Competition Analysis
1-day Advanced SEO Course in Competitor Analysis — SCM
Competitive Analysis Training Course Overview
This advanced SEO course enables you to refine your SEO strategy and focus your efforts where they will be most effective — by closely analysing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) found in your own web sites and in those of your most successful SERPs competitors.
The course challenges you to come up with objective answers to questions like these:
- Are your current SEO goals really achievable — by you or your competitors?
- Are you really targeting the correct audiences and search expressions?
- Is your web site coding up to snuff? — e.g. using latest HTML5, CSS3, WAI-ARIA?
- Are you exploiting new SEO channels? — social media, geolocation, structured data
- How good are your semantics, categories, taxonomies and labelling?
- How good are your links? — focused, maintainable, cost-effective?
- Do you have a content marketing strategy? — is it good enough?
Having compared yourselves with your principal SEO competitors, we take you through a series of drills, exercises, discussion, and checklists, designed to produce the first — very rough — draft of a newly focused SEO strategy. The critical feature of this strategy is that it must be expressed as behavioural objectives, i.e. achievable outcomes which can be objectively measured.
Course contents — 1 Compare non-interactive content
- Titles and headers
- Introductions
- Subheads
- Emphasis and de-emphasis
- Lists
- Order and sequence
- Focus
- Vocabularies
- Expression
- Content layering
Course contents — 2 Comparing link content
- Keyword locations
- Within pages
- Within content blocks
- Within links themselves
- Keyword selection
- Keyword layering
- Compare anchor descriptors with target content
- Anchor descriptors and adjacent content
Course contents — 3 Comparing link relationships
- Finding and counting competitors' links
- Tracking social media links
- Link types and attributes, e.g. nofollow
- Qualitive link relationships
- Link source value, targeting, etc
- Google's
link:syntax - Commercial link-finding tools, e.g. SEOMoz
- … WordTracker, SEOElite, Majestic SEO, etc.
- Understanding how these tools gather data
- Tool-specific metrics, e.g. MozRank, ACRank
- Identifying potential link sources
Course contents — 4 Semantic markup & metadata
- Visual order vs. source code order
- HTML5 semantic elements
- Element presence and organisation
- HTML5 semantic attributes
- Whole page metadata
- Dublin core and Open Graph Protocol (OGP)
- Rich snippet metadata
- HTML5 Microdata
- Microformats
- RDFa
- Other invisible metadata, e.g ARIA roles
Course Objectives
On completion of this course, students should be able to:
- Distinguish SEO competition from generic competition
- Identify SEO key performance indicators (PKI)
- Identify who their real SEO competitors are
- Identify competitor pages per product/service
- Analyse competitor's markup, semantics and links
- Evaluate sites and pages for competitive advantage
- Devise a feasible competitive SEO strategy
- Setup and optimise SEO performance measurement
- Continually enhance their SEO over time
- Utilise cutting-edge web design for SEO
Target Audience
- Web designers
- Web developers
- Web marketing and communications managers
- Web marketing and communications staff
Training Pre-requisites
Either of the following courses
Or equivalent SEO knowledge and experience.
Training Style
This instructor-led SEO training, is conducted as a workshop. Students are expected to actively participate and contribute to the learning process.
Much of the time is devoted to whole-class discussion. We strongly encourage students to share their experience and to comment on one another's websites, SEO strategies, SEO competition, etc.