Finding competitive advantage in search

John Straw, CEO and founder of Linkdex, says for brands and companies to have a fighting chance of success in the next decade they need to optimise their presence on search engines…

While social media grabs headlines and takes a larger share of internet users’ time, the single biggest source of traffic to business websites is still search engines. Yet search engine optimisation (SEO) does not receive the attention or resources relative to its importance.

Businesses in the UK know this. Research conducted by Linkdex in 2010 found that 75% of small businesses ranked ‘being on top of Google’ the most important source of new customers, however spending on getting to the top of search engines was not proportionate.

Of course there are exceptions, and there are companies whose revenue can rise or fall by hundreds of thousands of dollars a week if their Google rank changes. For those companies, monitoring of competitor’s SEO strategies is incredibly important. In fact this information is so sensitive that Linkdex has been asked by several blue-chip companies to keep it out of the public domain.

Protecting a high ranking position in a search engine is more of a competitive advantage than buying market share or awareness through PPC advertising. Once you are at the top of the rankings, it takes a long time and substantial effort to be dislodged. It is not just a case of being outspent. This is long term value that doesn’t go away.

In SEO terms, a competitor is any site that ranks above you in the search engines for the phrases that you want to be found for. For example, if you want to be found for “uk media news” then your competitor is the site that currently ranks number one for that search, currently Media Guardian. Finding out how to beat your competitor to the top spot requires understanding the links that have been built to that site.

A site investing in an SEO strategy will build their links across multiple site types including: news sites, blogs, directories, forums, wikis, pr article submission sites and social media. A large site might have over 50,000 links and analysing how those links are distributed manually one-by-one takes time and money.

But doing this analysis can be incredibly valuable. For companies that are successful at SEO and which are publicly traded, the profile of links and how that profile is changing over time, is a piece of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) that can, in some cases, drive financial performance. Knowing a competitor’s profile has become essential, rather than as it was two to three years ago.

Traditionally, the kind of SEO decision making tools that inform effective strategies have been the preserve of the biggest and most wealthy brands. This is because huge amounts of data needed to be crunched manually.

The tools do exist to automate this process. Linkdex has spent a considerable amount of research and development to create algorithms that look for signals in websites and automatically categorise them. Being able to view a competitor’s SEO strategy against your own link profile gives a huge competitive advantage.

Not only does this kind of analysis help to make decisions about where to build links, it will also show how businesses are investing in social media and whether that investment is having an effect on search engine rankings.

Many businesses are still not even doing SEO properly for themselves, let alone building the capability to be able to analyse competitor strategies. For brands and companies to have a fighting chance of success in the next decade they need to optimise their presence on search engines.

For more information, see linkdex.com