CHAPTER 3

Smart Marketing Requires Intelligence: Research, Audit, and Listen

Long before an army goes into battle, intelligence organizations are busy collecting and analyzing information about the opposing threat. The right information and insight could lead to a much more advantageous outcome. Inaccurate information or an absence of competitive research can lead to disaster.

In the competitive world of content marketing, search, and social media optimization, it’s essential for companies of all sizes and industries to understand their online marketplace in order to gain a business advantage and develop a competitive strategy. This chapter covers several key areas of assessment, including the search and social landscape and website SEO readiness.

The approach to competitive search and social media research can vary widely by situation, but it’s essentially always going to involve some kind of information capture, assessment, and comparison. A new business entering a competitive market with companies that have mature Internet marketing programs may need to uncover key weaknesses in their competitors’ marketing efforts in order to compete “David and Goliath” style. In a situation with companies that have very similar levels of Internet marketing resources and effort, competitive research may uncover weaknesses or unrealized opportunities that can create advantage. In all cases, an understanding of the competitive search and social media landscape will help content marketers differentiate to better attract and engage with customers.

In my many years of online marketing experience, I’ve seen a wide variety of companies enter the web marketing space with different ideas about what’s possible as well as different levels of understanding about what or who their competition really is. For example, one entrepreneur in the self-help area of memory and IQ improvement offering online puzzles as content wanted an SEO program that would help achieve top visibility on Google for the term “brain.” With a new website and nearly 700 million competing search results for the search term, a first-glance evaluation indicated the desired outcome to be unlikely with any reasonable budget and time frame. Further competitive research into the search landscape did not reveal the list of online puzzle and learning websites considered by the entrepreneur to be competitors, but rather a mix of Wikipedia, university (Harvard), industry publication, and resource websites with large numbers of web pages and a long history of search relevance for the topic. In the search and social media marketing world, the competition isn’t always who you think. Companies need to understand that online competition isn’t just made up of companies competing for market share in the business world, but also information and content published from a variety of sources that compete for search engine and social media users’ attention.

In the case of the “brain” customer, thoughtful analysis of the search and social media landscape revealed popular forums and social networking groups focused on topics related to what the target website visitor would find useful. A more diverse yet more relevant keyword mix related to puzzles proved to be more attainable and, more important, a better reflection of the interests among the target community. A larger group of keyword targets promoted through the optimization of content and social media channels resulted in the entrepreneur’s website reaching more than 300,000 unique visitors per month and a decision to change the business model to advertising over product sales because of the volume of traffic. Had the entrepreneur focused only on the term “brain” without conducting competitive and marketplace research, the company might still be selling just a few learning games and puzzles per month instead of having a thriving website supported by an active social community and strong search engine traffic.

BUSINESS AND CONTENT COMPETITORS IN SEARCH RESULTS

There are many preconceived notions about what can be achieved with a good SEO program, and before companies allocate substantial resources, there should be an effort to understand the competitive landscape. With search engines, the competition can come in several forms, including search results, advertisements, social recommendations, digital assets, and links. Essentially, competition is anything that takes the attention of your prospects and customers away from your content. (See Figure 3.1.)

FIGURE 3.1 Competitors Appearing in Organic Search Results

For the purpose of this book and its emphasis on content marketing, I discuss two approaches to competitive research with regard to search results. The first is based on the results pages for the keyword mix that you’re after. Search engine results pages (SERPs) help answer the question about which business competitors and what types of content competition show up on the first page for the keyword phrases that you’re targeting. This is an ongoing task performed monthly to identify trends or variances.

The other approach is to monitor the search visibility of real-world competitors. With brick-and-mortar businesses, offline competitors are often quite different than online competitors who rank well for target keyword phrases. It can be useful to track offline competitors regardless of their position to see if they catch on to the value of SEO and experience a jump in search visibility. Of course, for an Internet-based business, all competitors are online. A useful tool for monitoring competitor organic keyword visibility on Google is SEMRush.

Monitoring the search results real estate for your brand, products, and services starts with keywords. If you have an idea of the most relevant phrases that represent your products and services mix, test queries on a search engine like Google or Bing to reveal some of your online competitors. We get a lot deeper into keyword research in Chapter 7, but for your preliminary efforts, a category-level understanding of keyword competitors within search will be a useful starting point. A tool like Google AdWords Keyword tool can help clarify whether your assumptions about keyword phrases are on target in terms of popularity and competitiveness. Once you identify a hit list of keyword phrases, review the search results pages on Google or Bing while you’re not logged in to identify what types of business and content competitors appear. If you are logged in to Gmail, Google Analytics, Google+, or any other service from Google, the search results you see can be significantly different because of personalization from your web history and friends’ Google+ shares.

Periodically revisit the search results for your most important keyword phrases, and document rankings as well as the makeup of content in the search results. (See Figure 3.2.) As you look at the different types of content in each search position over time, you may notice trends that reveal new opportunities.

FIGURE 3.2 Different Content Types Appearing in Organic Search Results

For example, a trending story may cause news or blog results to appear high on the page, which might prompt you to comment on a high-ranking story or reach out to a journalist or blogger to offer your point of view. There’s a great book you can download on Kindle called Newsjacking (by David Meerman Scott) that explores this practice in depth. Here’s another example: When you notice that the search engine tends to favor certain media, such as video content, for one of your target keyword phrases, it may prompt you to focus on video content and optimization for a particular target keyword phrase with the intention of leveraging the perceived bias toward that type of media.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing search result fluctuations for the same keyword phrase tracked over time do occur, with content types ranging from web pages to images to video. For both competitive research and opportunistic reasons, it makes sense to monitor the content mix of search results pages over time. There are also changes with how search engines display information that warrant attention to SERPs. For example. Google used to offer “real-time” search results on some queries with information syndicated from social media sites like Twitter. After launching Google+, and the lack of continued relationship with Twitter, Google stopped displaying those real-time search results, meaning it was no longer possible to use Twitter to gain near-instant search visibility on certain keyword phrases.

Monitoring the makeup of search results for keyword phrases that are relevant and in use by customers will help keep you apprised of overall search results competition as well as changes made by search engines in how they represent web content from their indexes.

Keep in mind, there’s no getting around personalization if you’re logged in to a search engine, and even if you’re not logged in, search results can be personalized by your geographic location. Despite that, a relative measure over time of the search results pages that represent your most important topics can be beneficial for understanding both your business and content competition. Tracking what you’re up against will help guide the right keyword, content planning, and optimization approach.

RESEARCH THE SOCIAL LANDSCAPE

Customers are increasingly influenced by a combination of search and social media content. A study cited by eMarketer indicated that 48 percent of consumers are led to make a purchase through a combination of search and social media influences.1 Understanding where conversations are happening on the social web relevant to the competition, your brand, products, and services as well as topics related to your customers, employees, and industry can help guide your social media strategy for content and engagement. (See Figure 3.3.)

FIGURE 3.3 Radian6 Social Media Monitoring

There are a number of benefits for monitoring competitors on the social web, according to David Alston, CMO at Radian6, a salesforce.com company:2

If you are watching your industry and the keywords used to describe it you will probably be the first to know when a new competitor appears on the scene. From a competitive intelligence perspective you may also wish to be alerted any time a competitor’s name is used. Knowing this may highlight opportunities to reach out to potential customers who have indicated they are trialing a competitor or dissatisfied with a competitor’s product or service. You may also discover which industry players are advocates for competitive brands giving you the opportunity to reach out and see if they are interested in knowing more about what you have to offer. Competitors will also often talk about subjects they are strategically interested in and being able to stay on top of those discussions allows you to anticipate potential future moves.

For the purpose of basic social media research, there are a few useful free social search tools (e.g., socialmention.com, search.twitter.com, or topsy.com) that can reveal useful information about topics of interest to your social media–savvy audience and about your competition. Twitter alone is very useful for mining information about sales and customer service opportunities, plus a whole host of other types of dialog and inquiry that are relevant to why your business communicates online ranging from competitive research to recruiting new employees.

There are a wide array of social media monitoring tools that can help identify threads of discussion that are relevant to your content and online marketing efforts. Basic tools like Andy Beal’s Trackur provide a good starting point for organized, qualitative social media monitoring that also offers more advanced options as your needs expand. Other effective social media monitoring tools that vary in advanced features and price points include Alterian SM2, Lithium, and Radian6 from salesforce.com.

Once you decide on a measurement tool, the next step is to set up monitoring. Social media listening tools are keyword-based, so it’s important to get a good handle on the unique throttling and filtering capabilities of the listening tool you’re using to fine-tune the quality of social search results. Without using features like negative keywords, segmenting which channels to listen to and adjusting the degree of influence on different types of signals, you may end up getting a report full of blog spam instead of good sample representative of real discussions about relevant topics on the social web.

Some of the key insights that come from initial social listening and research include answers to the following questions:

• Is your category of product or service or your industry being discussed? What questions do people have? What are their concerns? What opportunities are being revealed?
• Is your brand being discussed, and what are people saying? Who is saying it, and where? What is the sentiment?
• What topics relevant to your specific business solutions are being discussed?
• Are any rogue employees publishing blogs or other social content without sanction or support from corporate marketing and public relations departments?
• On which social channels or websites are there active discussions and communities of interest relevant to your customer interests?
• Who are the influencers participating in key topic discussions and in what channels?
• Are your competitors’ companies, products, and services being discussed, and where?
• Are your competitors active participants on the social web with content? What type of content?

After you’ve completed your initial monitoring to identify a baseline for conversations about social topics, competitors, and your brand and products, it’s time to establish some ongoing monitoring of those conversations. Any of the tools just mentioned can help you perform this task. The important thing is to start with something fundamental, such as industry, brand, and competitor topics. Then grow the array of monitoring efforts according to your needs. Companies usually experiment with social media monitoring themselves, since there are a good number of tools that are easy to use. As social media monitoring needs grow, outside or dedicated resources are usually allocated in order to scale efforts beyond initial marketing objectives. Some companies add social media listening responsibilities to the duties of a social media strategist; others expand social listening into a full-team effort, complete with social media listening command centers (e.g., companies like Dell and Gatorade).3,4

One point of opportunity with search keywords and social media topics is to create a fixed and dynamic keyword list to determine whether any of the popular and relevant search phrases overlap with the social topics being discussed on social media websites. We dig more deeply into what you can do with that keyword insight in Chapters 7 to 11, but being able to find search keywords and social topics that overlap can be powerful guides for an optimized and socialized content marketing strategy. Content relevant for high search visibility that also caters to popular social topics can encourage social sharing, which in turn creates signals that reinforce better search visibility.

TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT OF YOUR WEBSITE

Now it’s time for the direction of our research to turn inward. There’s more to this piece of the content marketing puzzle than marketplace and competitor research, including insight that could provide essential information for a website that is optimized for keywords and search engines as much as it’s optimized for customers. Content marketing is a central theme to this book, but without visibility where customers and other target audiences are looking, search engines in particular, content efforts can fall flat or not reach their full potential. What can you do for significant improvement of your content search visibility? The answer to that question starts with a technical SEO audit.

Search engine optimization is a bit of a moving target involving a mix of influences. According to Google Webmaster Central, more than 200 variables are used when ranking web content.5 The famous PageRank is just one of them. Google’s Inside Search website states that it has anywhere between 50 and 200 versions of its core algorithm in the wild, so the notion of SEO professionals reverse-engineering Google’s method of ranking web pages with universal predictability are gone.6 However, what we can do is understand Google’s and Bing’s motivation for search quality and the emphasis on providing relevant answers fast. Search engines’ algorithmic efforts are meant to produce not only the right information for searchers, but also the best user experience. Understanding how those motivations and the technical nature of search engines work is what helps content marketers plan, optimize, and promote content that is relevant for both search engines and customers.

Best-practices search engine optimization involves a mix of attention to keywords, content, links, social signals, and, increasingly, factors like page speed, the use of semantic markup, and author authority. When I’m asked for the one SEO tactic I’d always start with first or that I would recommend above all others, it would be a technical SEO audit. If a search engine can’t make a copy of your website to show in the search results, then your site may as well not exist when it comes to expecting traffic from search engines. No pages in the search index would be like showing up to play a baseball game without a team. Ensuring the ability for a search engine to crawl and index a website is, in large part, the focus for technical SEO.

What is a technical SEO audit? There’s no standard definition commonly accepted by SEO professionals, but essentially, a technical SEO audit is an evaluation of a website as it interacts with search engine spiders or bots. Search engines get the information you see in the search results by operating software programs called bots, which follow links from page to page on the web, capturing content as they go. The content that search engine bots copy is organized into an index from which the search results process occurs. Okay, that’s a simplification, but you should understand that search engines have to be able to copy your website content in order for it to appear in the search results. If there are difficulties or even inefficiencies with the process of a search engine bot doing its job, then it can mean web pages are not crawled and thus not included in the index or search results.

A technical SEO audit is one of several SEO audits typically conducted to determine the SEO readiness and effectiveness of a website. Research into keywords, content and on-page factors, links, and social signals, when combined with a technical SEO audit, provide a complete view of the opportunities for search engine success.

One mechanism for communicating ongoing technical SEO performance based on an audit is an SEO Scorecard. Scorecard reports are data rich or simplified according to who will be reading and using them in the organization. (See Figure 3.4. for a high-level SEO scorecard.)

FIGURE 3.4 SEO Audit Scorecard

There are plenty of books, blogs, and resources online focused on technical SEO and even information retrieval if you want to really dig into the topic. Ten years ago, Mike Grehan of Incisive Media wrote the first great book on SEO and how search engines work: Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide. While there have been a near infinite number of changes since then, the book is still very relevant today. Two of the most useful resources are actually direct from the search engines themselves: Google’s Webmaster Central and Bing’s Webmaster Tools.7, 8

If you’re a content marketing professional or a social media strategist, chances are pretty good that you won’t be conducting a technical SEO audit yourself. However, there are some tools that can be quite helpful, such as those for doing research on keywords and links to the website in question. It’s important to note that a tool’s effectiveness is directly related to the abilities of the user, so it’s important to have someone with experience and skills perform your technical SEO audit. Here are some of the tasks and tools that such an audit might include:

• Review current website search traffic and performance with Google Analytics or another analytics tool.
• Track inbound links with Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer.
• Check the speed of pages with Google Page Speed Online.
• Review the content management system, templates, and source code.
• Check for duplicate, thin, or poor-quality content.
• Overview site SEO readiness from Alexa Site Audit.
• Document the site URL structure and map with Xenu Link Sleuth.
• Assess basic crawl issues with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Document keyword ranking with Advanced Web Ranking or Raven Tools (good for relative measures).

Collecting these pieces of information and conducting an analysis of the website from the perspective of how a search engine sees the content will help generate recommendations to improve the website’s ability to attract organic search traffic. Current link, social, and search engine traffic analysis can reveal areas of opportunity for improvement as well as things that should be scaled up.

Links are like electricity for websites and are used by search engines to discover content as well as a factor in sorting or ranking content in search results. Evaluating link sources of your competitors that are already performing well in search can reveal new linking opportunities. That same link research can also show the quantity and quality of current links to your website, which serves as a baseline for where and how to improve.

The faster your pages load, the better the user experience for customers. It also means that Googlebot can crawl your website faster, and if you look at the billions of documents Google has to crawl, faster means more efficient for Google. That’s why page speed has been made a signal to help determine page ranking.

Content management systems can be a source of many types of issues with a website’s SEO performance. Templates that publish content from a database can be an SEO’s friend or its worst nightmare depending on the ability to make changes. For example, dynamically populating title tags using reverse breadcrumb navigation can provide a strong, search-friendly feature to an entire website with a relatively small change to the templates and database. But if those changes aren’t possible, a website could be stuck with a situation like uneditable title tags or the need to manually edit thousands of page titles.

Google has a preference for unique quality content, and efforts like the Google Panda Update have put more emphasis on content quality and uniqueness. If a website publishes slim content with more information in the navigation and footer than in the body of the page itself, those pages may not have a very good chance of appearing in the search results. If a website has a substantial amount of content that is deemed low-quality or duplicate content, then it can affect the entire website, even though the remaining pages are of high quality.

Basic SEO services like Alexa Site Audit provide a range of information that can be useful in assessing a websites search engine readiness and provide a prioritized list of recommendations. Xenu Link Slueth is free software that crawls your website and provides a report of all the URLs to help understand how the site is structured, to uncover any broken links, to check title tag length and redirects, and a host of other features. Microsoft offers a similar website SEO evaluation tool called Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.

Google and Bing Webmaster Tools provide another set of useful data about how their respective bots interact with your website. These webmaster dashboards provide information ranging from crawling errors to how often your site appeared and was clicked on to the number of inbound links. You also have the opportunity to indicate preferences about your website to the search engine, such as by submitting a site map or indicating a canonical URL or geographic target preference.

The value in a technical SEO audit for content marketers is that it helps remove any barriers to your valuable content from being included in search results and, in most cases, can improve the search visibility of your content significantly. When content marketing professionals ask why they should bother with SEO when their excellent content will be shared by the people who read it, I respond by pointing out that great content can be even greater if it’s easy for interested readers to find and share. It’s a competitive digital world, and for content publishers who want to maximize the availability of their content to people who are actively looking, then optimizing the keywords, content, code, social shares, and links of a website is essential.

The importance of good research on competitors, the search and social landscape, and a quality technical SEO audit cannot be understated. Capturing information about who your real competitors are in search can provide key observations about what keywords, media types, and promotion channels can be leveraged to gain the desired visibility on search engines. An understanding of social media conversations related to topics of interest to your brand, the competition, and how potential customers think of your products and services is also essential for developing an effective approach to social engagement. A technical SEO audit can provide marketers with a hit list of website and content management system improvements that will fix or improve the ability of search engines to crawl and index your content for availability in search engines. Additional technical SEO insight can provide opportunities to outsmart your competition by understanding the SEO tactics they’re using and countering with an approach to your advantage.

So far, we’ve gained an understanding of where SEO and social media listening can assist our content marketing efforts for attracting and engaging customers. We’ve also dug into competitive and market research to identify the search and social landscape as well as steps to make sure our website is search engine–friendly. The next step in our planning phase of an optimized approach to content marketing is to identify the bigger picture of how an integrated approach to search and social media optimization will help achieve content and online marketing goals.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. “Search and Social Together Aid Online Shoppers,” eMarketer, March 16, 2011, http://www.emarketer.com/(S(qolko3450oim0q55s152wx45))/Article.aspx?R=1008282.

2. Lee Odden, “Social Media Monitoring – Top 10 Reasons for Monitoring Brands,” TopRank (blog), May 2011, http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/05/top-10-reasons-for-monitoring-brands-in-social-media/.

3. Lionel Menchaca, “Dell’s Next Step: The Social Media Listening Command Center,” Dell, December 8, 2010, http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2010/12/08/dell-s-next-step-the-social-media-listening-command-center.aspx.

4. Adam Ostrow, “Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center,” Mashable, June 15, 2010, http://mashable.com/2010/06/15/gatorade-social-media-mission-control/.

5. Webmaster Central, Google, accessed November 2011, http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

6. Inside Search, Google, accessed November 2011, http://www.google.com/insidesearch/underthehood.html.

7. Webmaster Central, Google, accessed December 2011, http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

8. Webmaster, Bing, accessed December 2011, http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster.