SoloSEO

1-800-GOOG-411 Another Reason for Local Search SEO

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 11th, 2007

I am surprised I didn’t hear about this from any typical news source, but Google has launched a 411 information service powered by their local search engine.

When you call 1-800-GOOG-411 it first asks for your city and state, which you give verbally. Then it asks for a keyword or category, I said “pizza” for my first query. Instead of the top 10 it gives you the top 8. At any time you can say “start over” or say the number of the listing for more information or to be connected.

When you’re in the details section you can say “text message” and instantly you’ll get the address and phone number of the place you were interested in.

So what does this mean for you? It means that local search SEO is more important than ever! Now instead of just computer users having access to local search, people driving around town everywhere will depend on Google for finding you, not the yellow pages they keep in the car.

I’ve been using Google SMS for a long time to find addresses and phone numbers of businesses locally. You just send a text message to 46645 (GOOGL) and type in “pizza near columbia mo” and you’ll get about 3 listings back with addresses and phone numbers (mine arrive in 2 separate text messages).

If you haven’t started on local search SEO for your site, it’s time!

2 comments Visited 4307 times April 11th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Top 5 Useful and Free SEO e-Books

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 3rd, 2007

Originally I wanted this post to be titled, “Top 10 Useful and Free SEO e-Books”, but I was surprised to find very few worthwhile free SEO e-Books, even when I enlisted the help of several SEO experts/friends! I had to dig more into “Internet Marketing” but SEO is such an umbrella term now that I think these fit well into its scope.

Here are the 5 free and useful SEO e-Books:

1) Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz

This is really the definitive guide for SEO outside of the paid e-Book by Aaron Wall. Not only does it go through every topic of SEO it also has a thorough list of resources down at the bottom for further reading. You can download it in other formats like Word and OpenOffice.

2) Viral Copy: Trading Words for Traffic by Brian Clark

Brian Clark is an exceptional writer and teacher, and this book offers valuable ideas and strategies for implementing viral content strategies. His website is full of invaluable information for anyone doing any type of content writing.

3) How to Use the Modern Press Release by David Meerman Scott

Press Releases are not only important in marketing but also in SEO. A well-written and distributed press release can go a long ways for creating traffic, links, and buzz. This e-Book discusses the “new rules” of Press Releases that can help you take advantage of this excellent SEO strategy.

4) Keyword Research from Pole Position Marketing

A thorough e-Book on keyword research, taking you from gathering to sorting to organizing keywords.

5) Keyword Research Guide from WordTracker

Even though some of it is centered on WordTracker, this e-Book is excellent for understanding the importance and use of keywords in SEO. Brian Eisenberg of FutureNow, Inc. even contributed to the e-Book.

Other SEO/Internet Marketing topics I expected to find free authoritative e-Books on, but did not:

- Link Building
- Social Media Marketing/Optimization (only this, but way too basic)
- Email Marketing
- PPC

Leave a comment if you know of a free and useful SEO related e-Book that I missed! (Please don’t bother with affiliate link-laden e-Books, I did not include those for a reason…not useful)

3 comments Visited 13896 times April 3rd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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SEO around the globe

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 19th, 2007

SoloSEO has been quite a surprise. When we launched last November, we had no idea the draw a stand alone SEO system would have, nor the level of interest it would generate. It has been truly a whirlwind. We did some quick figuring the other day and discovered that domains from over 40 different countries are currently using our site to SEO their sites. It is also surprising Germany and Russia are the top two, since the site is only being offered in English, and not localized for any other foreign language. There was no way to predict this amount of international interest. Of course we are thrilled to see so many from all over the globe interested in what we are doing, but we now feel pressure to address the SEO needs of site owners who can’t read English, and provide them with the SoloSEO tools in their own languages.

Personally, international business is a big passion of mine. My graduate work was done at Thunderbird, a graduate business school located in Arizona which focuses only on international business, and is ranked by U.S. News as the top school in that speciality. After graduating I was hired by a firm located in Utah, which sold a mineral in over 50 different countries. I was given the title of Global Marketing Director, and put in charge of overseeing the foreign markets, both in managing the distributors and determining our global marketing strategies. It was a wonderful time, doing what I had gone to school to do, international business. I loved the travel and the many countries I got to visit. In a typical year I would visit half of our distributors in 25 + countries, traveling about half the year. It was horrible on my social life, but I personally learned a ton about the world of international business, and how to ask where to find a bathroom in many foreign languages.

When I eventually decided to go out on my own and do the entrepreneur thing, I had hoped to continue with my international life. I started a consulting company with a partner, and we attempted to assist other companies on how they could expand their business operations into international markets, but this proved to be a tough sell. Many of the companies we met with thought we were too young, with too little international experience (5 years) to be consultants of anything, and especially in international business. Eventually, with my international dreams dashed, I had some technology built by a company I was attempting to represent in Japan, and started an online technology company that transfered digital files overseas for processing. This company became the extent of my global business aspirations and I was severely disappointed. But at least I got to be an entrepreneur, and I began to focus my attention on making a living in other ways. I decided it was time to put food on the table and take care of my families financial needs, but I hoped for an opportunity to “go global” in the future.

Michael and I originally met during the development on the first online company, and we struck a bond/partnership. 7 years later we have now launched other technology companies, all of which are focused on delivering online services to domestic clients. And this was also the original design behind SoloSEO. We just felt is was important for domestic site owners to have all the SEO tools they need, all in one place, so they could make SEO a less painful process. We knew others were probably struggling like we were, and they just wanted to optimize their site, to hopefully attract potential clients who were searching for their products. It was our hope the launch of SoloSEO would address the SEO needs of many domestic site owners, little did we know the international excitement which would grow quickly. Soon we had requests from the UK, Spain, Germany, among others for potential strategic partnerships, and international site owners, from many non-English speakers were signing up for the service. It was quite hard to believe, but here we are, and we are now trying to best capitalize on this interest.

So, as of last Friday, I have been here in Tokyo, Japan meeting with potential partners to hopefully offer our SoloSEO tool set in Japan (which is why my Japanese business card is included as the image above). I truly love Japan, I love being here. I lived here for a few years, over 20 years ago, and I studied Japanese in college, so I have grown to love the Japanese people, the culture, the language, the business methods and the food. Japan is as unique as any country on earth, but much more civilized, and perpetually polite and proper (and safe) than all others, which is also what I like about Japan. If you get a chance to visit Japan, you must take it, you will not regret it.

So in this post, I guess I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who has made this trip to Japan possible, and I hope there will be many more international trips possible in the future. The growth and success of SoloSEO is remarkable, and we hope future international partnerships will contribute to our growth, which will continue to ensure that SoloSEO is always on the cutting edge in providing the best in SEO online tools. We assuredly continue to provide our clients with the most efficient and effective SEO tools available, no matter which country they are living in, or which language they speak.

Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu.

I’ll be back home Thursday, I hope the weather will be sunny and warm. I need to golf soon.

1 comment Visited 4484 times March 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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What do the Presidential Candidates use for Analytics?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 12th, 2007

I thought it would be interesting to look at all of the top presidential candidates and see what they are using for analytics for their site. I visited each site, viewed source, and looked for Javascript code or any other trace of analytics code I could find.

Hillary Clinton uses Google Analytics

John Edwards uses Google Analytics

Barack Obama uses Google Analytics

Rudy Giuliani uses Google Analytics

Mitt Romney uses Omniture

John McCain uses either Revenue Science (if they have some analytics system built-in) or it is a server-based (non-Javascript) analytics solution.

We use Google Analytics for SoloSEO but I have heard Omniture is a great solution too. Setting up with Omniture takes a little bit of work because you need to put in variables for each page (like page name), but other than that it is pretty easy and has lots of features.

I would suggest the candidates use Crazy Egg and track where people are clicking around on the site. We’ve discovered a lot of interesting behavior on our site, I can only imagine having that much more traffic and learning what you can do to maximize it.

7 comments Visited 9504 times March 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Bloggers Lack Respect

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 9th, 2007

Due to our launch of SoloSEO and our foray into blogging, I have been more sensitive to the plight of all bloggers, and to the generally less than optimum reputation of bloggers. I knew about blogging before our launch, and I got a sense from the talking heads of TV land, and the faceless voices of radio land, that bloggers weren’t held in high regard in the media world, but who is? Personally I have never understood why a degree in Journalism gives a reporter more of a “right” to report about SEO, medicine, politics, marketing or anything, over someone who blogs and actually works or has earned degrees related to those industries, but this seems to be their indefensible attitude. For my view, reporters without “real-life” experience in the industries they are reporting about, aren’t worth the time it takes to drop off that printed media in the round file, or the effort one must expend to turn off the offending electronic device, but I digress.

During my non-blogging years, I didn’t read many blogs, and the ones I did read where scrutinized before I would buy in. I personally felt each author needed to be: 1. Formally Educated, 2. Obviously Knowledgeable (in the blogging topic), and 3. Successful (in the industry they were blogging about). If the blogger didn’t meet muster, I didn’t view them as a viable blogger or worth my reading time. My views on this have obviously changed slightly over time.

As I now I sit here… a blogger, somewhat educated (with a Bachelor in Economics, a MBA, and working on my dissertation for a Ph.D. in OM), but with no formal education in SEO. I don’t remember that class being offered at the university. So my formal knowledge on SEO is suspect I guess. It has come from a few popular SEO books, personal experience, attendance at PubCon, and blogs. Our success with SoloSEO, although steady, isn’t as earth shattering as I would liked it to be after only 3 “official” months, and yet here I am still blogging, pretty hypocritical huh? I can now see Blog mountain from this side and my perspective is different. Before getting our first businesses online, I had no extensive knowledge into Internet Marketing or Do-It-Yourself SEO, as Internet Marketing wasn’t a course offered way back then. Nor did I have any idea there was such a wellspring of information on the SEO topic online. This abundance of info comes from some very intelligent, and trustworthy individuals. However, because of the three strict credentials listed above, I truly had a difficult time giving many “SEO blogging experts” much respect right out of the gate. While I have made my peace with many SEO blogs and are comfortable with their interpretation of SEO principles, others have fallen out of favor. I am still often dumbfounded by some of the speculation, and mind-numbingly simple deductions made by some considered most knowledgeable among us. Comments I read in blogs like “I think,” “my Spidey sense tells me,” or “based on my gut” followed by a claim concerning how search engine algorithms MAY work, cause me to gulp the Pepto. In the world of academic writing, any claim made by an author needs to be defended by statistically reliable results, or at least based on some long term research which indicates, within a statistically acceptable level, a strong possibility of fact. But in the world of blogging, anyone can claim to be an expert, run some unscientific, and even questionable tests (or not do anything at all), and then throw the results out there as probable truths. I believe it is this free wielding of ideas which causes many “offline” reporters/media sorts to question the credibility of bloggers. I’m not saying it’s right, and it is obviously stereotypical. Plus I don’t think many reporters have a sound footing from which to throw stones anyway, but with major market changes comes detractors, and due partly to woeful failings of mainstream media, bloggers have continually gained notoriety, and have found an increasingly important voice.

So, do we at SoloSEO consider ourselves to be SEO experts and qualified to blog. According to my narrow, academically weighted criteria, probably not. However, according to the general blogosphere criteria, yeah baby!! We are as qualified as anyone. It is not a position I am completely comfortable with, but we have learned a bunch over the years SEOing our own sites, using lots of other’s tools, and we have enjoyed good online success in the process. We learned more about SEO when creating Solo, and we will share what we think is important to those who care to read. I will say through our own research, and through discussions with leaders in the SEO field, we have been able to create and consolidate the most comprehensive set of SEO tools, all in an online environment, all in one place. That is something to which we are very proud. We feel we have contributed to make SEO more accessible to more folks trying to be more successful for themselves online, and that feels pretty great. These tools are as simple to use as any SEO tool out there, and they work one with another, and build upon each other, making SEO a smooth flowing process, much different from the segmented SEO tool parade that previously caused us much suffering.

Rest assured, we will continue to blog on topics we feel are important to our fellow Do-It-Youself army of SEOers. Our perspective is quite different as we are first small business owners, with our own business sites. And we too have struggled to learn SEO to better our business’ position online, as opposed to SEO professionals who earn their living assisting others SEO their sites. We see good SEO as a competitive advantage, and we focus on doing SEO better than our competitors, which increases our access to potential clients. We do appreciate the votes of confidence and support from you in the infancy of Solo, and we will not take this loyalty for granted. SoloSEO tools will continue to evolve and adjust to best provide you all with a powerful, yet simple solution for your SEO campaigns, and we will continue to use these tools for our own sites and blog when we learn something cool.

So, will the mainstream media ever give bloggers credit for the important work they attempt to do? Probably not. Do we care? Absolutely not.

2 comments Visited 4556 times March 9th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Overture Keyword Tool Resurrected, 3 Source Keyword Tool is Back!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 8th, 2007

Overture’s Keyword Tool was declared dead by many, then Yahoo said it wasn’t dead yet, and now I can confirm it has been resurrected. Before it took FOREVER to load, and would often time out. Now, it runs like a charm. But don’t use it there, you can access not only Overture’s Keyword Tool from SoloSEO, but also WordTracker and Google Adwords, SIMULTANEOUSLY. Is that cool or what. You don’t even need an account from WordTracker, and you’re not limited to a measly 100 words either.

Try a free trial of SoloSEO, and if anything use it for the sweet keyword tools and keyword manager. This is what it looks like:

In case you’re wondering, before it was only 2 sources as Overture’s keyword tool was dead. Those funny little icons might need some explaining too. The > Play one is to re-run the keyword query (it’s all AJAX, pretty slick) and the + Add icon is to add it to your list (you can add as many as you want without leaving the page, AJAX again, real slick). The 5 bar icon is for popularity. Instead of those obscure numbers that come with Overture and WordTracker, we’ve normalized popularity of keywords to a 0-5 scale (yeah, that’s sweeeeeet). When you save keywords to your keyword manager, it saves the popularity with the keyword. Then you can use those keywords in other tools quite easily (like our keyword ranking reports that run weekly or monthly straight to your email box).

Try SoloSEO!

1 comment Visited 5812 times March 8th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Know your competitors, before they know you.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 28th, 2007

Many see SEO strategies as a process which is only used when you are constructing your web site, or after launch to improve the site performance in SERPs, but SEO tools can also be used effectively to analyze prospective markets, even before a decision is made to start competing in a particular market.

By using some of the SEO tools, one can quickly identify the leading competitors in just about any market, and analyze their online presence, the quality and mass of their content, effective keywords, traffic, among other indicators. So why not use these tools before launching a business? I know of many entrepreneurs, including myself, that have come up with an idea, then just jumped in with both feet, without taking time to really look at the competitors online, but just generally in the marketplace. And if you feel you can out-compete the existing competitors, then you just go for it. That was pretty much the way we have done things around here for years. However, through the creation of SoloSEO, and the process we went through to learn the market, analyze what was presently out there, and fill the void we felt existed, we learned a bunch about online competitive analysis. Now that we have built the tools, and can perform online competitive analysis easily, it has changed they way we analyze opportunities and it affects our priorities on which markets we now enter and the timing of the entrance.

In one of our other businesses we bring in products from other countries and set up online stores to sell those products online. We have access to a wide variety of products from international manufacturers, so making a decision on which product to launch next has always been open for debate, and eventually decided by “gut-feel.” But those days are past. With the launch of the new SoloSEO competitive reports system earlier this month, we now can actually enter in the domains of the competitors from various industries we feel are most worthy of review, and then we watch how they perform. Based on what we see, we can then decide which industries to enter, and also prepare our new site to better compete head to head with our competitors right out of the gate. We have time to create content, watch pricing trends, see what is bringing in the most traffic, analyze the popular keywords, and make the appropriate changes to the site before launch; it is obviously a huge competitive advantage.

Anyone in business should understand the importance of watching their competitors, it can essentially be the difference between market success and failing miserably, and now that there are tools which make this once daunting, time consuming, and frustrating task very simple, not participating in competitive analysis isn’t an option. If you are not presently analyzing your competitors, I suggest you make it a point to start. In a book called Made in America about Sam Walton’s life and the success of Walmart (a must read for all aspiring entrepreneurs), Mr. Walton speaks freely about walking into his competitor’s stores and taking notes, then going back to his store and implementing the good ideas, and improving on them. The success of Sam Walton is legendary, and much of it is based on his keen understanding of not only his target market, but also the knowledge he gained from his competitors. Knowing your competitors, duplicating what they do well, and then improving on your own product/service is what free market competition is all about. Simply building a better mouse trap.

If you haven’t done so, please review Michael’s blog post on the competitive report system, and begin keeping an eye on your online competitors ASAP. If you are already a SoloSEO subscriber, then these competitive reports are now included in the current service, and have been added at no additional cost. If you are considering starting your own business, the competitive report system can provide you with information on your potential competitors, which will give you an excellent understanding of how you are going to need to position your firm to out-compete the online leaders. Finally, even if you are just extremely curious about online business and want to learn more about trends, traffic and popular keywords, the competitive reports can be wonderfully addictive and couldn’t be simpler to use. Just pick the site(s) you want to watch, and the completed reports magically appear in your email box for review at your convenience. Competitive analysis is now as easy as opening an email. What an improvement!

Add comment Visited 4423 times February 28th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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10 Reasons to use Paid SEO Tools instead of Free SEO Tools

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 22nd, 2007

If you take a step back and look at it, the SEO industry is rather odd. SEO experts who are paid thousands of dollars by companies will also freely share tips, tricks, principles, pricing structures, and SEO advice. Then we come to the tools, where there are literally thousands of free SEO tools spread across the web, helping you check backlinks, perform keyword research, and measuring various metrics.

The free help and advice from the experts is fantastic. The free SEO tools, however, have some issues that can make SEO more difficult than it needs to be. The following reasons explain why paid SEO tools have many advantages pver free SEO tools and lead to better and more productive SEO.

1) Reliability: Free tools are not well supported by their authors because there is little to no incentive to make sure the tool is always working and available for use. There can even be disincentives to the authors, paying for bandwidth or API usage without compensation from users of the tools. If programmers can either be assigned to work on a client’s site or to fix/update the free tool, the client obviously comes first. Paid tools on the other hand give an incentive to the authors for support and maintainenance of the tool because users expect tools they pay for to work and be reliable. Using programmer resources on the part of the tool author to fix/update the tools pays for itself in maintaining and attracting paid tool clients.

2) Accuracy: Although some free tools are accurate, there is little motivation for free tool authors to improve and update algorithms, sources, and other factors involved in determining the results of the tools. Authors with paid tools are motivated to stay on top of their tools and when accuracy is in question, they’ll hear about it from their clients, and have motivation to make changes.

3) Convenience: We’ve all been there, trying to find that one tool I used that one time at that one site. Our paid toolset, SoloSEO, makes it much more convenient for you to use your tools. One site to bookmark, one login to remember, and you’ve got access to all the SEO tools you’ll need under one roof.

4) Integration: Having free SEO tools scattered all over the web is not only a hassle, but there’s no chance for integrating these tools together. SoloSEO has put together an integrated system for managing keywords, link building, and content tracking. You can use keyword tools directly from keyword and link lists, for example. The tools and lists work together so you’re not copying and pasting from an Excel file all day long.

5) Innovation: It’s hard to innovate when there is no driving force. When I am working on new tools or reports I am motivated by our potential to attract new subscribers and keep current subscribers happy. With free SEO tools, typically the author has bigger fish to fry than to think of new free SEO tools, or how to make them better.

6) Support: The authors of free tools usually give little to no support for their tools. They have regular jobs that actually pays them, and these types of things are more important for his/her time. With Paid SEO Tools, you have support from either the authors or a support team in case of problems or issues that come up. With a paid SEO tool you will usually get a response back within 24 hours, but with free SEO tools it is up to the convenience of the author.

7) Feedback: With paid SEO tools you should find that your feedback really counts and may even be implemented into the tools. With free SEO tools, the authors again have little motivation to put time and resources into something that does not generate revenue. At SoloSEO we have a feedback form right in the system. We try to answer all questions within 24 hours, and we have implemented more than a dozen suggestions from our customer base.

Keeping Track: Almost all free SEO tools do not offer to save your data, as this takes up resources on their server. Paid SEO tools want to make the tools as convenient and as helpful as possible, and so paid tools are more apt to save data, preferences, and the like.

9) Ease of Use: Paid SEO tools are very concerned with the interface, its appearance and functionality. You can easily find many U-G-L-Y free SEO tools that make you shiver just by looking at the form to use the tool. SoloSEO utilizes a simple yet functional interface, similar to WordPress admin, in having a main menu and sub menu to give you quick and simplified access to all the tools available.

10) Data Resources: Free SEO tools use free data resources to supply their results. SoloSEO (a paid SEO toolset), provides WordTracker data for keyword research (that alone is worth $57/month), and access additional data from Google, Alexa, and Amazon all in one system.

Now I’m not trying to say that all free SEO tools are bad, but I am saying there are inherent problems in the “model” of free SEO tools. I’ve also been trying to not make this an advertisement of SoloSEO, so forgive me if I failed, but there are areas where SoloSEO really fills a void in terms of powerful, integrated SEO tools (that’s why we started SoloSEO frankly). If you haven’t tried SoloSEO yet, now’s a great time to start a 2-week trial. It’s only $29/month after the free trial and you can manage 5 domains for that price ($4/each/month after). SoloSEO really pays for itself by saving you time, making you more efficient, and you even get access to data like WordTracker that you may already be paying for.

8 comments Visited 10442 times February 22nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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New Competitive SEO Report at SoloSEO.com

Posted by Michael D Jensen on February 20th, 2007

Watching your competition is an important part of SEO and it can take quite a bit of work to stay on top of it all. We are excited to announce that SoloSEO now includes a powerful Competitive SEO Report to compare your SEO statistics and rankings with your competitors. The report is included with a membership and can even be run during a free trial of SoloSEO.

This competitive SEO report will run each month and results are sent to you via email so you don’t even need to log in after you set up the report. The report is easy to start, just fill in a few keywords and the domains of your competitors.

Once you set up the report it runs in the background, so you can continue using other tools in SoloSEO. After just a few minutes you will get an email with the completed report.

The report has three parts: 1) SEO Site Statistics, 2) Feedback on your statistics vs your competitors, and 3) Rankings of you and your competitors.

SEO Site Statistics

This report compares backlinks, pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, PageRank, and Alexa Rank. The backlinks (as reported by Yahoo) give you an idea of how you compare with your competitors in terms of quantity of backlinks. The quality of your backlinks, as well as topic relevancy and anchor text will need to be looked at separately to get the full picture (SoloSEO includes tools for this too), but this is a general metric for knowing the popularity and connectivity of a site. The pages indexed is a nice way to compare the size of your site with your competitors. More unique and quality content will always help, so this gives you a way to gauge on what you need to more effectively compete. PageRank is somewhat useful as a gauge of the quality of a site, but is by no means the all-important factor to worship in SEO. PageRank updates also only occur every several months. Alexa Rank is a gauge of the traffic your site is receiving, and like PageRank is more of a general metric than a golden Willy Wonka ticket.

Some general feedback, suggestions, and even congratulatory statements are given for each part of the SEO Site Statistics section, which is intended for beginner SEOs and non-SEOs to get an idea for what the numbers are saying to them.

The rankings of your site and your competitors are displayed for each keyword, giving you a quick and easy way to check how your site ranks versus your competitors. For now the chart uses Google for rankings, although this may expand in the future.

We are very excited about this report and the opportunities it affords you. We have been having fun running the report internally for our own companies. Having the report automatically run each month and emailed is a great feature that makes it even easier to keep track of it all.

Two other reports are also available in SoloSEO, the Keyword Rankings Report and Keyword Competion Report. The Keyword Rankings Report can now be set to automatically run weekly and monthly, which makes it even easier to keep up on your rankings for important keywords.

Try the new Competitive SEO Report, and other powerful SEO tools today by signing up for a free trial or by logging in to your account!

2 comments Visited 8988 times February 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Out SEO Your Competition

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on February 19th, 2007

We all know SEO assists a site to perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but the reasons people SEO can differ. Some just want to share their knowledge with the world and aren’t selling anything, (like in informational blogs), some want to rank as an authoritative site to increase the revenue in their AdSense campaigns, and some want to find new clients through organic search, or do better in their PPC campaigns. There are also some that are motivated by all or a combination of these motivations. For me personally it is the opportunity to find more clients, and to out-compete my competitors for those clients.

In the introduction to his seminal book On Competition, Michael Porter (recognized Harvard professor and expert in competitive studies) states:

“No company, and no country, can afford to ignore the need to compete. Every company, and every country, must try to understand and master competition” (Porter, 1998, p. i).

I come from a primarily business background, and have spent a good bit of time studying competitive analysis theory, or the use of different analytic tools to attempt to understand, predict and prepare for the strategic adjustment competitors are most likely to implement in the marketplace. It is truly a fascinating area of thought. However, each of these competitive analytic tools requires considerable amounts of time and research to make them worth anything, and even when the analysis is complete, it can only provide the researcher nothing more than a more educated guess as to what a competitor might do. Some widely used competitive analysis tools used today include: SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), Competitive Array, Game Theory (very interesting), Five-Forces, etc., just to name a few. There are even many firms that will perform the analysis for you, using a variety of these tools for a fee. Dun and Bradstreet offers small business firms information about their competitors for a fee, $9.99 per firm, for a firm analysis, $24.99 for an industry analysis and $65 for various marketing lists. Despite the inherent weaknesses of these various analysis tools, innumerable firms continue to spend all kinds of resources to run these analyses in hopes of putting themselves in a better competitive position.

Now on to why I love the online competitive world… There are certain SEO tools and techniques which provide us the opportunity to really know what our competitors are up to online, with real data. The SEs (Search Engines) have already aggregated the data, and using these SEO analysis tools properly can drastically reduce the ability of a competitor to surprise you, or make huge moves online unnoticed. Not to mention this real data reduces the need of firms to “make educated guesses” as to what their competitors are really up to. Online, the competitive marketplace is more transparent than offline, and with the increased competitive information comes the increased importance to be more competitively astute and responsive. So once competitive trends are discovered, firms need to react more quickly to address these trends, to stay ahead of the curve, and remain competitively viable. This is done by using other SEO tools which assist your site to become more competitive online, specifically in the SERPs. SoloSEO was built to not only to provide competitive intelligence tools, which efficiently watch industry competitors, but to also offer effective SEO tools, allowing firms to improve their online competitive position.

This week we will be launching a new service, which will make the competitive intelligence process more convenient and streamlined for our subscribers. We are very motivated to assist our clients become more aware of their competitors more quickly, and assist them improve the competitiveness of their sites with effective SEO tools. Please stay tuned…

Add comment Visited 4267 times February 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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