Looking at the SEO maturity of your competitors

Are you really looking at the maturity and manpower of your online competitors? You should. 

Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

I previously shared a tip around how to evaluate your competitor’s author pages when doing a competitive assessment.

There are a few other tips that I think are essential:

Make sure you’re looking at the history of the site’s SEO work (you can find this by searching job descriptions and looking for interviews with previous SEO staff). Also, look at the sheer volume and expertise of the SEO staff they have (LinkedIn searches are great here). 

I was doing this for a client and discovered that one of the sites in their competitor set had been doing SEO since BEFORE Google was in existence. I discovered that by reading an interview with one of their former SEO staff. That’s a mature SEO organization. In fact, I’ve been using the SEO maturity model quite a bit during these client conversations.

Also, see if you can figure out if they have a more mature link building effort underway using PR and content marketing techniques by asking the following questions:

• Does it look like they are building content assets for promotion reasons? Or developing partnership arrangements for promotional reasons? 
• Do their PR staff mention SEO, or can you see signs that they are getting placements on sites that syndicate? 
• Do they have comprehensive media kits to encourage social media sharing? Check out the CDC’s free resources for their Fight Flu campaign to get a sense of how comprehensive those assets could be for a campaign.
• What is their social following like and is that driving a huge amount of shares and links? 
• Or conversely, is their backlink profile built off of efforts years ago that no longer exist at the organization? 

By answering all of those questions you can get a much better picture of the SEO maturity of your client’s competitors and unearth ideas for how you could come up with strategies to compete with them or (potentially) outpace them.

So that’ s your tip for today – use the SEO maturity model and try to dig into the manpower and strategies your competitors are using when you work on your competitive audits. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.