Simplified Competition Analysis - Juicer's Guide

I'm going to write a series of guides to help those of you just starting out with some of the basics, and some of the not-so-basics. This forum and others have been good to me, so hopefully this series will be useful to those trying to figure out how to get started. I'm going to talk about how I do things, and what has worked for me with affiliate marketing. I've been in the game for a little over a year, and in that time I've built up a full-time income stream that just keeps increasing.

The only two tools you will need are the free version of Traffic Travis, and the free subscription for majesticseo.com. I'm generally only concerned with the top 3 results. If you can't get top 3, you probably aren't going to make much money with the term unless it's a huge search volume. Once I see who is ranking top 3, I just take their site URLs and plug them into majesticseo.com to see the number of linking domains. I've found that this crawler finds a lot of links, and generally is the best out there that I'm aware of for replicating what Giggle actually finds and indexes.

With Traffic Travis and MajesticSEO, the main things I'm looking for are:

1) # of linking domains shown in Majestic
2) Domain age shown in TT
3) Title/H1/Desc shown in TT

I've ordered those in what I believe to be their importance as far as outranking another site.

#1 Once I see how many linking domains they have, I have a good idea of what it will take to beat them. What that number is and whether you can beat it will be different for everyone. Since SEO is one of my strengths, I'm comfortable taking on any niche that has less than 1,000 linking domains to the page if the term is valuable enough. For most people starting out, you'd like that to be much lower, perhaps under 100.

#2 Domain age is something that most people don't pay enough attention to. I've put it at #2 because it's been my experience that this factor is extremely important in tough niches. In general, if you don't have the domain age to compete with the top sites, you will need MANY more links to overtake them.

#3 On-page is important and you should always do well on your own site, but in general it's not incredibly important to judge your competition based on this since links are much more important. Still, if you see every site has their Title/H1/Desc optimized, it's just another factor that will need to be overcome with pure link power.

If you guys have any questions about this stuff, I'll answer them here. My next guide will be keyword research, and then on-page SEO and site design. Kinda backwards to write that guide next, but I felt like writing this one now.

New approach. Thanks mate. + rep!

I would also add that the incoming links to those guys should be checked to see if those are BH links or WH links from authority sites. BH links can always be beat, if the other guy is not on the ball.

Also I think goog is starting to hate thin sites, so can beat the other guy if you have many more highly themed pages (that is on-page SEO, becoming ever more important, due to link spam).

Great post.

^yep, very true. In a niche I just started competing in there is a very well known BH guy with a site he got up there a few months ago. His ranking bounces around a lot and I'm pretty sure I will overtake him in a couple of months for #1 using greyhat techniques.

good one

So you are saying I shouldnt let #8 and #9 on here worry me? This is a bad example, but ive seen keywords with a bunch of big BL sites 5-10, and easier sites 1-5. Should i be worrying about those big BL sites, or theres a reason the easier sites are beating them so I should worry? Heres the link to the TT report. Obviously with only 200 Backlinks at #1, its almost pointless to check magestic, because I should be able to outrank 200 backlinks http://www.flickr.com/photos/60567821@N04/6924333421/

^Thanks for reminding me how much I hate TTv4. I still use version 3 because it includes more important information such as domain age in that initial report.

I would always check Majestic for the linking domains because the number of links shown in TT is generally worthless (if it's still using Yahoo). The reason is that Yahoo will show sitewide links over and over, so if someone has a blogroll link on a site with 2,000 pages, then it shows them with 2,000 links. Now if I have a link on 2,000 different sites, which 2,000 links is more powerful?

I always hate seeing Amazon #1 in a niche because they are like Herpes, it just never really goes away, even when you push them down to #2 they might come back and give you headaches. You're mainly competing against their domain age and the "spillover" effect of the massive number of links to their homepage, BUT I also have a suspicion that certain sites have been given preferential "authority" status with G, and will always be up there ranking well in particular niches.

As for domain 7 and 8, it seems that they are ranking up there simply because there aren't many other good results for G to choose. They don't have any on-page SEO factors targeting your keyword, so I wouldn't worry about them, especially when sites with even a small number of links AND title/h1 are ahead of them.

I wasn't even looking at domain age, I use TT too, I wonder why they removed it??

Can I ask, do you look at competition when you create "filler pages", besides the main keyword? Do you choose anything above 200 searches, super easy comp etc to do these pages, or just pick any related keyword, no matter what the comp looks like?

Wow, Didn't even hear you say anything about PR ??

Does the latest version of TT provide age parameter? I dont think so

Love it.

Subscribed.

Thanks a million,

And have a blessed one...

Nope, can't find domain age either? and good point by "zmoney"; doesn't PR play into it?

No, I don't really care about PR. It's a factor for sure, but fairly insignificant. The reason I say this is because I've bought enough expired domains to know that PR is simply this:

If I have a link from a page with PR5, my site will be PR4. That might be the only link I have to my site, but it's a PR4. Same with inner pages on sites. I have lots of sites which are PR4 and have PR3 inner pages, with the only link to the inner page from my homepage. Therefore, I'm WAY more concerned with the # of linking domains and the domain age than I am with the PR of a page. That said, it's not useless either.

zmoney said:

I wasn't even looking at domain age, I use TT too, I wonder why they removed it??

Can I ask, do you look at competition when you create "filler pages", besides the main keyword? Do you choose anything above 200 searches, super easy comp etc to do these pages, or just pick any related keyword, no matter what the comp looks like?

Wow, Didn't even hear you say anything about PR ??

Click to expand...

No idea why they removed it. When they released v4 it was basically a huge clusterfuck and completely broken/useless/downgrade from v3. The WF has a pretty big thread about it on release day. I had bought it and promptly returned it...I still use v3.

A lot of my sites morphed into authority sites along their development as I kept adding pages. Almost all of them are targeting much larger search volume. My earliest sites, anywhere from 800-10,000 searches/mo, and my newer sites go for even larger keywords. My biggest change though has been targeting multiple keywords on the homepage. I used to just go after one, but found that the juice carries over to allow you to target 5-7 phrases on the homepage with generally more success than creating an inner page for a closely related term.

I would say the majority of my sites are between 6-30 pages.

ryanjm said:

BUT I also have a suspicion that certain sites have been given preferential "authority" status with G, and will always be up there ranking well in particular niches.
.

Click to expand...

Let me confirm your suspicion. In the local search, fcuking yelp reviews get number 1 rank in some niches. I'm going to implement your methods and hopefully be able to knock the yelping bitches down a few notches.

Thanks for your reply! Just confirming, in Majestic, What TT says has 20 only has 1, What TT says has 60 has 21!!!

Going to try to find an old TT too

Loving this thread!! Been working on trying to feel "confident" that I know what I'm doing when analyzing. Obviously, nothing is set in stone and its all dynamic, but, with a simple strategy, you can eventually build the confidence to know what your getting into.

Thanks again.

This is an opportune time for me too, great thread love the simplicity.

Been studying IM for 8 months hard core. I was gonna go into offline marketing but another project up, (outside the IM field),,, therefore, decided i'm just gonna take action and try to rank a few MNS and grow them...

Let them age for 6 - 12 months, then try to monetize them thru either.. adsense, cpa or list building (will decide on the fly, figure i could always flip them with age and ranking as a last resort).

Gosh, feel as if i know so much theory, just gotta do now!! It's a passive hobby right now that i'd like to turn into a main line of income eventuality.

Your thread is appreciated... Thanks and will be following!

"domain age"

ryanjm, do you subscribe to the idea of buying an aged domain on godaddy and putting up a one page on it related to the theme, and then 301 redirecting it to our money domain once that page is indexed? Hoping to pass the age over. It seems like it would make sense.

Any reason that TT shows inflated results? I mean, its kind of weird, I'm looking at a domain now that shows 1237 in TT and 1100 in Magestic ... MagesticSEO seems soo low, it seems too good to be true lol..

Last I heard TT was using Yahoo's Site Explorer, which is dead and also reports sitewide links into the thousands if you have just 1 sidebar/blogroll link that populates itself all over the site.

When you look at Majestic, do you use the fresh index or the historic index? The fresh index always shows so many fewer backlinks. I can't understand why they even separate them so I feel like I'm overlooking something.