Unfiltered: How to Show Up in Local Search Results

Posted by sherrybonelli

If you're having trouble getting your local business' website to show up in the Google local 3-pack or local search results in general, you're not alone. The first page of Google's search results seems to have gotten smaller over the years – the top and bottom of the page are often filled with ads, the local 7-pack was trimmed to a slim 3-pack, and online directories often take up the rest of page one. There is very little room for small local businesses to rank on the first page of Google.

To make matters worse, Google has a local "filter" that can strike a business, causing their listing to drop out of local search results for seemingly no reason – often, literally, overnight. Google's local filter has been around for a while, but it became more noticeable after the Possum algorithm update, which began filtering out even more businesses from local search results.

If you think about it, this filter is not much different than websites ranking organically in search results: In an ideal world, the best sites win the top spots. However, the Google filter can have a significantly negative impact on local businesses that often rely on showing up in local search results to get customers to their doors.

What causes a business to get filtered?

Just like the multitude of factors that go into ranking high organically, there are a variety of factors that go into ranking in the local 3-pack and the Local Finder.

Here are a few situations that might cause you to get filtered and what you can do if that happens.

Proximity matters

With mobile search becoming more and more popular, Google takes into consideration where the mobile searcher is physically located when they're performing a search. This means that local search results can also depend on where the business is physically located when the search is being done.

A few years ago, if your business wasn't located in the large city in your area, you were at a significant disadvantage. It was difficult to rank when someone searched for "business category + large city" – simply because your business wasn't physically located in the "large city." Things have changed slightly in your favor – which is great for all the businesses who have a physical address in the suburbs.

According to Ben Fisher, Co-Founder of SteadyDemand.com and a Google Top Contributor, "Proximity and Google My Business data play an important role in the Possum filter. Before the Hawk Update, this was exaggerated and now the radius has been greatly reduced." This means there's hope for you to show up in the local search results – even if your business isn't located in a big city.

Google My Business categories

When you're selecting a Google My Business category for your listing, select the most specific category that's appropriate for your business.

However, if you see a competitor is outranking you, find out what category they are using and select the same category for your business (but only if it makes sense.) Then look at all the other things they are doing online to increase their organic ranking and emulate and outdo them.

If your category selections don't work, it's possible you've selected too many categories. Too many categories can confuse Google to the point where it's not sure what your company's specialty is. Try deleting some of the less-specific categories and see if that helps you show up.

Your physical address

If you can help it, don't have the same physical address as your competitors. Yes, this means if you're located in an office building (or worse, a "virtual office" or a UPS Store address) and competing companies are also in your building, your listing may not show up in local search results.

When it comes to sharing an address with a competitor, Ben Fisher recommends, "Ensure that you do not have the same primary category as your competitor if you are in the same building. Their listing may have more trust by Google and you would have a higher chance of being filtered."

Also, many people think that simply adding a suite number to your address will differentiate your address enough from a competitor at the same location — it won't. This is one of the biggest myths in local SEO. According to Fisher, "Google doesn't factor in suite numbers."

Additionally, if competing businesses are located physically close to you, that, too, can impact whether you show up in local search results. So if you have a competitor a block or two down from your company, that can lead to one of you being filtered.

Practitioners

If you're a doctor, attorney, accountant or are in some other industry with multiple professionals working in the same office location, Google may filter out some of your practitioners' listings. Why? Google doesn't want one business dominating the first page of Google local search results. This means that all of the practitioners in your company are essentially competing with one another.

To offset this, each practitioner's Google My Business listing should have a different category (if possible) and should be directed to different URLs (either a page about the practitioner or a page about the specialty – they should not all point to the site's home page).

For instance, at a medical practice, one doctor could select the family practice category and another the pediatrician category. Ideally you would want to change those doctors' landing pages to reflect those categories, too:

Doctorsoffice.com/dr-mathew-family-practice
Doctorsoffice.com/dr-smith-pediatrician

Another thing you can do to differentiate the practitioners and help curtail being filtered is to have unique local phone numbers for each of them.

Evaluate what your competitors are doing right

If your listing is getting filtered out, look at the businesses that are being displayed and see what they're doing right on Google Maps, Google+, Google My Business, on-site, off-site, and in any other areas you can think of. If possible, do an SEO site audit on their site to see what they're doing right that perhaps you should do to overtake them in the rankings.

When you're evaluating your competition, make sure you focus on the signals that help sites rank organically. Do they have a better Google+ description? Is their GMB listing completely filled out but yours is missing some information? Do they have more 5-star reviews? Do they have more backlinks? What is their business category? Start doing what they're doing – only better.

In general Google wants to show the best businesses first. Compete toe-to-toe with the competitors that are ranking higher than you with the goal of eventually taking over their highly-coveted spot.

Other factors that can help you show up in local search results

As mentioned earlier, Google considers a variety of data points when it determines which local listings to display in search results and which ones to filter out. Here are a few other signals to pay attention to when optimizing for local search results:

Reviews

If everything else is equal, do you have more 5-star reviews than your competition? If so, you will probably show up in the local search results instead of your competitors. Google is one of the few review sites that encourages businesses to proactively ask customers to leave reviews. Take that as a clue to ask customers to give you great reviews not only on your Google My Business listing but also on third-party review sites like Facebook, Yelp, and others.

Posts

Are you interacting with your visitors by offering something special to those who see your business listing? Engaging with your potential customers by creating a Post lets Google know that you are paying attention and giving its users a special deal. Having more "transactions and interactions" with your potential customers is a good metric and can help you show up in local search results.

Google+

Despite what the critics say, Google+ is not dead. Whenever you make a Facebook or Twitter post, go ahead and post to Google+, too. Write semantic posts that are relevant to your business and relevant to your potential customers. Try to write Google+ posts that are approximately 300 words in length and be sure to keyword optimize the first 100 words of each post. You can often see some minor increases in rankings due to well-optimized Google+ posts, properly optimized Collections, and an engaged audience.

Here's one important thing to keep in mind: Google+ is not the place to post content just to try and rank higher in local search. (That's called spam and that is a no-no.) Ensure that any post you make to Google+ is valuable to your end-users.

Keep your Google My Business listing current

Adding photos, updating your business hours for holidays, utilizing the Q&A or booking features, etc. can help you show off in rankings. However, don't add content just to try and rank higher. (Your Google My Business listing is not the place for spammy content.) Make sure the content you add to your GMB listing is both timely and high-quality content. By updating/adding content, Google knows that your information is likely accurate and that your business is engaged. Speaking of which...

Be engaged

Interacting with your customers online is not only beneficial for customer relations, but it can also be a signal to Google that can positively impact your local search ranking results. David Mihm, founder of Tidings, feels that by 2020, the difference-making local ranking factor will be engagement.

(Source: The Difference-Making Local Ranking Factor of 2020)

According to Mihm, "Engagement is simply a much more accurate signal of the quality of local businesses than the traditional ranking factors of links, directory citations, and even reviews." This means you need to start preparing now and begin interacting with potential customers by using GMB's Q&A and booking features, instant messaging, Google+ posts, responding to Google and third-party reviews, ensure your website's phone number is "click-to-call" enabled, etc.

Consolidate any duplicate listings

Some business owners go overboard and create multiple Google My Business listings with the thought that more has to be better. This is one instance where having more can actually hurt you. If you discover that for whatever reason your business has more than one GMB listing, it's important that you properly consolidate your listings into one.

Other sources linking to your website

If verified data sources, like the Better Business Bureau, professional organizations and associations, chambers of commerce, online directories, etc. link to your website, that can have an impact on whether or not you show up on Google's radar. Make sure that your business is listed on as many high-quality and authoritative online directories as possible – and ensure that the information about your business – especially your company's Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) -- is consistent and accurate.

So there you have it! Hopefully you found some ideas on what to do if your listing is being filtered on Google local results.

What are some tips that you have for keeping your business "unfiltered"?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

source https://moz.com/blog/unfiltered-local-search-results

Congress grills Facebook, Twitter, Google on shells hiding election meddlers

 How can Internet giants know that innocent-seeming US companies aren’t actually shell vehicles for malicious foreign actors to buy ads to interfere with elections? The short answer is they can’t, and that drew questioning from a congressional probe today into Facebook, Twitter, and Google being used to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.. One member of the committee… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/31/election-inference-shell-companies/?ncid=rss

Real World Growth Hacking: A Guide to Getting Customers for the Unfunded

“1.2 million uniques in 18 months.”

Sounds impressive.

Looks amazing at first blush.

Until you start reading. Until you start listening.

And then you see it. Spot it from a mile away.

“Raised $XX million from Joe Schmo venture partners” in fine print towards the bottom. Like it was insignificant. Like it didn’t change anything.

Immediately you should see red flags. Instantly you should be put off.

It’s not just the money. It’s the access. It’s the network. It’s the one-line email to a friend of a friend that gets you in touch with every top media property on the ‘net.

I’m not hating. Neither should you. It’s just that the numbers and therefore, the article, become farce. Those “tips” they used. Those “hacks” they employed.

Writing “really great content” isn’t the reason they hit 1.2 million uniques in 18 months. Going from $zero to $millions overnight is. Going from from 10 beta users to 10,000 the next day is, too.

Talent starts listening. Prospects start buying. Journalists start taking notice. Instant credibility hits as a byproduct.

All of those things are great. If you can get them. But you can’t. Because you’re un-funded.

So here’s what you should be doing instead.

The biggest problem facing the unfunded

Raising money isn’t the end goal. It’s also the exception in most cases.

You wouldn’t get that from reading most tech sites. But in reality, out there in the real world, it’s true.

The problem is that if Paul Graham ain’t on your speed dial, you’re gonna need a second approach.

‘Cause the things that work in that tiny, miniscule, subsection of a market won’t work for you. Or me. Or most.

The context is completely different. Which means the strategies, tactics, and campaigns are, too. Or should be, at least.

Here’s an example to make this crystal clear.

Let’s go on a new trip. Pick anywhere at all. New York City sounds fun.

So what do you do first? You don’t go to “Hotel XYZ.” Not initially, anyway. Instead, you go to Expedia or TripAdvisor or Yelp or Hotels.com or Google Travel or wherever.

And what do you look at first, before price?

Names you recognize.

That’s because 59% of people buy from companies they recognize.

Image Source

Another study from a different source found the same exact findings.

“70% of US consumers look for a ‘known retailer’ when deciding what search result to click.”

Image Source

“Brand bias” is way out in front, before pricing for most people.

How about one more for the skeptics out there?

MarketingExperiments.com ran a simple conversion test. They did all the crap A/B tests you hear about on most sites.

They did the headlines the buttons the CTAs the colors and the rest of the junk “experts” say you should be doing.

TL;DR? None of that stuff moved the needle. Not significantly. Not permanently.

One test, however, did.

Except you’re probably not going to like the answer. Not if you’re unknown and unfunded, anyway.

Image Source

The test the moved the needle on subscriptions by 40%?

The freaking logo.

“There was no significant difference between any of the treatments. The Boston Globe audience is highly motivated, and putting a button above or below the fold didn’t matter as much as the newspaper’s respected journalism.”

That’s it. All it took was the brand name. Because it’s known. Because it’s respected. Because people can trust it.

Because it’s been established over the past century.

This is the part no one tells you online. This is your biggest problem.

It’s not Skyscrapers. It’s obscurity.

Funded companies (usually) get instant credibility. By association. If they don’t completely suck.

But you gotta get it any way you can get it.

The unfunded doesn’t. There’s no awareness. Which means there’s no trust. Which means nobody’s buying.

Social proof ain’t a gimmick. It’s validation. And you need it. So here’s how you go about getting it.

First, here’s what won’t work for you

All companies have constraints.

It’s time for the funded. They need to go big, fast, now.

It’s money and notoriety for the unfunded. Time? You should have loads of it. You don’t have many customers distracting you, right? https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-getting-customers/

Russian-backed content may have reached 126 million on Facebook

 Facebook has reportedly upped its estimate of how much content was produced by Russian-backed actors during the election and how widely that content was seen. According to prepared remarks due to be presented tomorrow but acquired by the Wall Street Journal today, the company estimates 80,000 pieces of content may have been viewed by a total of 126 million people. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/russian-backed-content-may-have-reached-126-million-on-facebook/?ncid=rss

People with chronic illnesses and disabilities get their own media channel with The Mighty

 There’s a corkboard in the office of The Mighty, the social network for people with chronic illnesses, mental health disorders and disabilities, which has pictures and letters from many of the site’s contributors and readers who have benefited from the stories the site shares. It’s there to remind staffers of the faces behind the work they do and the impact the site has. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/people-with-chronic-illnesses-and-disabilities-get-their-own-media-channel-with-the-mighty/?ncid=rss

Instagram injects 2X bigger Stories previews mid-feed

 Instagram Stories is doing so well, the app wants to ensure you don’t just scroll by its Snapchat clone. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it’s redesigned its mid-feed re-engagement box for Stories to show preview tiles of people’s slideshows that are twice as big as the Stories bar atop the feed. The box appears slotted between traditional permanent posts part way down… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/instagram-stories-previews/?ncid=rss

Timely and Relevant Is The Only Message That Matters

During the 2014 Grammy Awards, musician Pharrell Williams was seen wearing an unusual hat:

Image Source

Sure, he may have gotten some funny looks, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

That is, until a certain fast food chain seized the opportunity to craft a clever tweet:

Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs

— Arby's (@Arbys) January 27, 2014

This was a spectacular feat on several levels. Many brands had been unsuccessfully trying to capitalize on the Grammys, but Arby’s nailed it.

It was also a great use of Arby’s social media persona. The restaurant even gained a funny response from Pharrell himself:

Y'all tryna start a roast beef? https://blog.kissmetrics.com/timely-and-relevant/

Skype’s big redesign publicly launches to desktop users

 Earlier this year, Skype introduced a revamped version of its application offering a heavier focus on media sharing and social expression tools, in an effort to better compete with more modern social communication services, like Slack and even Snapchat. Today, the company is publicly launching the new version of Skype to the desktop, including on Mac, Windows 10 (November 2016 update and… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/30/skypes-big-redesign-publicly-launches-to-all-desktop-users/?ncid=rss

Why Single Opt-In? And an Update for Our EU Customers

Last Tuesday, we announced in an email to our customers that MailChimp is adding single opt-in as an option for email lists, and making it the default setting in new and existing lists starting October 31.

However, we’ve made an important change for MailChimp users located in the European Union: If your primary contact address is in the EU, your existing forms will remain double opt-in. You can change your lists to single opt-in on the Signup Preferences page at any time. After November 3, you’ll also be able to make that change in each list’s settings.

We made this decision after receiving a lot of feedback from EU customers who told us that single opt-in does not align with their business needs in light of the upcoming GDPR and other local requirements. We heard you, and we’re sorry that we caused confusion. Customers located in the EU will receive an email from us today to let them know how we’ve changed the plan.

Please know we are committed to helping our customers get ready for the GDPR. Double opt-in provides additional proof of consent, and we suggest you continue using double opt-in if your business will be subject to the GDPR.

For customers outside the EU, existing forms will still switch to single opt-in on October 31. You can switch back to double opt-in at any time through the Signup Preferences page or in each list’s settings. Going forward, all new lists can be set to double opt-in during the list creation process or in list settings.

Why single opt-in?

We know that some of you are curious about why we’re moving to single opt-in as a default, after having been double opt-in by default for so long. I’m happy to address that.

I run the Research team here at MailChimp, and every 6 weeks we go to a new city and interview small businesses. In those interviews, more and more business owners are bringing up double opt-in. What they’ve been saying is that double opt-in is not an easy journey for their customers. Some go so far as to say that double opt-in is “broken.”

At MailChimp, the idea of making something easy for a customer is core to who we are. When our customers expressed concerns that double opt-in was becoming increasingly ineffective, we decided to dig deeper.

What our data shows

Over the past 5 years, most email service providers have moved their email marketing from double opt-in to single opt-in. But that’s not why we’ve followed suit.

Rather, as the majority of companies have moved to single opt-in, recipients have become re-educated on how email marketing confirmation works. Today, most people don’t expect or look for a double opt-in confirmation message when they subscribe to a newsletter.

Indeed, we’ve seen double-opt in rates within MailChimp slip to 39%. This means 61% of people start but do not finish the double opt-in process.

Some of those email addresses may be misspellings, misdirected forum spam bots, or other problematic subscriptions. But after analysis by our own data scientists, we discovered that the overwhelming majority of those who don’t complete the double opt-in process are legitimate subscribers who no longer anticipate the confirmation message.

This shift in norms has led most of our customers to prefer single opt-in. But since MailChimp has only supported double opt-in in our native signup forms, the only choice for customers who wanted single opt-in has been a custom integration or third-party form. (Our API has supported single opt-in since 2009.) This new default doesn’t affect imports or API calls, which account for 98% of subscriptions entering our system today.

So while we’ll continue to support double opt-in, we’re shifting the behavior of native forms in MailChimp to default to single opt-in. We’re making this change now because we have stronger, more intelligent data-backed systems in place to prevent spam for all of our hosted forms—double and single opt-in—so we don’t expect this to impact deliverability.

Benefits to both

Many of our customers are excited about this change, but we’ve also heard from customers who have concerns about our decision to change the default setting on existing lists. We understand that it adds an extra step for those who want to remain double opt-in, but we wanted to simplify the process for the majority of customers who prefer single opt-in. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to keep double opt-in as well, and you can change your settings at any time.

Ultimately, you should decide which opt-in method is best for your business. Single opt-in helps you grow your list and give customers a fluid, user-friendly experience when they sign up for marketing emails. Double opt-in is great for customers who want that extra step to confirm email addresses have a valid, monitored inbox, and it can have a positive impact on open and click rates. Double opt-in can also be used to satisfy local regulations or meet recommended email marketing practices in areas of the world with differing requirements.

Learn more about both options in our Knowledge Base.

source https://blog.mailchimp.com/why-single-opt-in-and-an-update-for-our-eu-customers/

Why Snapchat Spectacles failed

 How come only 0.08% of Snapchat’s users bought its camera sunglasses? Hundreds of thousands of pairs of Spectacles sit rotting in warehouses after the company bungled the launch. Initial hype and lines for its roving, limited time only Snapbot vending machines led Snap to overestimate demand but underdeliver on quality and content. Massive piles of assembled and unassembled… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/why-snapchat-spectacles-failed/?ncid=rss

How I cured my tech fatigue by ditching feeds

 On paper, smartphones are amazing pieces of glass. They have magically cured boredom as we always have something to do — those endless feeds of content are a perpetual source of inspiration, information and amusement. And yet, feeds need to die because they distort our views and disconnect us from other human beings around us. Many people have deleted the Facebook app from their phone… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/28/how-i-cured-my-tech-fatigue-by-ditching-feeds/?ncid=rss

Senator Feinstein makes broad request for all ‘Russia-connected’ Twitter and Facebook user data

 The nature and extent of Russia or Russian-linked actors interfering with the election is yet to be determined, but it’s not for want of inquiries. Half of D.C. is looking into it in one way or another, and Senator Diane Feinstein is no exception. Today she sent letters to several parties involved, including Facebook and Twitter, asking for a variety of documents relating to her… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/senator-feinstein-makes-broad-request-for-all-russia-connected-twitter-and-facebook-user-data/?ncid=rss

How to Use the "Keywords by Site" Data in Tools (Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) to Improve Your Keyword Research and Targeting - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

One of the most helpful functions of modern-day SEO software is the idea of a "keyword universe," a database of tens of millions of keywords that you can tap into and discover what your site is ranking for. Rankings data like this can be powerful, and having that kind of power at your fingertips can be intimidating. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the concept of the "keyword universe" and shares his most useful tips to take advantage of this data in the most popular SEO tools.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the Keywords by Site feature that exists now in Moz's toolset — we just launched it this week — and SEMrush and Ahrefs, who have had it for a little while, and there are some other tools out there that also do it, so places like KeyCompete and SpyFu and others.

In SEO software, there are two types of rankings data:

A) Keywords you've specifically chosen to track over time

Basically, the way you can think of this is, in SEO software, there are two kinds of keyword rankings data. There are keywords that you have specifically selected or your marketing manager or your SEO has specifically selected to track over time. So I've said I want to track X, Y and Z. I want to see how they rank in Google's results, maybe in a particular location or a particular country. I want to see the position, and I want to see the change over time. Great, that's your set that you've constructed and built and chosen.

B) A keyword "universe" that gives wide coverage of tens of millions of keywords

But then there's what's called a keyword universe, an entire universe of keywords that's maintained by a tool provider. So SEMrush has their particular database, their universe of keywords for a bunch of different languages, and Ahrefs has their keyword universe of keywords that each of those two companies have selected. Moz now has its keyword universe, a universe of, I think in our case, about 40 million keywords in English in the US that we track every two weeks, so we'll basically get rankings updates. SEMrush tracks their keywords monthly. I think Ahrefs also does monthly.

Depending on the degree of change, you might care or not care about the various updates. Usually, for keywords you've specifically chosen, it's every week. But in these cases, because it's tens of millions or hundreds of millions of keywords, they're usually tracking them weekly or monthly.

So in this universe of keywords, you might only rank for some of them. It's not ones you've specifically selected. It's ones the tool provider has said, "Hey, this is a broad representation of all the keywords that we could find that have some real search volume that people might be interested in who's ranking in Google, and we're going track this giant database." So you might see some of these your site ranks for. In this case, seven of these keywords your site ranks for, four of them your competitors rank for, and two of them both you and your competitors rank for.

Remarkable data can be extracted from a "keyword universe"

There's a bunch of cool data, very, very cool data that can be extracted from a keyword universe. Most of these tools that I mentioned do this.

Number of ranking keywords over time

So they'll show you how many keywords a given site ranks for over time. So you can see, oh, Moz.com is growing its presence in the keyword universe, or it's shrinking. Maybe it's ranking for fewer keywords this month than it was last month, which might be a telltale sign of something going wrong or poorly.

Degree of rankings overlap

You can see the degree of overlap between several websites' keyword rankings. So, for example, I can see here that Moz and Search Engine Land overlap here with all these keywords. In fact, in the Keywords by Site tool inside Moz and in SEMrush, you can see what those numbers look like. I think Moz actually visualizes it with a Venn diagram. Here's Distilled.net. They're a smaller website. They have less content. So it's no surprise that they overlap with both. There's some overlap with all three. I could see keywords that all three of them rank for, and I could see ones that only Distilled.net ranks for.

Estimated traffic from organic search

You can also grab estimated traffic. So you would be able to extract out — Moz does not offer this, but SEMrush does — you could see, given a keyword list and ranking positions and an estimated volume and estimated click-through rate, you could say we're going to guess, we're going to estimate that this site gets this much traffic from search. You can see lots of folks doing this and showing, "Hey, it looks this site is growing its visits from search and this site is not." SISTRIX does this in Europe really nicely, and they have some great blog posts about it.

Most prominent sites for a given set of keywords

You can also extract out the most prominent sites given a set of keywords. So if you say, "Hey, here are a thousand keywords. Tell me who shows up most in this thousand-keyword set around the world of vegetarian recipes." The tool could extract out, "Okay, here's the small segment. Here's the galaxy of vegetarian recipe keywords in our giant keyword universe, and this is the set of sites that are most prominent in that particular vertical, in that little galaxy."

Recommended applications for SEOs and marketers

So some recommended applications, things that I think every SEO should probably be doing with this data. There are many, many more. I'm sure we can talk about them in the comments.

1. Identify important keywords by seeing what you rank for in the keyword universe

First and foremost, identify keywords that you probably should be tracking, that should be part of your reporting. It will make you look good, and it will also help you keep tabs on important keywords where if you lost rankings for them, you might cost yourself a lot of traffic.

Monthly granularity might not be good enough. You might want to say, "Hey, no, I want to track these keywords every week. I want to get reporting on them. I want to see which page is ranking. I want to see how I rank by geo. So I'm going to include them in my specific rank tracking features." You can do that in the Moz Keywords by Site, you'd go to Keyword Explorer, you'd select the root domain instead of the keyword, and you'd plug in your website, which maybe is Indie Hackers, a site that I've been reading a lot of lately and I like a lot.

You could see, "Oh, cool. I'm not tracking stock trading bot or ark servers, but those actually get some nice traffic. In this case, I'm ranking number 12. That's real close to page one. If I put in a little more effort on my ark servers page, maybe I could be on page one and I could be getting some of that sweet traffic, 4,000 to 6,000 searches a month. That's really significant." So great way to find additional keywords you should be adding to your tracking.

2. Discover potential keywords targets that your competitors rank for (but you don't)

Second, you can discover some new potential keyword targets when you're doing keyword research based on the queries your competition ranks for that you don't. So, in this case, I might plug in "First Round." First Round Capital has a great content play that they've been doing for many years. Indie Hackers might say, "Gosh, there's a lot of stuff that startups and tech founders are interested in that First Round writes about. Let me see what keywords they're ranking for that I'm not ranking for."

So you plug in those two to Moz's tool or other tools. You could see, "Aha, I'm right. Look at that. They're ranking for about 4,500 more keywords than I am." Then I could go get that full list, and I could sort it by volume and by difficulty. Then I could choose, okay, these keywords all look good, check, check, check. Add them to my list in Keyword Explorer or Excel or Google Docs if you're using those and go to work.

3. Explore keywords sets from large, content-focused media sites with similar audiences

Then the third one is you can explore keyword sets. I'm going to urge you to. I don't think this is something that many people do, but I think that it really should be, which is to look outside of your little galaxy of yourself and your competitors, direct competitors, to large content players that serve your audience.

So in this case, I might say, "Gosh, I'm Indie Hackers. I'm really competing maybe more directly with First Round. But you know what? HBR, Harvard Business Review, writes about a lot of stuff that my audience reads. I see people on Twitter that are in my audience share it a lot. I see people in our forums discussing it and linking out to their articles. Let me go see what they are doing in the content world."

In fact, when you look at the Venn diagram, which I just did in the Keywords by Site tool, I can see, "Oh my god, look there's almost no overlap, and there's this huge opportunity." So I might take HBR and I might click to see all their keywords and then start looking through and sort, again, probably by volume and maybe with a difficulty filter and say, "Which ones do I think I could create content around? Which ones do they have really old content that they haven't updated since 2010 or 2011?" Those types of content opportunities can be a golden chance for you to find an audience that is likely to be the right types of customers for your business. That's a pretty exciting thing.

So, in addition to these, there's a ton of other uses. I'm sure over the next few months we'll be talking more about them here on Whiteboard Friday and here on the Moz blog. But for now, I would love to hear your uses for tools like SEMrush and the Ahrefs keyword universe feature and Moz's keyword universe feature, which is called Keywords by Site. Hopefully, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

source https://moz.com/blog/improve-keyword-research-targeting

WhatsApp finally lets you recall messages you’ve sent by mistake

 WhatsApp has finally got your back when you send a message to the wrong person or group. The Facebook-owned messaging app is rolling out a feature that will finally let its 1 billion-plus users delete a message for all people within a conversation. Right now, the app’s delete feature is fairly useless as it only removes a message for the person who sent it. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/whatsapp-finally-recalling-messages/?ncid=rss

Facebook says its ad transparency features will go live next month

 In response to concerns that Russia used Facebook ads in an attempt to influence last year’s presidential election, the social network has said it will increase transparency by allowing anyone to see any ad run by any organization. Now it’s releasing a few more details about its plans, like the fact that the new transparency features are expected to go live next month. Once they… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/27/facebook-says-its-ad-transparency-features-will-go-live-next-month/?ncid=rss

How MailChimp Does Pride

Instagram Superzoom records dramatic close-up videos

 Instagram’s newest feature lets you make your own “Dramatic Chipmunk”-style video by shooting a stuttered zoom-in, including cinematic sound effects, with a single tap. Superzoom is coming to Instagram Stories on iOS and Android today, alongside an array of spooky Halloween stickers and augmented reality masks. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/instagram-superzoom/?ncid=rss

Facebook rolls out new tools for group admins, plus badges and profiles for members

 Facebook today introduced a good handful of new features for groups on Facebook, with a focus on helping admins better manage and grow their online communities, and helping members better connect with one another. The additions, inspired by user feedback, include support for welcome posts, badges, member profiles, and other admin-level controls. The company met this June with hundreds of… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/facebook-rolls-out-new-tools-for-group-admins-plus-badges-and-profiles-for-members/?ncid=rss

Instagram’s ‘Superzoom’ auto-records dramatic close-up videos

 Instagram’s newest feature lets you make your own “Dramatic Chipmunk”-style video by shooting a stuttered zoom-in, including cinematic sound effects, with a single tap. Superzoom is coming to Instagram Stories on iOS and Android today, alongside an array of spooky Halloween stickers and augmented reality masks. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/instagram-superzoom/?ncid=rss

Using Marketing Analytics to Win at Email Marketing

You might be part of the group of marketers that feel as though your email campaigns are missing something.

Only, you’re not sure what they’re missing.

You’ve reversed engineered your competitor’s email campaigns to see what they’re doing, but the truth of the matter is, you will never know the strategy behind their success because you don’t have access to their analytics.

So you end up in a cycle. You create emails, you write good copy and add relevant graphics, just like the guides tell you to, but you still don’t see the kind of results everyone talks about.

Email marketing is consistently one of the best marketing avenues to use.

So why aren’t you seeing the same results?

Many marketers make the mistake of not paying close enough attention to their email marketing analytics.

If you’re a marketer who isn’t using data to fuel and guide your email marketing campaigns, you’re leaving serious money on the table.

Data allows you to see what does and doesn’t work so you can optimize your emails to perform better.

It’s a tricky, but rewarding process and involves taking raw data and turning it into actionable insights to help improve your email marketing campaigns. Doing so will put you leagues above your competitors.

In this post, I’m going to explain the importance of using email marketing to improve the way you segment your emails, improve the email content you send out and create winning email marketing campaigns.

It doesn’t matter how brilliantly written your email marketing campaigns are, or how many well designed images they contain if you don’t see any results or can’t measure whether your efforts are helping you achieve your overarching goals.

Let’s dive in!

Choosing an email marketing vendor

Looking at the current landscape of email marketing and the software available is often overwhelming.

If you’ve already chosen, and are happy with your email marketing provider, move on to the next section.

If we look at the email marketing software market radar below, it’s clear to see there are a number of different vendors to choose from.

Choosing an email service provider largely depends on what you hope to achieve with your email marketing campaigns and what feature(s) you’re looking for.

Source: Email Marketing Market Research, Crozdesk

Taking into account vendor size and the strength of the solution may help you evaluate which vendor to choose from based on your business’ personal requirements.

For example, if you’re looking to send automated, triggered email messages, you might use a tool like Kissmetrics Campaigns or you might choose to use a provider like Sendgrid if you’re looking to just send email marketing newsletters.

The issue, though, is although your choice of vendor will have some say in the types of email marketing campaigns you can run, they only go so far with providing you an honest view of how your email marketing campaigns are performing and what you need to do to improve them.

If you are looking to improve your email marketing campaigns, you need to consider utilizing analytics to provide you with the core insight into how your current campaigns are performing against your preset goals.

Know Your Goals Before Choosing KPIs

Before you begin email marketing, think about what you hope to achieve from it.

You need to set goals.

Where most marketers go wrong is thinking their goals should be things like:

• Increase open rate
• Increase click-through-rate
• Reduce the number of people who unsubscribe

Although these are some good metrics to follow (more on that later) they’re not goals.

Your email marketing goals should align with your business goals. For example, you might choose to do email marketing in the hope of generating more leads, growing your subscriber base or converting more leads into customers.

Note: you can have more than one goal, but you’ll have to tailor each metric to each individual goal.

When you’ve chosen the goal of your email marketing campaign, it’s time to work out which metrics you should be using to track the progress of your goal.

Image Source

For example, 73% marketers identified click-through rate as being one of the most useful metrics for measuring email marketing performance.

But let’s think about that for a second.

Say you’re the email marketing manager at a SaaS company, you might want to increase your open and click through rate.

The problem is, open rate and click-through rates are known as process metrics. They indicate the order of events that occur from when an email is sent to when it reaches the subscriber. But they shouldn’t be goals in and of themselves.

Now if we reframe the situation and change our goal to: increase the number of free trial sign ups.

The reason isolating metrics is counter-productive is because it doesn’t give you the full picture.

Within your last campaign, suppose you increased your clickthrough rate. You might think that’s good, but the key question you need to answer is, did that increase the number of free trial signups? If the answer to that question is no, you need to work out why.

If it did increase the number of free trial sign-ups, can you correlate that to your click through rate. Now, you can see how things like changing your email subject can have a direct effect on your click through rate which in turn has a direct effect on your conversions.

The key is to not take each metric as an individual number, but to use these process metrics and incorporate them into your overall marketing strategy to increase your revenue, or whatever your end goal might be.

If your goal is to attract more visitors to your website you probably want to focus on growing your subscriber list. So this is the metric you need to be following.

But what if your goal is to increase the number of leads generated? If this is the case, you should be tracking how many leads you’re capturing each day/week/month.

Choosing the metrics to follow largely depends on what sort of business you’re running. A SaaS company might have different goals than an e-commerce company who also might have different goals to a non-profit.

Moving beyond basic data

If you want to win at email marketing, you need to think seriously about your analytics. There is a lot to track, so I’ve broken the core analytics down to focus on into three categories: basic, advanced and expert, with each getting harder to come by as you go up the scale.

Basic metrics

Basic metrics are easily accessible and are also known as behavior metrics. Most basic email service providers will give you some information around these metrics.

They include things like:

• How many people open your emails?
• How many people click your links?
• Which links get the most clicks?
• What’s the most common time people open your emails?
• How many people unsubscribe (on average) from each email you send?

You might already be looking at behavior metrics to improve your email marketing campaigns.

But you’re ruining your chances of developing a winning email marketing strategy if this is the only data you consider.

What’s the point in having 100% open rates if no one purchases? Something has obviously gone wrong and understanding analytics further will help you understand why and where it all went wrong.

An open case for advanced email metrics

The thing about the basic metrics like click through and open rates, they’re basic metrics and simplistic. In that whilst they tell you who opened the email and who clicked through, they don’t tell you much else.

Moving beyond these basic metrics, consider your click-to-open-rate.

This metric tells you how engaging your email content is. It helps you understand whether the content of your email resonates well with your specified target segment. Working out this metric will provide you with a percentage of your subscribers who opened your email and also clicked on a link. It helps give you a clearer idea of the entire story.

So if one of your goals is to create engaging content, your aim should be to increase this percentage. Your click-to-open rate gives you an indication of how your subscribers behaved when they opened your email.

It gives you a complete, holistic view of how your email content is performing. For example, you might have a low click-through rate, but you can still have a solid click-to-open-rate. If you judge your emails on just one metric, you won’t get the full picture.

When you create a Kissmetrics Campaign, you set a Conversion goal. If the users you sent these emails to convert, they’ll count in this converted list. So for example, if you send out an email to people about a sale, you can select your Conversion as “Purchase”. If they read your email, then go on to Purchase, they’ve converted.

Advanced metrics

The advanced metrics looks at the results of your campaigns. They help you answer things like:

• How many people actually purchased one of your products or services after clicking on your email?
• How much money do you make on average per email campaign sent?
• How much (on average) does each subscriber bring you in revenue?
• How many of your email subscribers convert into an actual lead?
• What is your email marketing ROI?

Expert metrics

Expert metrics are also referred to as experience analysis.

Experience analysis explains why your subscribers do what they do. Expert metrics are important because they show you what drives your subscribers decisions and the motivations behind the choices they make when they choose to engage or ignore your email.

Instead of just knowing how many of your emails within a specific campaign were opened, you’ll understand why they have a higher rate.

You’ll have a greater understanding why revenue is higher or lower at certain parts of the year, for example.

Now the issue is, for this area of analysis, you probably won’t be able to gather this data from your email provider. You’ll have to look further afield to get into your audience’s mind and understand exactly what makes them tick.

It’s no lie that understanding the behavior analysis is important, but it only goes so far. If you want real insight you need to know whether the people who are engaging with your emails are doing so because they’re bored on their train to work, or whether it’s because you framed your message right and they’re interested in doing business with you.

Using your data

Now that you’ve gathered the right data, it’s time to start listening and drawing the right conclusions.

When you have collated the right data from your email campaigns, you’ll be able to send better email marketing campaigns by first creating data driven customer personas.

You’ll now identify who to target, when and why you should target this person and send them content you know will be useful to them.

For a second, let’s think about our own email inbox. How many times per week do you receive irrelevant emails that seem as though they have nothing to do with you? How many times a week do you consider, or actually unsubscribe from email newsletters?

If everyone used their data to fuel their marketing campaigns, they’d have less people unsubscribing.

Using a tool like Kissmetrics Campaigns will enable you to send automated, triggered emails based on user’s previous behavior. The beauty of these email is that they’re not cold and they’re not unwanted because they’re based on previous behavior. These emails are in place to nudge the user towards something, whether that be purchasing, logging in, etc.

 

When you start to use the right tools to get the right data you’ll be able to:

Define and segment your audience

Who is your audience, and what sort of emails do they want to receive? When you’re defining your audience, let’s not forget about your original goals from the beginning.

In the example below, Pets At Home, a pet retailer, use the name of the pet within their email copy.

They also ascertain exactly what type of pet you have whether that be cat, dog, rabbit etc to ensure they only send you relevant targeted emails that you’re likely to open.

If you don’t segment your emails, you will end up sending general emails that attempt to appeal to everyone but end up appealing to no one.

It’s shocking to think there aren’t more more marketers segmenting their audience based on data because segmented emails generate 58% of all email revenue.

When you choose to segment your audience you improve the personalization of the emails you send.

You can segment your audience by demographic data such as:

• Age
• Income level
• Gender
• Occupation
• Marital status

But most importantly, if you want real success with your email marketing, look at how your audience is behaving and segment based on that in relation to your overall goals we spoke about before. You might consider things like customer type, spending history, adoption status etc.

Targeted, personalized content

Once you’ve segmented your audience, you’ll be able to send specific relevant content to different cohorts of people.

74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

Target messaging involves having an understanding of your audience and tailoring content and offers that speaks to them at the different stages of their journey with your brand.

In simple terms it means using the information about the audience within that segment to guide your message. If you’re a SaaS company and you have a segment of subscribers who have yet to try your software, sending them an email letting them know there’s another chance to get a free trial will obviously be more relevant than sending that email to someone who is already making great use of your software.

Email marketing shouldn’t happen in silos

Email marketing, as we’ve said, shouldn’t happen in isolation to your other marketing efforts, they should all be connected. Email marketing should be there to support your overarching, larger goals.

Often, your email audience will be prompted to visit your website after reading an email. It’s important to continue looking at the data once they land on your website to see if the whole cycle from email, to lead to conversion could be improved.

Use a heatmap tool like CrazyEgg to see where your visitors are clicking on and interacting with your page.

Doing so means the hard work from your email marketing isn’t lost by a poor landing page that doesn’t perform.

What’s more, if you’re already using Kissmetrics campaigns, you can use the platform to track website behavior too.

Having a tool that tracks both the way your audience are interacting with their emails and your website will give you a much clearer idea of what is and isn’t working. You’ll not only get to understand the behavior, but you’ll be able to see what they actually did on your site and see exactly who they are.

Testing and analyzing

Even after you’ve defined your overarching goal and the metrics you need to follow to achieve that, you should always be testing.

Because your email marketing campaigns are now data driven you will have a clearer idea of what elements you should test.

Focusing on the data will give you a clearer idea of what elements you should be testing.

If your goal is to increase landing page sign-ups, you might decide to track your open and click-through rates.

If you notice you have low open rates, but high click through rates, that should tell you that the content of your email is good, but you need to improve your subject like to encourage more of your subscribers to open your email.

Analyzing your results in this way will improve your email marketing campaigns.

It will give you a clearer idea whether or not you’re focussing on the right metrics and also whether the things you’re doing to improve your campaigns are actually working. </<br>
source https://blog.kissmetrics.com/win-at-email-marketing/

4 Ways to Capture an Audience for Your Holiday Marketing

Instagram’s “Superzoom” auto-records dramatic close-up videos

 Instagram’s newest feature lets you make your own “Dramatic Chipmunk”-style video by shooting a stuttered zoom-in including cinematic sound effects with a single tap. Superzoom is coming to Instagram Stories on iOS and Android today, alongside an array of spooky Halloween stickers and augmented reality masks. Superzoom joins Instagram’s Boomerang GIFs, Hyperlapse… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/instagram-superzoom/?ncid=rss

Twitter bans Russia Today and Sputnik from advertising on its service

 Twitter has banned Russian media companies Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik from advertising on its service after it found that both had “attempted to interfere with the [2016 U.S.] election on behalf of the Russian government” using the social network. “This decision was based on the retrospective work we’ve been doing around the 2016 U.S. election and the U.S.… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/twitter-bans-russia-today-and-sputnik-from-advertising-on-its-service/?ncid=rss

Twitter gets a surprise beat in Q3 on sales of $590M and EPS of $0.10

 Twitter reported its earnings this morning for Q3, and watchers of the company, used to seeing declines across the board, got an unexpected piece of news: the social media platform reported revenues of $590 million on adjusted earnings per share of $0.10. Total monthly active users for Q3 were 330 million, up 4 million from the prior quarter and an increase of 4% year-over-year. US MAUs grew… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/twitter-gets-a-surprise-beat-in-q3-on-sales-of-590m-and-eps-of-0-10/?ncid=rss

Facebook launches Marketplace for cars with dealers and Blue Book pricing

 Buy a car through Facebook, and the social network could earn a special place in your heart. So Facebook is creating a special section of Marketplace for vehicles. You’ll now be able to use new search filters to find a ride with a specific type, make, model, mileage, transmission, and more from both people and car dealerships like Edmunds, Cars.com, Auction123, CDK Global, and SocialDealer. Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/facebook-marketplace-cars/?ncid=rss

Facebook’s Workplace, now at 30,000 orgs, adds Chat desktop apps and group video chat

 It’s been once year since Workplace, Facebook’s social network designed specifically for businesses and other organizations, came out of beta to take on the likes of Slack, Atlassian, Microsoft and others in the world of enterprise collaboration. Now, with 30,000 organizations using Workplace across some 1 million groups (more than double the figures Facebook published April)… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/facebooks-workplace-now-at-30000-orgs-adds-chat-desktop-apps-and-group-video-chat/?ncid=rss

Bot-hunting Twitter bot sniffs out bogus political tweets

 If you’ve ever wondered if the hashtag heavy, politically far afield Twitter user you’re about to eviscerate in 140 characters is totally delusional or merely not quite sentient, well, wonder no more. On Wenesday, Quartz just launched a handy Twitter bot known as @probabot_ to sort so much automated chaff from Twitter’s proverbial fields of wheat. Probabot identifies… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/botometer-twitter-bot-hunting-probabot/?ncid=rss

Tonight is a new dating app optimized for real dates

 When Whim launched two years ago, it was based on a straightforward idea: What if a dating app was focused on enabling real dates, rather than chatting? Of course, plenty of actual dates happen as a result of Tinder and its imitators, but it can take a lot of awkward messaging to get there. Whim eliminates those preliminaries. Founder and CEO Eve Peters said the idea appealed to users, but… Read More

source https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/tonight-dating-app/?ncid=rss

How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO

Posted by John.Reinesch

Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. Far too often, I see organizations skip this important step and get right into keyword mapping, optimizing content, or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.

By the end of this analysis, you will understand who is winning organic visibility in the industry, what keywords are valuable, and which backlink strategies are working best, all of which can then be utilized to gain and grow your own site’s organic traffic.

Why competitive analysis is important

SEO competitive analysis is critical because it gives data about which tactics are working in the industry we are in and what we will need to do to start improving our keyword rankings. The insights gained from this analysis help us understand which tasks we should prioritize and it shapes the way we build out our campaigns. By seeing where our competitors are strongest and weakest, we can determine how difficult it will be to outperform them and the amount of resources that it will take to do so.

Identify your competitors

The first step in this process is determining who are the top four competitors that we want to use for this analysis. I like to use a mixture of direct business competitors (typically provided by my clients) and online search competitors, which can differ from whom a business identifies as their main competitors. Usually, this discrepancy is due to local business competitors versus those who are paying for online search ads. While your client may be concerned about the similar business down the street, their actual online competitor may be a business from a neighboring town or another state.

To find search competitors, I simply enter my own domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the “Organic Competitors” section, and click “View Full Report.”

The main metrics I use to help me choose competitors are common keywords and total traffic. Once I've chosen my competitors for analysis, I open up the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template to the “Audit Data” tab and fill in the names and URLs of my competitors in rows 2 and 3.

Use the Google Sheets Competitor Analysis Template

A clear, defined process is critical not only for getting repeated results, but to scale efforts as you start doing this for multiple clients. We created our Competitor Analysis Template so that we can follow a strategic process and focus more on analyzing the results rather than figuring out what to look for anew each time.

In the Google Sheets Template, I've provided you with the data points that we'll be collecting, the tools you'll need to do so, and then bucketed the metrics based on similar themes. The data we're trying to collect relates to SEO metrics like domain authority, how much traffic the competition is getting, which keywords are driving that traffic, and the depth of competitors’ backlink profiles. I have built in a few heatmaps for key metrics to help you visualize who's the strongest at a glance.

This template is meant to serve as a base that you can alter depending on your client’s specific needs and which metrics you feel are the most actionable or relevant.

Backlink gap analysis

A backlink gap analysis aims to tell us which websites are linking to our competitors, but not to us. This is vital data because it allows us to close the gap between our competitors’ backlink profiles and start boosting our own ranking authority by getting links from websites that already link to competitors. Websites that link to multiple competitors (especially when it is more than three competitors) have a much higher success rate for us when we start reaching out to them and creating content for guest posts.

In order to generate this report, you need to head over to the Moz Open Site Explorer tool and input the first competitor’s domain name. Next, click “Linking Domains” on the left side navigation and then click “Request CSV” to get the needed data.

Next, head to the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, select the “Backlink Import - Competitor 1” tab, and paste in the content of the CSV file. It should look like this:

Repeat this process for competitors 2–4 and then for your own website in the corresponding tabs marked in red.

Once you have all your data in the correct import tabs, the “Backlink Gap Analysis” report tab will populate. The result is a highly actionable report that shows where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, which ones they share in common, and which ones you don’t currently have.

It’s also a good practice to hide all of the “Import” tabs marked in red after you paste the data into them, so the final report has a cleaner look. To do this, just right-click on the tabs and select “Hide Sheet,” so the report only shows the tabs marked in blue and green.

For our clients, we typically gain a few backlinks at the beginning of an SEO campaign just from this data alone. It also serves as a long-term guide for link building in the months to come as getting links from high-authority sites takes time and resources. The main benefit is that we have a starting point full of low-hanging fruit from which to base our initial outreach.

Keyword gap analysis

Keyword gap analysis is the process of determining which keywords your competitors rank well for that your own website does not. From there, we reverse-engineer why the competition is ranking well and then look at how we can also rank for those keywords. Often, it could be reworking metadata, adjusting site architecture, revamping an existing piece of content, creating a brand-new piece of content specific to a theme of keywords, or building links to your content containing these desirable keywords.

To create this report, a similar process as the backlink gap analysis one is followed; only the data source changes. Go to SEMrush again and input your first competitor’s domain name. Then, click on the “Organic Research” positions report in the left-side navigation menu and click on "Export" on the right.

Once you download the CSV file, paste the content into the “Keyword Import - Competitor 1” tab and then repeat the process for competitors 2–4 and your own website.

The final report will now populate on the “Keyword Gap Analysis” tab marked in green. It should look like the one below:

This data gives us a starting point to build out complex keyword mapping strategy documents that set the tone for our client campaigns. Rather than just starting keyword research by guessing what we think is relevant, we have hundreds of keywords to start with that we know are relevant to the industry. Our keyword research process then aims to dive deeper into these topics to determine the type of content needed to rank well.

This report also helps drive our editorial calendar, since we often find keywords and topics where we need to create new content to compete with our competitors. We take this a step further during our content planning process, analyzing the content the competitors have created that is already ranking well and using that as a base to figure out how we can do it better. We try to take some of the best ideas from all of the competitors ranking well to then make a more complete resource on the topic.

Using key insights from the audit to drive your SEO strategy

It is critically important to not just create this report, but also to start taking action based on the data that you have collected. On the first tab of the spreadsheet template, we write in insights from our analysis and then use those insights to drive our campaign strategy.

Some examples of typical insights from this document would be the average number of referring domains that our competitors have and how that relates to our own backlink profile. If we are ahead of our competitors regarding backlinks, content creation might be the focal point of the campaign. If we are behind our competitors in regards to backlinks, we know that we need to start a link building campaign as soon as possible.

Another insight we gain is which competitors are most aggressive in PPC and which keywords they are bidding on. Often, the keywords that they are bidding on have high commercial intent and would be great keywords to target organically and provide a lift to our conversions.

Start implementing competitive analyses into your workflow

Competitive analyses for SEO are not something that should be overlooked when planning a digital marketing strategy. This process can help you strategically build unique and complex SEO campaigns based on readily available data and the demand of your market. This analysis will instantly put you ahead of competitors who are following cookie-cutter SEO programs and not diving deep into their industry. Start implementing this process as soon as you can and adjust it based on what is important to your own business or client’s business.

Don’t forget to make a copy of the spreadsheet template here:

Get the Competitive Analysis Template

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

source https://moz.com/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo