When asked how they are performing against the competition, in my experience, most businesses get it wrong. What’s even more worrying is their estimates are not even close to the measure’s reality.
The causes of this disinformation are many and varied. Going into detail is not useful. What is useful however is describing the solution.
Tracking too few keywords
Even small niche markets have many hundreds of keywords. Medium sized markets have thousands and large markets have tens of thousands. If you’re rank tracking 50 or 100 keywords, what chance do you have of drawing any meaningful conclusion.
There’s more to life than rankings
I know I’ve just told you rank tracking lots of keywords is important, but it’s not that useful if you’re looking at lots of ranking positions and up and down arrows. It’s what this data can then be combined with that makes the numbers interesting.
Linkdex uses positional comparisons of large groups of keywords to estimate the traffic a website might receive as a result of those rankings, market share, and the monetary value of those rankings (both equivalent media value and predicted revenue).
Linkdex also allows you to group your keywords using tags. This means you can split out brand vs non-brand, and create more interesting groups of keywords that might be related to products and services, conversion rates, keyword modifiers e.g. best, cheap, discount, city and many more. Understanding the value and your performance at keyword group level can shape strategic priorities and allow you to grow revenues faster than a less focused approach.
These numbers make for eye-opening reading and often lead to significant shifts in channel investment.
What caused the gap?
Knowing there’s a gap is a great start but it quickly leads to the next obvious question. What caused the gap? Causality and SEO is a minefield of a subject. However it nearly always boils down to two metrics. Content and links pointing at the content.
Sites that are developing more high quality content and more high quality links through time usually dominate their market. This is why Linkdex benchmarks a website’s content quantity, quality and value and combines it with a level of link insight that is still unrivaled in the SEO industry.
Try Linkdex and discover where you’re placed in your race
Make sure you add lots of keywords and we’ll do the rest. You can get these from our keyword research tool or you can create a spreadsheet using relevant Google Adwords keywords plus your Google Analytics account. If you need help please contact our customer service team.
Featured Image Source: Philo Nordlund – Flickr
15 Feb 2012
