Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #2: Doing Online Marketing Competitor Research

Michael Utley: Hey, welcome to another episode of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. This is the official podcast for DodgeballSeo.com and Dodgeballmarketing.com. Glad you're here. Today we're going to talk about doing online marketing competitor research. There are a lot of great tools for doing real deep dive competitor research that are out there that are very expensive, or you could hire a consulting firm to research a bunch of stuff and develop a big report. But there's also a bunch of information hiding in plain sight that can be very valuable for you if you track it over time. So we're going to talk about that.

Michael Utley: And the way I would recommend thinking about this is that there is some basic information that's just kind of out there in plain sight that you've probably poked around and looked at, but you maybe haven't ever thought about taking all of your competitors and tracking this information in a more disciplined way. So what we recommend is starting a spreadsheet and once a quarter going through and updating these numbers and seeing how they change over time. So you can set your spreadsheet up either by competitor or by date, and then have a set of competitors and the different metrics going left to right. That's probably the best way to do it. And that way each row is just another date. And that way you can sort of ad hoc go in and do it whenever you feel like it. But you can see how things are behaving over time. Or if you're really good, you can do it once a quarter or even, gosh, you could do something like this once a month. It wouldn't be that hard to do. But it's really easy to go look at the information we're going to talk about and capture it in a spreadsheet and understand where your industry is spending money on online marketing.

Michael Utley: There are surveys and there are lots of tools, eMarketer, others, that do annual reports, but there's nothing like knowing what your competitor right down the street is doing with their online marketing and where they're spending their time and energy.

Chris Raines: And what people are saying about them.

Michael Utley: And, yes, and what people are saying about them. So we're going to talk about some things that are quantitative and a few that get a little bit more qualitative. And we'll talk about how to do that in a quick spreadsheet. So this is what we would call... I don't know a better phrase for this, but sort of a poor man's competitor research report. This is something you can do yourself. This is a DIY approach to competitor research and we found it to be eyeopening. And we've been surprised when we've presented these, when we've done these for people, at how much of this information just wasn't known, but it's all public information.

Michael Utley: So we got a few bullet points we're going to get into. So let's jump in. So number one, I've got number one, run each URL through SpyFu and see the pattern of the history of their SEO rankings.

Chris Raines: So SpyFu is what?

Michael Utley: SpyFu is a really great set of SEO tools. SEMrush and SpyFu are two that we really like for different reasons. And there are a handful of others. But with SpyFu you can see the history of how many keywords a website has ranked for in the top five pages of Google search results. So think about there being 10 results on a page. So about the top 50 listings, which is a little bit of a ballpark figure to know, okay, what's the overall amount of exposure that this website has in search engines compared to another website.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And so if you take each website and run it through, you can get two measurements with SpyFu that you can capture and lock in. What's the current number of keywords for which they rank in the top five pages of results. So that's a whole number and it's usually a hundreds or thousands. So you might have in your spreadsheet 235. And then SpyFu has another chart that's really helpful, the sum of ranks. So they give a number that is 50 points for every number one placement for every keyword the site ranks for all the way down to one point for every 50th slot that a website ranks for, added up as a whole number.

Michael Utley: So this number, if they're ranking for say 235 keywords, this sum of rank score may be in the tens of thousands, but you can just capture that as a whole number. And that's going to give you your own little sparkline, your own little tracking tool, for that website for knowing how they're ranking in search engines over time. And often what we've seen with these SpyFu rankings is a really great ranking at one point that then just drops off. And that tells you a little bit about what's going on under the hood, because it tells you, oh, maybe they got away from pursuing their SEO strategy. Maybe they are kind of running low on budget and can't invest in that. So there's some real intuitive things that you can start to pick up and infer on what's going on under the hood if you start to track some of these publicly available numbers over time. So that's number one.

Chris Raines: Yeah. You can also follow individual keywords over time, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Raines: So pool installation San Diego, if you're a pool installer in San Diego, you want to know where you are, where your competitors are.

Michael Utley: That's another one. And SpyFu actually has that setup as well. You can load 10 to 20 keywords in a report and track those over time. And so, yeah, that's another great way to use SpyFu to do this. Now that's-

Chris Raines: That's worth thousands of dollars, those keywords are.

Michael Utley: That's right. That's not strictly a competitor tracker. It's a keyword tracker, but SpyFu has that exact same capability.

Chris Raines: Right. Right. Let's move on to number two. And I would call this category just online review sites. So this, Michael, is both qualitative, as you mentioned, and quantitative. So quantitative, you can go your... Let's talk about all the ones, Google My business, Yelp, Facebook has reviews. And then, depending on what industry you're in-

Michael Utley: And then if you get into some industries, you've got stuff like Home Advisor.

Chris Raines: Exactly. Individual niche focused review sites. So whatever is appropriate for your industry, find out what the review sites are. It's always going to be Google and most of the time it's going to be Yelp.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So this is a good way to get an overall quantitative view of how people think about the business. Is it three star, roll up, four star, five star. But the real meat in this, and this takes a little bit more time, is looking at the comments, the individual reviews, the text of the reviews. So this can tell you... You can get really good insight on what is selling for these people. So if you're a shutter company and people keep talking about, oh my, I love my new plantation shutters, plantation shutters, or whatever different types.

Michael Utley: They might talk about the quality of the products, the speed of the installation.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I really-

Michael Utley: Experience. The clean work crew.

Chris Raines: Exactly. So and that tells you what matters to the customer, right?

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Raines: And so all this, SEO takes all this. It really boils down to serving a customer on the other end of all this technology, right?

Michael Utley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Raines: So online reviews sites are great because you can actually read and start... And if you read enough of them, you'll start to realize patterns. And you'll go like, man, everybody's talking about how clean the crew is. That matters to customers, so we should really put effort into doing that. Or everybody's buying plantation shutters. Why aren't we selling plantation shutters? Everybody's... So it gives you an idea of what people care about, what people like, and what your competitors are actually selling.

Michael Utley: So let's review this. You've really got three different things that are valuable from this exercise. You've got, number one, how many reviews are they getting?

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: You can just capture what's the cumulative number of reviews they have.

Chris Raines: And that's a good sense of opportunity.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: If your competitor has three reviews, well gosh, there's nobody. If all your competitors have less than 10 reviews well it's-

Michael Utley: Push down on the gas.

Chris Raines: Push down. It's yours for the taking. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And then next is what's their star rating. And then next... Now I'll call that third category, the one that you outlined, I'll call it taking the temperature.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Because what you've really got to be able to do, if you're doing this in your spreadsheet, you've got to just take the temperature each time you do a check-in and say, what's going on with this company? Is it good or bad? And then what are people saying?

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so that's the way in-

Chris Raines: And are there any themes that develop over time?

Michael Utley: And I would try to capture that in just as few bullet points as you can to keep it really tight. And so you can have these three different measurements. All right, next up, something that you can do is go to their YouTube channel. If a company has a YouTube channel, or you can even do this with other video marketing platforms, but they're not going to give you really as much information. You can definitely do a temperature check if they're using Vimeo or Wistia, but YouTube is actually going to give us some really valuable numbers. You can get a Vimeo and capture a handful of things or, excuse me, YouTube and capture a handful of things. You can look at how many videos they've published. What's the total number of active, published videos they have. You can see how many views their channel has. And just deciding if that's only going to show you the views for the videos that are active.

Michael Utley: If they've delisted a lot of videos over time for products that have been retired, whatever, you may be seeing a partial number. So this number of views could go up and down. So that's actually helpful to know. You can see the number of subscribers they have. And so those numbers tell you how much are your competitors spending on video strategy? How much traction are they getting? You can qualitatively guess at some of this stuff and say, well, I don't see or hear about them doing much video. Or you can go start capture numbers and have qualitative data that tells you, oh wow, they've added five more videos. They're being very consistent in their video strategy.

Chris Raines: And here's a good way to kind of take that qualitative and quantitative data and use it in your own strategy. You could go to let's take our shutter example. Look at what their most viewed videos are. So maybe their how to install, how to properly install plantation shutters is their most... And it's by far their most viewed video.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: Then that gives you intel of like, okay, this is what... A lot of people are searching for this. So you turn around and you do a piece of content on that on your website.

Michael Utley: If you see a hot video on a competitor site, you can go turn that into a blog post.

Chris Raines: That's a great sign that shows demand. And then that's an opportunity because that likely is resulting also in search volume on Google.

Michael Utley: I'll tell you something else we see. We see sometimes content that pops up really well and we can see the numbers for it in video, and then retroactively add those as bullets to services pages.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah. All right. Next up is inbound links. So when you're using a tool like SEMrush, and again, if you're a member of Dodgeball Marketing, or if you're a member of Dodgeball SEO, you don't need to pay for any of this. We'll pay for all this as part of your program. But looking at the number of inbound links to a website, inbound links are a big factor in SEO. So you can actually use SEMrush and just go see for each of these sites, how many inbound links do they have. And a second number you can add as a separate set of columns is... You can do this for each competitor... Is how many different domains are linking to them. And this is all information. You're not hacking into their Google analytics. You're not cheating. You're not doing anything. You're just getting publicly available information. The reason not everybody has it is it's through tools that you have to license to use. But the number of inbound links for each of these sites fluctuates and changes over time. And so you can monitor that and see which factors are really driving who's winning. Yeah.

Chris Raines: I love it. Let's do the next one. We'll call this social sniffing.

Michael Utley: And this is a pretty big category. This is probably the bulk of what we're going to cover for the rest of this episode.

Chris Raines:

Yeah. So this is basically go to each social channel. So think of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn-

Michael Utley: You can even kind of lump YouTube into this, but we've already talked YouTube.

Chris Raines: All the social channels out there and get an idea for how many followers are on each channel that your competitor has. And also what kind of engagement or activity. And this tells you... I think the main thing this tells you is sort of where the action is for your particular market. So here's an example. If you're an HR benefits consultant and you know who your sort of competitors are in your market, and you notice that your competitors are just... they have a Facebook page, but it doesn't really get engagement. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a huge opportunity to gobble up Facebook. It might mean that all the action's happening on LinkedIn. So if you go to LinkedIn and you see posts that get 20 comments, 30 comments, shares, likes, it could... That gives you a sense of where are these people hanging out with their and what are they engaging in? And that might tell you we need to steer more, this is where the action is. So we're okay with sort of maintaining Facebook, but LinkedIn is where we need to be.

Michael Utley: Yeah. If a really small company that's a direct competitor to you has a lot of activity on LinkedIn, that kind of tells you, wow, they're investing time and energy on LinkedIn.

Chris Raines: Right. But yeah, a competitor having a low follower count doesn't necessarily mean there's opportunity there because, again, it's about the customer, right?

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: So if your customers just aren't showing up on a certain platform, then this makes sense for you to be there.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So let's think about some numbers you can see. You can see for one thing how many accounts they have and which channels they're active in.

Chris Raines: What kind of content they're [crosstalk 00:13:33].

Michael Utley: What kind of content they're producing.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: If they're a company... If you're in an industry that's highly visual, how much are they using Pinterest and Instagram compared to something that's a little bit less visual? How consistent are they in publishing and activating these profiles? Or do they have zombie profiles? If you start to see zombie social media profiles at a company, you're starting to see a lack of management and a lack of control over their brand. So that's a real indicator. That can tell you the health of what's going on under the hood over there at the competitor's shop.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: To know kind of how they're doing. So that's good. So social media because it is so on the table and in the open actually gives you a lot of qualitative and quantitative measures that can be captured either as whole numbers or take the temperature, short descriptions. You can have a two or three word description in your spreadsheet and capture that data and build that data over time.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I like this one too because it, again, gives you that bird's eye view of where should we be investing our time? You can't do all the things in all the channels at once. So where should we be investing our time?

Michael Utley: Yep. And that kind of takes us to our last point, consistency of online strategy. Something I love in SpyFu is you get this SEO sparkline over time. And so looking that tells you the real health of how someone's working and doing their online marketing. But also once you have your own spreadsheet, you can see how it behaves over time. And so those two things together give you a really good, full picture of the consistency of the leadership, the management, and the money investment, the time and energy investment, in online marketing to let you know who's getting traction where.

Michael Utley: All right, that's it. Let's wrap up with that. Doing online marketing competitor research. Hope this has been helpful. We'll see you on the next one.

Chris Raines: See you.