show. Just real quick, we're going to be talking about competitor analysis, how to research their marketing strategy, their being the competitors. Yeah, no, I think that's Ivan in the other room. Yeah, that's it. All right, Ivan, you need to turn it down, buddy. Put tiff to Ivan for getting us. Like, we wouldn't be here in this room all connected if we didn't have Ivan. So thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah. It's funny when we used to do some live events and somebody would invariably turn on their phone and check out the live event. Well, no, and then we're like, hey, we're right here. You don't even have to watch us

on Facebook. You're in the room. Well, have you been, like, at home where you're texting maybe the wife back and forth? Oh, yeah. And you're in the same house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That has certainly happened. I'm a little surprised it hasn't happened with the kids, but that's mostly because they don't have, like, full-on cell, like, they have cell phones with no cell service yet. We'll get there eventually. Get your mic closer to you, I think, and point it right at your mouth. There you go. There we go. Right there. Now you've positioned it so you have to sit up. You know you can pull it down. Well, you know, Chris, this is all new to me. Like, you know, I used to be able to look at you on the screen, and now we're talking to the camera. Yeah, so do we look at each other? Anyway, I'm excited, and guess what we do have? What do we have? We have a review. Yes! And guess what the review is? Five stars! Man, it's been a while since we've been able to syncopate that. This review is from Daryl Dixon. He's actually got eight other reviews. It is a Google review, so Patif to Daryl. It says, Great work. While looking for a marketing agency in Houston, I found them with lots of positive feedback and started working with them. Provided my business with complete digital marketing services, and so far, our ROI is positive. Absolute genius. Marketing genius. Again, thanks, Patif. To you, Daryl. So, we appreciate that. Yeah, no, we've been having a few clients, and we've been really working on our project management and our scopes. Yeah. Like, everything is awesome. It's just, it's awesome. Awesome, and getting better all the time. Yeah. Yeah, that's really good, and it's good to see that. That's why we got this review from Daryl, so pretty cool. Thank you, Daryl, if you're listening. You know, we got other good news. Chris, like, just hit me with all this good news. I'm

going to hit you with news. I feel like it's Friday, but it's not. It's Thursday. We have a new sponsor. Maybe we need to move this to Friday, so then we can have beers on Friday. Yeah, that's a possibility. Well, we do have this whole office tour. Yes, yes. We are setting up, by the way, they're working on setting up in the other room right now for guests, where we can do a Joe Rogan type. Like multiple guests, not just you and I. I want to show off the live edge wood table. Yes, that's been in the works for quite some time. And it is awesome. You will get to see that soon. We're excited. The thing that we have is we have a new sponsor. Awesome. Yeah, and I feel like that's you. Spifu is the sponsor of the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yeah, we're excited to have them. If you haven't used Spifu, you've got to go check that tool out. And we actually found this article, again, researching your competitor's marketing strategy. And it happens to be talking about using the tool Spifu to actually research it. That is such coincidence. So think about the value. I think this is worth mentioning, right? Yeah. So we've got a new sponsor. The new sponsor expects like a 30-second commercial, maybe a minute, two minutes top commercial from us. And we're actually, because we're so focused on delivering value, we're actually going to do the whole podcast about their tool. This is pretty phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, competitive intelligence is certainly a buzzword right now. Yeah. And it's something that all brands need to use. So if you go to Spifu.com, Microsoft uses them. Like there's a ton of brands that use this tool and you should check it out. I know all the digital markets out there have probably heard about it. And here's what I'll tell you, Chris. Like I was on the phone with them for quite a while. And it was interesting because Spifu for me was

always a tool that you use PPC to see kind of what the competitors were, to kind of see how you combated with everyone else. And they got some really good SEO stuff on there now, too. Yeah. So this is a great like full sweep of analytical tools. And so really when I saw this article, I really liked what they were talking about. And it added a lot of value. So I thought, yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's generate value. Also, if you're watching, you'll notice that there are these globes that are in front of us. We don't even have them all. We need to accumulate them. Those are AMA awards that EWR Digital has won in the last three years. Two or three years. I don't know. I don't know. There's a bunch of them everywhere. There's some over at your office. There's some at the other office. There's some at my house. Since COVID, it's kind of been like desperate. Like things are in different locations. Well, you know, I wake up every morning. You know, I'm just kidding. My award. My AMA award. All right. Well, let's jump into this article. Again, we're going to be talking about how to research a competitor. You know, keeping up with your competitor's marketing strategy is a great way to identify their strengths and their weaknesses, which you can use for your marketing strategy. We're going to talk about seven ways to monitor your competitor's marketing strategy. And they're not all SpyFu. A lot of them do talk about how you do this particular type of monitoring using the SpyFu tool. SpyFu tool. SpyFu tool, SpyFu tool, SpyFu tool, SpyFu tool, SpyFu tool. Hey, that was fun. I think I got better at the end. Number one is identifying your competitors. Of course, you're going to do competitor research. And by the way, this article is by Cedra Condren and Patrick McGrane. They collaborated on this particular article. The first thing you want to do is understand who your competitors are. And they make, Cedra and

Patrick make the point that, you know, I say, hey, figure out who your competitors are. Like right away, like two, three people maybe come to mind, right? Maybe it's one, two, three, depending on your industry and where you're located. And they make the point that, hey, there's probably some other people who may not be on your radar who probably should be on your radar. So I think that that is a super valid point, Chris, and I can tell you when we talk to clients and they tell us who their competitors are, that's not always who their competitors are, right? At least in the online presence state of mind. And so they think that this person's their competitor because they're bumping into them maybe at conferences or events or proposals or they know the person. But really, when you look at their online presence, it could be completely different. And I think how they stated it was really good is that this is, there could be other people that you should also be looking at in addition to these people. And also one of the cool things about competitor analysis and researching this online is you can kind of see where people are getting their business, right? What are the keywords? What is the content they're creating? Where the links are coming from? Like, I know that there's some other companies that you're closely associated with that we're looking at a lot of competitor analysis on online, what they're doing, where they're getting business, and you can craft that strategy. So I think what's happening on page as well as off page is incredibly important, right? And taking this data and sifting it through, it helps you make better decisions. And yeah, but it's just so funny, I will say, having competitors, like when we talk to clients that they say, these are my competitors, and then you look online, you're like, not really. These are not your competitors, at least online. Yeah. In the online space, you're kicking their butts. And that can be good

and bad news for them. Like, first off, like, hey, the people you think are your competitors, you're kicking their butt because they're not even on the first page, second page. But by the way, there's the people you didn't realize that are actually, you know, pretty much a challenge or can be a challenge for you. So yeah, that's that. Here's what to watch for as you do. And he says, basically, SpyFu, you can quickly identify your competitors using the domain overview tool. While you're looking at that tool, note the ratios of SEO versus PPC. How much SEO traffic are they getting? How much PPC traffic are they getting? Review the core keywords. This will help you to check them out, check their keyword competitor and tells you the direction of their marketing plan. And then finally, see the keywords that they buy or rank on that you don't. So maybe they're buying keywords that you're not spending money on. Maybe they're ranking for keywords that you aren't aware of that you're not focused on. So go ahead and do that. I would say that also look at Google Analytics. Okay. Look at, well, GA4 now. Actually, guys, the data, if the data is starting to drop off, which it is, it's because Google has stopped Google Analytics and you have to set up GA4. So certainly a pro tip, go ahead and do that so you can start capturing data. We're a couple of days in. If you haven't set it up, you have actually no data. That's one. Look also in Search Console because Search Console is who's going to your website before that pixel triggers. So you want to kind of triangulate this data. But what I can tell you too is a lot of times with some of these tools, especially maybe on the paid side, you can see where the little honey holes are or why are they bidding on this keyword? What are they doing in this area? You don't, that might not be something on your radar, right? And also

you can see where they're getting traffic. Again, if they're not in the top, let's say five positions on Google, they're probably not getting that much traffic from that term, right? And so I think that that's super important to look at when you're looking at the overview of these keywords. And then again, I know we're going to get into more of the details. So let me actually, what is that? Sorry, but I had to send a text message because just a little background story. Our other location, some people decided to take the copper cables out of the building. So now there was no building to city power. And so we connected a generator and we locked the generator up at night. I set it up this morning using forklift. Didn't want to leave the forklift key in the forklift. And so one of my business partners was like, hey, where's the forklift key? Because they want to shut down the upload. So interestingly enough, like I don't have my brace on, but I'm doing rehab on my knee. Yeah. The building next door to them had their copper wire, like $10,000 of like copper wire stolen. And then one of their employees had their Cadillac converter stolen. Yeah. No, it's getting crazy. It is. It is crazy. Like, I feel like it's already crazy. Yeah. It is already crazy. Yeah. All right. So if you're going to search for your domain in SpyFu to look at these details, scroll down the page to your organic and paid competitors. This is how you identify your competitors. Is the competitor you're researching actually in this list? Again, that goes back to, hey, I think they're my competitors. Maybe they're not even on the list. Competitors that aren't top of mind could be bigger threats than you first thought once you figure that out. Let's see. I have some other information. I put a note. If you see that we've estimated your budget. So the point here is that they're making is these tools are estimation tools, right? Even

the data Google provides from a PPC perspective, like this is how much search volume there is, is an estimation tool. And SpyFu, just like every other tool that's out there, is an estimation tool. What you want to look for is the relative data, right? So if you know you're spending $10,000 a month and SpyFu says that you're spending five and then it says your competitor is spending 10, well, they're probably spending 20 and you're only spending. So the relative numbers are going to be fairly accurate. So that's really brought up an interesting point for me because when I look and do competitor analysis, I'm really trying to look at estimations as well as projections. And when I look at someone's site, right? And I'm like, okay, they're on pages on point. All right. Yeah. You look at like the links that they're starting to get here. You look at how many blogs they're posting. You look at the type of content is, and then you like look at the trend line in Google and you're like, because I had this one client, this was like a year ago, specifically. They're like, those guys don't worry about them. And I was just like, they're the only thing to worry about. I was like, I looked at all your other competitors and they're actually the only ones I'm worried about. And they're like, they haven't done anything for years. Well, but I go, well, whoever they got, like, like it hasn't happened yet, but I'm telling you in like three to six months, we're going to have a problem if we don't step it up. And, um, and it was just funny because that is actually what happened. Yeah. They popped to the top. Yeah. Yeah. So, so just know that this is a relative tool. You're looking at relative traffic from an SEO perspective, relative traffic from a PPC perspective. All right. Next, visit their website and set up alerts. Like this is just great advice. So head over to Google, search your competitor's domain. And

when you do look at the search engine result page and look at what their description is, right? If they're intentional about it, you want to be more concerned about them. If Google has just pulled some sort of description, uh, on its own, then they're potentially less of a concern, but you want to pay attention to their title tags, their meta descriptions. And inside of those, what tone do they use? Do they have a CTA in their meta description? What are their new features that they've released? How are they positioning themselves and other strategies that maybe you weren't aware of? Yeah. I mean, setting up the alerts, okay, is I think huge. Yeah. Uh, we do that for our current clients. And then what you just made me think of is I'm going to go tell the team is whoever the target competitors are that we're looking at against. Yeah. The account managers need to set up the alerts for those. So we're not doing that. And that I think is really great advice. And like, even I, I, you know, you described their newsletter or, um, their notifications because a competitive intelligence again with Google, it's a zero sum game. Like, it's like, it's not like everybody can win, you know, it's whoever provides the best answer to that question will win. And whoever gives the user the best experience, that's what Google is looking for. I mean, Google's unindexing blogs, Chris, like crazy right now because there, there's so much content being created. It's like not valuable, not valuable, not valuable. And so, uh, I think everyone has to step up their game. I think there's going to be this bifurcation of basically people that can continue to do the things that Google wants to do and the people that get left in the dust. Right now, Google is trying to offset that with like G and B. You can create a website and, you know, they're offering some kind of tools, but look, you got to have good hosting. Yeah. Your website's got

to load fast. Um, it's looking for these kinds of signals to make signals to make the decision. Uh, and, and what, and the decision it's making is, is this going to provide a good experience to the user? And does it answer the question? And what does the user do once they get there? Do they, what steps do they take? So CRO UX huge right now with the way the algorithms has changed. That is absolutely a pro tip of what I'm seeing in the data. That is where the dial has turned. And I mean, I am hearing some inklings of some other things, but that is where your attention should be. And that was actually said on a podcast where we interviewed somebody at Google. That's like, that took over from Matt Goetz. Gary. Gary Isles. Yeah. And basically, um, we're going to turn that into, uh, a downloadable kind of white paper. Oh yeah. Uh, all the data that he kind of laid out there is been coming to fruition over the last 10 months. So no surprise, no surprise. Um, you can, okay. To get a little bit of geeky, you can also use a tool. There's a website called built with, and you can look at the technology that's built. And, and often that'll tell them, Hey, what are the form they're using? Are they on WordPress? Uh, if they're e-commerce, maybe they're Shopify, maybe they're WooCommerce or big commerce or e-commerce. So you can get some perspective on what are the platforms that your competitors are using? Cause maybe there's some inherent value in that platform that you should consider for, for your business. Yeah. No, it helps you with the tech staff. Yeah. Um, it's nice to see it. How are, like, are they hosting? Are they serious about it? Um, there's a lot of great things with the built with tool as well. Yeah. That's something that, that we use in our audits. Yep. All right. So to set up the alerts for their brand, you want to set up

a Google alerts. Uh, this will give you an email whenever new results of the brand pop up. Um, and he gives it a warning that has been sporadic in recent years. Uh, I've had it running and it's been running fine for me. Uh, although I don't have any other tool that I'm using to kind of back check and say, Hey, there was a brand new mention that you didn't bring to my attention. There are some other listing tools out there that you can check out that go into a lot more detail on not just Google, uh, but social media mentions. And that is something to look out for because Google loves brands and people talk about brands and people share on just a new medium. I mean, Facebook is literally like the face-to-face referral now, right? Yeah. DM and people, Hey, check this out. And Google and Facebook made up and Google's indexing all that stuff. So, yeah, you can set that to show comments, right? In case anybody's commenting out there, right? So the next one, again, setting alerts on your brand is mention, um, this is a service. So I actually printed this before I got to this point. I think it's a service, uh, does a great job of monitoring brand mentions and comments and blog posts, right? So kind of more granular look at it. And they, they point out the authors point out that if you use Slack, you can actually set it up as a channel and it'll alert you every time the brand is mentioned. Now that's a pro tip. That's kind of cool. I would kind of recommend that you don't do that, or maybe you mute that channel because the last thing you need in this busy, hectic era of you getting emails and having to manage phone calls and tasks and, you know, uh, fellow employees is you need something to pop up on your screen and go, Hey, your competitor has been mentioned. Go spend 20 minutes looking at that. Yeah. So again, protect

your time. It depends what size of company you are. And if you have the capabilities to manage it, cause what I would even tell you is there's, there's a lot of things when you talk about comments on blogs on directions, I can go with that. And, uh, I'm not going to do that right now or I'll totally be real or her article completely. But I typically, depending on the size of the company, if it's just a local company, I recommend them to turn it off. Yeah. Cause there's some hacking concerns with it. There's some spamming concerns with it. Uh, really, I would even say, and you're talking about comments on like their WordPress side. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Like there's some security issues with it. What I would say is think about even with social media, what channels can you ultimately really be on and only be in a couple of places, but actually be there. Yeah. Right. And you can cross post stuff and all that, but that's just creates more work for you. So I think that that's a really good point. But if you're a bigger couple company, really web 2.0, where you can interact with people makes it like next level and tying that into Slack. There's a lot of people that use Slack as their kind of CRM or internal CRM with clients to be able to loop that in and tie that in and see it all in one place. Pretty awesome. So there's a lot of things you can do with system integration, web tools, uh, or web hooks. Um, pretty cool stuff. Yep. Very cool. Some pro tips there. Uh, all right. So next, this is number three of seven assess their SEO performance. I think this almost goes without saying, but analyzing your competitors SEO will help you understand how they draw people to their website through informative and relevant, relevant content. You can emulate their approach. Uh, you can look at the same keywords and have the same target, or you could also fill

in the gaps by covering territory where they're weak. So here's what to look for. And there's four things, uh, their most valuable organic content. See what gets them the most clicks, right? Their existing rankings. What areas do they have a strong presence? Maybe you're talking different, targeting different words. You're like, Oh, I didn't think of that phrase, or I didn't think of that word. Uh, cause as a synonym to the words that you are actually targeting. And what I will say to that is a lot of times, a lot of these tools will give you, uh, what is their paid media value, like the CPC value and, uh, really SEO is a methodology and, and it really works for any industry that there's a lot of search volume for, and you can harvest that demand. And what I would tell you is if you don't know anything about an industry, that's one of the things I love to look for is what's the commercial intent of that keyword. Like how much are people bidding on that keyword? How valuable is that keyword? And the market's so saturated right now that, well, it gives you a guide on, on, Hey, what to go after, what to go after. And then you can typically draw that line in tools like SpyFu where, um, you can see what they're actually doing on paid media. Like, so usually, um, also that paid media kind of feeds that loop of SEO, right? So it brings more people, the site, it generates more clicks. Those clicks help Google to get a better idea of how people interact that are searching for that term. And if that data is better than other data, it moves you up. So we've had that conversation actually a lot of does SEO and PPC, do they talk to each other? Does Google help? What does one side help the other side out? I think what the conclusion is that we came up with a couple of years ago is it doesn't indirectly help it out. Like

they're not talking internally. They're pretty siloed. Yeah. But because you're giving it more data to feed the beast, it then can, uh, decide on what happens a lot faster. So it's certainly a good idea to, uh, maybe, uh, feed a certain page, uh, some, some paid clicks to see how they interact. Yeah. And to see how, how the consumer or the visitor interacts with it. And there's something magical about paid, right? When we're working with a client, and I think this happened very recently with a pretty, pretty, pretty big client, which is when they realize they're paying for ads. Then they're more interested in results. That's still the case for a lot of clients. And, and really this is probably true more of the bigger clients that SEO is this kind of magic thing. And if you get first position placement, that's great. Um, but that doesn't often drive the customer or, or the, or, or, or the owner or the SEO or, um, to go, okay, now what's happening once the traffic arrives, but when you do paid ads and they're like, I paid how much for that, what's happening on that page? How do we make that dollar go farther? That's something magical. That's different than SEO. Cause SEO is frankly, a lot more work, uh, has a lot more value ultimately, but it is a lot more work and ultimately costs more. Uh, but there's something about paying for one at one click that causes people to, to want to optimize the page. I would say that I, I think over the longterm, the ROI I've seen on SEO is over anything, even email automation. And I've seen the return on SEO over, like you should look at it annually. Like one of the articles that I was thinking about doing was ROAS, right. And like, wait, how are you calculating your ROI? Um, but what, one of the biggest things that, that I will tell you, Chris is, um, bigger clients, um, don't really understand, not all of them. Some do

don't understand the difference between SEO and paid because a lot of times in conversations I'm having with them and they're like, no, we're, we're paying the money and we're, we're at the top of the rank and still works. Oh yeah. Right. They don't understand based on how. That's a paid ad. That's not an organic, yeah. Well, the thing about paid ads and, and here is what at least my experience has been is paid ads are typically, uh, people that are searching for coupons. They want to do it right. Or it's somebody that needs something for an emergency. Okay. Emergency plumber, emergency air conditioning, or like whatever emergency. I have a snake, like, like, like they don't care. They just need somebody there now to fix it. Yeah. Right. And if you're, if you're selling a product, that's a little bit more in depth, it's a little bit more, um, you know, on average, someone searches 50 times before they buy something. Wow. Okay. Like we, we have some data on, on basically how many times people click and the different types of searches that people do when they search for some of this stuff. I need to publish some of that, but basically, um, depending on the selection and also the platform they buy. So on Amazon, it's very different because people just look at the stars and read it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're thinking like Amazon, Amazon might have a different search, search model, like a customer journey there. But, but what I will tell you is, um, it just, it just, uh, people that click on ads are there's, there's, there's, there's an overlay with, with organic. Like, and I mean, do you click on both ads and organic? I, I, so I used to say that I would click on a pay per click ad if I was ready to buy something. Right. Cause I know that somebody's paying for it and they're ready to sell something. Yeah. I probably click less now just because I think people have

gotten better at SEO. So your target audience is there. Um, I, I'm going to have to pay attention a little bit more, but I, if, if, if, if you like pulled up my data and told me that I haven't clicked a paid ad in a year, I would, I wouldn't doubt that information. Like, I don't think I click paid ads ever and you and I are a little more aware than the average consumer and just everybody in our audience is more aware that, Hey, that's a paid ad. You know what? I would be surprised. Cause I'm sure I've clicked the competitors paid ad before. I was really thinking if you were a consumer, right. If you're looking as a consumer, I, I mean, the data says there's very few people that actually overlap. And one of the big things is the Google guaranteed ads, right. We're taking about 15% of the clicks at the top. It's a little blue check box, Google guaranteed. People don't know that those are ads. So they keep trying to disguise what is an ad. I mean, they would love to have the whole page ads, right? Like they, they test it out and they kind of throttle it back and forth, but certain people don't like ads. So they keep trying to disguise them. Now, what I can tell you, and this is another thing I should probably write down, but there's been times that I'm searching for something. I see it in the ad, but their SEO is so bad that I can't find it after. So you have to click the ad. So then I'm like, and I'll give it like a couple of seconds and I'm like, all right, I'm just clicking on the ad and, and I, and I do kind of read the offer. Then he sends him a proposal. I need to, right. But I think that, um, I think that people are getting more sophisticated with the search engines and they understand what these things are and they know how to navigate.

And so there are people that click ads, but there's also people that don't. And when we're talking to clients, like going back to just what I was originally saying, they don't always understand that there is a difference in that. And that the user who clicks a particular one is a, is a different kind of user. Like that's, I hope people that are listening because one, we're like back in the, uh, back in the office. This is cool. Yeah. I like, I like this and, um, I'm like learning myself of things that I need to do better. Yeah. Us talking. That's why we do this podcast. Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, so this has been great because I'm going like, there's things that send note to team, send note to team. Yeah. I even, you're watching this, right? Somebody transcribe this and send the appropriate notes in the appropriate direction. All right. So we were talking about four things to look for. The third one is their past rankings. Watch for growth and important changes. Cause you can see that. And we'll talk about that here in a second. And then also look at their backlink profile pages that link to them and help them rank. Um, yeah. So I was going to say something on this and I didn't realize we're already an hour and a half. We've already spent an hour and a half on this. It looks like we've already spent. There's no way. No, I know. It's crazy. When we're in person, it's like, I don't know. Uh, I'll tell you what, then that's, uh, is, are you sure that's right? Like, are you reading that? It says an hour and a half. That can't be right. Anyway. Okay. It, it, oh no. Cause we started it a lot longer and then we went live. Okay. Does that say it's been live for an hour and a half? I have no idea. All right. Well, we can, we can crank through this. We don't really, yeah. Let's finish it and we'll chop

it up. We need to. So the next thing to look at in terms of assessing SEO performance, top pages, pages versus top ranking pages. Uh, there's a couple of ways to do this. If you want to find your competitor's content that gets them the most click, then use the top pages feature on SpyFu. Uh, this will show you the pages that bring them the most traffic from the search engine result page. Right. And then how to find top pages, type a competitor's domain into the SpyFu search bar and select SEO research, navigate to the top pages tab. Right. And then how to find the top rank. So you've got top pages and top ranked, uh, type in competitor's domain into SpyFu. This is pretty easy. Uh, and then select the SEO research section, uh, choose the SEO keywords tab and change the dropdown to page one keywords. So those are only the keywords that are on page one. Uh, and then the results will list searches that include your competitors on the first page. Go ahead and click the reports, go ahead and get that down. And now you've got your reports on, uh, top pages and top, uh, keywords. So what I do want to say about this, cause I think it's super important is yes, you need to be on the top page, but also the top five and the top three and the top one are different, like drastically, dramatically different amounts of clicks. Yeah. So the top position in Google, the first position, not the first page, the first position gets the lion's share of the traffic. It gets about a third of all clicks for that search. Yep. Right. And then you go down from there and it, and so a lot of drops precipitously. Yeah. So like, if you, if you're like, I'm on the first page, but you're hanging out at the bottom, you're not done with the campaign. Yeah. Yeah. The campaign is just getting started. So we just brought on two new SEOs. Right. Okay. Uh,

actually we've brought on three, we've brought on analysts, we've brought on two SEOs. And so we have quite a big SEO team now, and I'm going through some of these fundamentals that we're sharing and we're encouraging them to listen to the podcast. And the crazy thing is two of the people on the call, and these are SEOs that have been around for a long time and they're good and they're technically strong. They're like, I never, I've never seen that data before. Like, so I showed them some studies and they're like, they were super engaged. Right. Right. It was, it was, it was very eyeopening. And so, um, I don't think that that information is disseminated out there and everybody says, Hey, you gotta be on the first page of Google, but, but it's really not first page. It's really maybe the first position on Google. You need to really be in the top three because you can't maybe guarantee first position of somebody, but, but you really need to get in that top three to move the needle or your campaign is not done. Yep. Right. So next is to check their past rankings, right? So use the ranking history to track their SEO performance and find notable events. Even if this is the case with SpyFu, right? Even if you have never searched that site before, you can check a website's past rankings pretty easily. SpyFu will show you any history that they have, even if you've personally never searched. So you don't need to set up a campaign and have it start tracking from the day you start the campaign. SpyFu has data, has large collection of data and will actually show you the history for it. That's really big because there are a lot of like keyword ranking tools that are great. They buy enterprise level data, but unless you put that keyword in there, you don't know what's going on. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You can't go back. So to be able to look back and to understand what's going on. And

also many times it's like there used to be back in the day, right? This company or that company that did awesome. Well, you can go back and see like what they did and, and try to recreate that. Now, you know, certainly in Google trends, things can change. User behavior can change, but sometimes they just, they just fall off their marketing. And I'll tell you specifically websites and companies that focus on their SEO. If I go back and look at them like a year later, like, so there's certain sites I keep track of or this or that. The ones that invest in SEO are ultimately overall always doing better than ones that don't. Yeah. Because those, those leads that come in that are just like, wake up in the morning, it's a little gift or it's a new client or it's a new purchase or whatever they add up so much. Yeah. Right. And so to have that wind at your back is incredible. Right. And everybody's like, Oh, I'll get all my business from referrals. And there are a couple of clients that I know specifically like lawyers and stuff like that, that they do. Yeah. Right. But they need to change their model and referrals, no matter how you get them or new clients, I think everybody loves them. And SEO is going to provide that additional marketing branding. I mean, it's going to, I think, I think SEO is going to just become a line item as, as executives over time, like truly understand, which I think we're there, but I keep running to, I keep running to clients that don't. Don't get, yeah. Aren't they? Yeah. I think we finished this one and we wrap up this podcast and pick it up next time. Right. Because I do think, uh, I don't want to go too long in the tooth on, on this particular podcast. Okay. Does that work? All right. So let's finish, kind of wrap this up. Um, they're back again, this is how you're analyzing their SEO. You want

to look at their backlink profile, uh, review their inbound links, finding your competitor's backlink profile gives you a two pronged benefit. So first you can reach out to the same authors and site owners that give them backlinks and you can reach out to them and try and get backlinks for them. And then second, it helps you learn how your competitors are perceived as an authority on particular topics. And that's, that's really important. You want to be the authority. So you, the more you can understand about their authority, the better you can adjust your authority and where you sit inside of it. How many more pages is there, Chris? I think. Oh, you know, it's pretty short. But here's what I'll tell you about backlinks though. Let's keep it quick. Okay. Let me see if I can get this in one sentence. One backlink could be worth 100 not so good backlinks. Yeah. Yeah. Or more. The right backlink is significantly more important than a ton of backlinks. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's, so it's not about quantity. It's about quality. Yeah. And, and really there's been two Google updates recently that have effectively gone after spam backlinks. So the higher quality Google's trying to also with authorship, with eat, with everything that they're trying to do, um, really understand who is saying what and who is like that links effectively a vote. Yeah. Right. So yeah, you want that vote. All right. So here we're going to track their ads. We just kind of tracked their SEO. Let's track their ads. You want to figure out where are they spending money? What's their copy? Like, do they purchase display ads? Um, use sites like what runs, where an ad beat to, to figure out where their display, your competitors display ads are running on other websites. So those are two tools I haven't, I have never, I'm look spy food, like at least for me was always really a paid tool. Right. And so I was really focused on paid traffic. Yeah. Yeah. And so they,

they know their stuff. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I, I would just tell you like, go check these out again, this, this podcast, I'm learning stuff here. Yeah. Um, I think that also copy too, Chris, we've done a lot of podcasts. You should go check them out about, uh, how important copy is, how important the headline is in itself. Yeah. And, and really, I don't think that people spend enough time on that, or even digital markers talk about how important copy is. Yeah. Right. They're just like, what are the ads? What are you bidding on? Where's it at? But man, you change that offer. I mean, remember, uh, remember that, that interview we do with Billy Jean and he was like, what do you want to do to get, you know, X amount change in results, change the offer by X percent. Yeah. Like, you know, you want to 500% change, give a 500% better offer. Yeah. And you know, and you'll make the change. So it's not just about getting in front of the people, but it's about what is it they're seeing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very sure. For sure. Uh, you get to learn about their ad words. So start with ad history where you can find your competitors, most trusted keywords at the top of the chart, and you can easily see where they invest their time and money. Um, don't leave the page without reviewing again, their ad copy, the copy that they run on their top keywords. It reviews their most dominant messaging, and maybe you need to make adjustments to your messaging based on what your biggest competitor is doing with their messaging. Yes. Yep. Run Google ads advisor report. Uh, this is an analysis of improvements they could make in their PPC campaign. And again, this goes back to the spot origin of spy food being in the paid area, any weaknesses like waste, wasted budget or, uh, weak terms or neglecting important keywords will stand out in this important, in this report and take advantage of those weaknesses

as you identify them. Um, all right. So number five, view their analytics data. And this is really, uh, the opportunity for the authors to dig into some other tools. Um, so one of them is compete. This can monitor your competition and compare their visitor and page view performance to your own similar web, see traffic by country and sites referrals. Their suggestions include similar sites to find new competitors. Quanticast or Quanticast actually learn deep details about audience demographics and interests. And then last buzz sumo, see your, your competitors, most shared content. I use that one. Most of them. Yeah. Yeah. It was like everything was, yeah, I, I feel like I got to get back on the text. I feel like I haven't learned, like I need to relearn a lot of stuff. There's a great, some great tools out there. Um, and we're, we're certainly doing a lot of paid stuff. What Chris was interesting, what we're doing with a lot of paid stuff is I felt like Google, uh, to a certain degree, maybe Google AdWords in particular got pretty saturated. And so we started to pivot to do a lot of other things on a number of other platforms. And we've seen some like awesome results, awesome success. And really, um, you know, I just expand your horizons. Yeah. That would be my, my big takeaway is expand your horizons. Well, you know, that, that, I think that's going to get into number seven. So we'll talk about that here in a second. You already ruined number six. I got to be honest, sign up for their newsletter by the, by ruin. I mean, gave the advice early. It is great advice, right? Sign up for their newsletter. Um, he, they even go into, why don't you become a customer, right? The onboarding process is the most at risk point for a customer. Uh, so go through their onboarding process. What, like how many emails do they send? How many phone calls do they have? What is their process like? If you sign

up for their newsletter, what is their messaging? What is their tone? Who is it clear that they're speaking to? Those are things again, you can learn. When I talk to the newsletter. Yeah. That's literally like, they all do that. Yeah. They're all like, they know exactly what their competitors are doing. They know how many emails, they know what it is that they say. And they're, they're looking at their onboarding process versus like what their key competitors are. I mean, that is, that is something that all of them do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and finally, I think this is a little bit different. I'm going to put a different spin on this. Again, this is researching their marketing strategy. Uh, the seventh one is conferences and trade show spying. So go to conferences and see what their booths like. What are they talking about at the conference? And I'm just going to say in general, go to conferences and trade shows so that you can further your knowledge in the industry. Yeah. Right. Like that's listen to the pod, like in the order, certainly because of convenience is one of the reasons. Listen to this podcast, right? Keep listening to the podcast. Uh, you'll get great information on the status of the industry, but for your particular industry, do go to conferences. Don't just go. Cause I got a booth and I might get a custom, a couple of customers go because you can stay on top of what's happening in your industry. And that is really valuable. Chris, I've gone to five conferences this year, this year, this year. Well, because you know, COVID, right? I'm just like, Hey, and you know, a couple of them are online. Okay. So two of them are online, but most of them were in person and it was, it was just great to be back and connect with people and hear talks and, uh, further your learning. I think that that's really the number one tip is invest in yourself, further your learning and all this data

that's available and all these great tools that are out there, you have to test them out and even set aside some time to kind of, Hey, I need, I need to go investigate some, some new things. Typically, like I read a book like in a weekend, cause I was like, there was something I specifically needed to learn. And I was like, I found the right books. I opened a book. I was like, this book is awesome. I read that whole book. And then I bought a bunch of books based off of that. Yeah. Based on base. No, from that, from that author. Yeah. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing stuff. So, so I can just tell you that, um, in the age of information. Anything you want to know is out there. Yeah. So often it's out there for free, like, yeah. Yeah. Or at the cost of a book. Well, I weren't giving everything away. It's right here. Yeah. Hey, Patif to Sidra and Patrick. We, what a great article, uh, go check out SpyFu. We're excited to have them as a sponsor. Go to spyfu.com. That's S P Y F U.com. Uh, not F U. Like don't take that the wrong way. SpyFu, uh, dot com. And, and Hey, if you get any value from our podcast, we're going to ask you to just do a small favor. Um, one is, well, let's start in the easy go to youtube.com forward slash best SEO podcast, subscribe and follow. Right. And, and, and click the notification bell. Yeah. I, I, I think the ass. Okay. You have it. This one. Instagram.com forward slash the, you have to have the word the in the Instagram account. I don't know. We all, I think we have best SEO podcast, but I don't know. It's law. It's yeah. But we're using right now. We're using the best SEO podcast. The best SEO podcast. So Instagram.com forward slash the best SEO podcast. Also check it out on Tik TOK. Like everyone's Tik TOK. Cool. Yeah.

We're cool. And hip, uh, Tik TOK.com forward slash the at symbol instead of the word the, we use the at, so that's what Tik TOK uses the at symbol, uh, best SEO podcast. And, um, yeah, the, the last thing, this is the bigger ask. If you're willing to, if you get value from this, share this with a couple of friends and go to EWR digital.com forward slash reviews. Uh, and that will take you directly to our Google, my business page where you could leave us a review and hopefully you make that review five stars. Oh, that was nice. No. So this is what I'll take. Tik TOK crushing it. Okay. We set this up like a month and a half ago. Cause I was like, I've been meaning to do it. I've been meaning to do it. I'm like, we're doing this. We already have like 700, 800 followers, a thousand something likes. And I think the view time of, of, uh, impressions or collective views. Yeah. Like I think the first post that we did was over 10,000 views. Okay. And, and I'm, I'm really like working on the algorithm cause it works a little bit differently. It kind of round robins with your friends and then you like shows them like the different stuff that they like. It runs it a little bit differently. And certain, uh, uh, shorts that we've done go viral. Yeah. Okay. Thousands of views. And then some of them don't do anything. And so we're, I'm really testing it out, but it's, it's super interesting and it's great little tips. If you don't have time to listen to an hour and 47 minute, I don't know if this podcast is actually going to be that, but that's what I'm seeing here. But if you don't have that kind of time, just get the little tips that we give you. We're, we're putting them out every week. If, if you want to jump on and listen to more about a specific topic, come listen to one of these podcasts.

And then if you want some consulting, we got bestseopodcast.com. We got great consulting and look, if you like what we're doing, please leave us a review. Like we, this is, this is really what we do this for is to hear, um, the reviews and how it's working for you. And, and we just want to know that you're liking what we're doing. Yeah. Right. So, so we appreciate it. Please tell us you like us. All right. Well, this wraps up the podcast until the next time. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.