Its a big old bad world out there & irrespective of how big or small your clients website offering may be, they have competition. Competition that is continuously evolving to try and stay ahead of each other through content creation.

As SEO’s and search marketing folk we evolve to stay that one step ahead, keeping an eye on the competition for our clients is a must, delivering actionable insights in our reports is a must.

How Do We Keep an Eye on Our Competitors Content?

There are umpteen ways to achieve this but one of the ways I have been using more and more is through the use of RSS feeds delivered into customized decks. The point of this being that myself and clients only have to skim read one page instead of having to resort to navigating to each competitors website in turn.

Of course “Google Reader” may well be meandering its way to your lips right now but of course not every client has a Google Profile nor the time to go and set up subscriptions to every competitors website and that’s just for those competitors that have an RSS feed, what of those that don’t have one? Yep I have that covered.

The Customized Deck

There are a couple of ways to pull the RSS feeds & they both use WordPress to achieve it. WordPress as you may already know has RSS built in the other way is through the MultiFeedSnap plugin both methods allow for multiple RSS feeds with MultiFeedSnap having the slight edge because of code hacks you can apply.

So what of the sites that do not have RSS feeds?

Again there are a few solutions to create RSS feeds from static content but by far and away the most user friendly way for me is Dapper with a simple UI to extract the elements you want to create feeds for.

How does creating RSS feeds for our competition really benefit our clients?

Well if you have competitors that update prices through their own vendors on a daily basis it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on those to compare against your own clients offering.

How does this all relate to SEO/SEM?

Plain and simple you get an edge into seeing what the competition is up to and provide better content recommendations back to your clients with the obvious benefits of having more quality content.

An example in the wild?

We all spend an extraordinary amount of time reading up on SEO that has been channelled through twitter, facebook et al but I thought I would make my life easier by setting up a single deck to browse all ofthe latest posts from my regular haunts in one place so I created SEO Bloggers which works by using the built in RSS from WordPress.

As a start up, the biggest pressure you face is time. Time to gain traffic before you run out of money, time to beat your competitors to market, time to find the time to fix the million and one bugs on your site, whilst also deciding on new features, cutting out the parts that don’t work, and even at times remembering to eat, sleep and wash. Well, two out of three aint bad.

Anyway, at some point, you’ll come to a realisation that you need users. Actually, seeing some of the prices paid in Silicon Valley, sometimes you just need a hot tub and beer cooler, but assuming you’re not in with the money crowd, you’re going to need to get some people to come to your website, download your app or play your game.

By that stage, however, it might be too late. If you start to try to build your web visibility at the moment you actually need traffic, you’re going to be too late – you’ll get traffic, but not when you actually need it. Lucky for you, then, that you’re here now, and you can build in a search visibility plan for your site from the very start. Brilliant!

There is a tendency to think that the best route to traffic is to create a big splash in tech blogs, start up sites, with a big PR campaign or a flashy launch. This, however, is a case of confirmation bias – because this is the most obvious part of a campaign, there’s an assumption that this is the key to success. It’s not – it’s just a part.

A mixed search marketing campaign is the best strategy for start-ups. First, though, I want to talk about the consensus in the SEO industry about site age. The story goes, Google loves and old domain, an old site. Look at the ones that have been around for ages, they are the best in the search rankings.

Again, confirmation bias.

It’s really not a question of the age of a domain benefitting a site, but rather the case that the longer a site has been around, the more links it will have had directed to it. Broadly speaking, more links, better rankings.

And so, this has never really been challenged, because, well, getting a site up early is still the most important thing you can do. Get some content on there, establish some relevancy, make sure all your on page optimisation is in order (there are a million and one blogs that will tell you the top five best things to do to your website, so I’m not even going to bother chasing that rabbit), and start to build some links.

Which ties into your PR strategy – creating links and driving traffic. And you can augment it with paid search traffic, too. The point is, none of this is impossible unless you think about, and plan your approach to getting traffic onto your website six to nine months before you think you’ll actually need it. Search marketing should be at the core of your business plan, under the section ‘customer acquisition’, and not just an afterthought.

Damain Koblintz is part of the search engine optimisation team at Vertical Leap, a search engine marketing company based in Portsmouth, Hampshire.