Hi everyone. Dean Hawker here, president of Conversion SEO and welcome to another video geared towards businesses that want to maximize their online presence. Today, I want to talk about an element of your marketing plan that many businesses overlook, especially during the planning stages of their online marketing program, and that is analyzing your competition. It's really a very important factor that many businesses, I think, don't really take into consideration before they get started. The reason that it's important is because it really helps you define how much work needs to be done.

If you have a very competitive space, for the keywords that you want to go after and you really want to try and push some of your competitors down the results and elevate your position in those search results, you need to know how strong your competitors are. And it goes beyond just doing research and saying, "Oh, competitor  A is in first position. Competitor B is in second position". There's actually tools that we can use to really breakdown their strengths and their weaknesses and help devise a plan that is going to help you succeed quicker than if you didn't know those things in the first place. So what I want to do is just go through a couple of quick scenarios. I'm only going to go over four elements, a kind of a competitive analysis, to show you some of the things that we look at.
             
But consider, there's probably about another 10 to 12 things that we look at when we really start getting into the details of your competition. So, right now, basically, site one, site two, site three and I want to go over real quick, pages, links, aging and key word ID. As we go through these, when you think of yourself being a searcher, maybe ask yourself, which one of these sites would you prefer be presented to you versus the other ones? And I think as we walk through this you'll kind of see where I'm going with it. But, if we start off real quick and we look at pages overall, site one has 17 pages on their website total. Site two has 325 and site three has 1,200.
             
So obviously, the difference between site one and site three is quite a bit as far as what you're assuming your way is decent robust content. When we look at links. Site one has 300 links. Site two has 4,500 links pointing to the website. Site three has 7,000 links pointing to their website. Age of the domain. Site one is relatively brand-new, one year, let's say it's one year or less. Site two maybe it's five years old. Site three is three years old. And then keyword identity is really a big important one. So, maybe sight one is so new, it really hasn't even had the chance to see any keyword identity at all and so it's not being recognized for any keywords. Site two 10 words. Site three 20 words.
             
And what this basically refers to are the target keywords that you want to have identified with your website when people are doing searches. So, if we take an example of baseball cards. Someone searches baseball cards, if this site really is identified with the term 'baseball cards', then it's probably not going to show up in the search results. If it does, it may be pushed way down in the results on the second or third page or even beyond that. So if you think about which one of those sites you would want to have returned to you as a searcher, you're probably going to pick site two and/or site three.
             
What this actually does though is it gives us a baseline as to where we need to be. So if you want to be competing in this space, or especially this space, well, that means we have to find a way to make this number grow. It means we have to find a way to get this number to grow. This, you can't really do a whole lot with as far as the age of your domain but you can actually influence some search results a little bit by having your domain renewed further out.
             
So, instead of just renewing it for just the next year, maybe we have you renew it for the next three to five years. That sends a stronger signal that if you just have it renewed for one year. And then, of course, the big one is keyword identity. We need to find a way to start getting your website identified for keywords that you want to rank for. A lot of sites were ranked for keywords that are not industry or market related. So, for example, if there's a unique business name to the website, they almost always rank for that. But if you really want to get in front of the audience that you're trying to capture, this is the big one right here.
             
So, how do you actually get this done? Well, we have tools and we can take your top two competitors, analyze their websites and get this, plus other factors like trust and authority. We can look at the performance of three different sites or more. There are ways that we can lay out a nice analysis to take a look at how much work is going to need to be done and what's the smartest strategy. If I can see these keywords and these keywords, may be they're ranking for keywords that really you don't want to rank for and some other one we can find you to get you in this space ranked before other ones to show you sooner rather than later in top positions, to get in front of your audience.
             
So it's a really, really powerful and important exercise to go through and it's something I would encourage anybody to pursue at the very beginning of trying to figure out a marketing plan. If you've been doing online marketing for a while and you're not seeing the results, maybe this is part of the reason. Maybe you're up against a lot more than you actually think you are and you might have to be a little bit different strategies to get some of these numbers to pan out and they can look like they should. Please subscribe to the channel for more videos that are going to be upcoming. I'll probably dive into some more of these pieces here. Links, for example, is a very big topic to discuss. Feel free to drop a comment or question down below and I'll look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks.