SMX London: Ranking Factors in 2010
Written on May 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
Posted by randfish
Somehow, my flight from Seattle landed just before the newest Icelandic ash cloud began shutting down airports across UK
Posts Tagged a-much-more
A Review of Spy Tools
Written on March 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
There are quite a few spy tools on the market currently, some more heavily promoted than others. They come in a variety of flavors such as SEO spy tools, PPC spy tools, and some which do both.
Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also, these tools occasionally come up with in-house metrics (of which they really don’t give you much useful info about how they arrived at the data the present from these “proprietary” metrics”) to help try and differentiate their offerings from their competition.
Spy Tool Reviews
There is a much more in-depth review, with examples, up in our members forum. Here, we will do overviews of some of the more popular tools on the market. Specifically, we will be taking a look at:
Value of Spy Tools
The idea that you are missing out on something is a core marketing tactic so even if you are comfortable with one tool chances are you’ve been tempted to go with another. Keep in mind, from a cost standpoint, the ROI you would take by just finding a few decent keywords to target will likely far outweigh any cost associated with these tools. Your business probably won’t collapse if you pick an A minus tool versus an A plus tool and none of these tools are able to make concrete decisions for you. What these tools provide are additional data points for you to consider in your own research.
We hope you’ll find these reviews useful. There are perhaps a few other services we missed given how many of these tools as there are and our primary focus on SEO. If these reviews are well received we could also review everything from Quantcast & Alexa right on through to AdGooroo, but we need to know if you would be interested in those types of reviews. If there are any other cool products or services you would like us to review just let us know.
A few disclaimers: some of these services have given us free review accounts, whereas we have paid for some of the others. And some of these tools offer affiliate programs, but all reviews were done without those 2 factors influencing the editorial. Most these reviews do not have affiliate links in them (I think SEM Rush is the only one which does have an affiliate link right now), and Aaron reviewed SEM Rush before they even had a public affiliate program.
Already an SEO Book subscriber?
- We license SEM Rush’s SEO data for our competitive research tool.
- The second post in this thread has some killer member’s only tips for getting the most out of competitive research tools.
- This thread is also awesome, and these three threads really shows how to use these tools in a way that really kicks arse.
If you can’t make $1,000’s from reading those threads then you certainly are not a professional grade SEO. 
Here is the original:
A Review of Spy Tools
Compete.com Review
Written on March 20, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo
Compete takes pricing to a different level but has some unique features as well. They have a few different pricing levels but to get all the features you need to dial it up at $499 per month. Although, some of their lower price points may provide good value depending on what you might use them for.
Compete Site Profiles
Here is how compete gets their data.
Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay
It’s kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:
- Unique Visitors
- Page Views
- Average Stay
- Demographic Info
- Link through’s to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)
Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.
The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it’s info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.
Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed…also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:
You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section
Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it’s pretty much industry wide).
Analytics Tools
Compete’s second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.
Referral Analytics
This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site’s SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.
It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)
In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.
Ranked Lists
Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps
Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)
- Step 1 - unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
- Step 2 - site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
- Step 3 - top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains
Search Analytics
Compete’s Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:
- Highly Engaging Keywords - Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
- High Traffic Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
- Paid Keywords
- Natural Keywords
- Engaging Long Tail Keywords - Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
- Enthusiast Keywords - Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
- Long Tail Keywords
- Total Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from…that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
- Average Time Index - scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.
You can also compare 2 sites like so:
In Closing
The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who “compete” in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.
Read the original:
Compete.com Review
Differential Diagnosis #3: Mysterious Rankings in Google & Bing
Written on June 4, 2009 by admin
Posted by randfish It’s been a long time since we had a differential diagnosis post here on SEOmoz, but we’ve been getting lots of comments and emails requesting some mysteries, so here goes: #1 - Who, Exactly, is Awesome, and Why? I agree with the sentiment of the second result, Google is an awesome product, but this ranking is very bizarre given the content and links pointing to this page/site.
Here is the original:
Differential Diagnosis #3: Mysterious Rankings in Google & Bing
Tags: a-long-time- ,a-much-more ,cheap ,google ,hash ,mysteries ,page ,post ,relevancy-issue ,search ,sentiment ,seo
