Link Research Tools

Hello. I’m Christoph Cemper of CEMPER.COM. Today I want to introduce our latest tool, the Competitive Landscape Analyzer to you.

The Competitive Landscape Analyzer, or CLA from LinkResearchTools compares your domain to your competition for a keyword, for a language, for a market. It gives you the right answers to those questions at your fingertips. Instead of tapping around blindly, you can now target your SEO competition with the right actions. Fact is, not even Google has answers to those questions without further specifications. Because the answer is different for every language, every country, every topic, every keyword.

Let’s get started. Let’s see how this works. And I tell you, it’s really, really, really simple. What we want to do is, we’ll look at the cheap flights example again. And I’ll pick the pretty bad ranking site, bmibaby. And some competitors. And of course you can compare this website, bmibaby, to any URLs that you want to compare them to if you have those competitors. But we can just do with five competing pages for cheap flights, in google.com, in English. And yeah, take the URLs from this tool.

Of course, you can do this for other languages, for other markets. The good thing is here, we do have all the results here pre-populated. And if I say OK, this is not sufficient, because well, cheap flights has four pages listed here. I want to get rid of one of those and maybe add another URL. We can do that.

Let’s take the skyscanner here. Then, we decide if we want to take the backlinks from the 16 different sources and analyze them for the domain, or for the pages. That makes a difference. It makes a big difference. And especially very competitive niches, you always have to do both. But let’s start with the domain backlinks. Assign a project, we can do that later.

And then finally pick what do you want to look at. If you want to see the natural, the right ratio, for follow and nofollow links, pick the Link Status. If you want to understand, if you need more brand links, or more money keyword links, or other anchor texts, you pick this one here. If you think the links are maybe not strong enough, pick SEOmoz Rank and Majestic Rank.

And the Theme of the Page, after all you want themed links. If you don’t have enough, you probably don’t rank well. You could even pick SEOmoz parameters on authority, SEMrush parameters for the number of keywords the page is ranked for. Germany, you would use the Sistrix index, or you could just look into the number of likes and retweets those links have.

Of course, the more you pick, the slower it gets. So I don’t want to slow this video down, so I uncheck some of those. And of course, keep in mind, you can check all of them. Then put a Sitewide Links filter, we leave that now at five. Because we want to cut off those multiple links from this domain after five.

The report title, well, that’s fair, we could call this bmibaby versus cheap flights. That’s probably a good name. Or just the top ten cheap flights. And then we run the report. And here is our report that I prepared for you. Let’s look at the results right now.

The whole section about keywords profile, I’ll explain in a second. Let’s first look at the really simple facts. I mean, we followed almost 7,000 backlinks from average 700 backlinks per domain or an overall 4,300 domains. Which is quite interesting, because we see there’s a wide spread of domains, which means there’s a lot of potential links to get for you, still.

Let’s first look at the metrics that we’re interested in. If I scroll down here, we have our famous link profiles here and see that the link status, which would be follow or nofollow, we don’t have a single mention here. We don’t have a single drop link here, which is interesting. That’s quite OK. The orange one is you, bmibaby, in this case. And then we have a total average, the top five average, the top three average. And you know the closer it gets to the top, the harder it gets to achieve, so the better you want to match up. And this detail table here is only for the superheroes, but the graph should be OK.

What we see is that we’re doing pretty good. We got 6%, like the average. Let’s look at the theme. The orange ones is us, bmibaby. And top three websites, got 23% links from the travel space. We’ve got almost double the amount of links from that area, so we get a lot better theme links. And still we rank at 43 or something.

Let’s look at this, the blogs and personal pages. Looks like the top three, the whole first page, has an average of 11% links from blogs. Maybe some blog links could help here. It doesn’t look like they’re doing much in that space. In fact, from business and economy websites, they got a lot more links. We would tend to think those are more authoritative. We’ll come to that in a second.

After all, if we look at this, we do see that we do have the absolute biggest number of links from the travel space, for us as a travel site. Why don’t we rank number one? Let’s look at AC Rank. Majestic AC Rank is similar to Page Rank, except the marketing mumbo jumbo I filled in. So I preferred a lot more. Again, bmibaby is the orange one. And you could look at this chart which looks a little bit crunchy here with the numbers. But you get the idea that we do have a pretty big number of 4s and 5s here. But when it comes to the 7s the stronger links, we do have less.

In fact, if we look at the table, we only have 8% versus the average of 13%, or almost half of the percentage that the top three have. Although we do have some really nice links here with a 8, which is, again over the average. Those could be news media, business sites. These AC Rank 7 links, we really miss it. You see this here, the whole average of the first page, the first three we saw, it’s pretty high. And we could double the amount of links without sticking out. You know, with those really strong links, that are hard to get, or they cost a little money.

Anyways, somebody should do something here. If we do look at the Moz Rank, we’re pretty good and strong. Funny thing here is SEOmoz Rank is scaled different. It has a different calculation method. So it’s a different angle, a different view. And what we see here is that we’re actually pretty strong, compared to SEOmoz Rank. Compared to SEOmoz Rank, we actually do have a lot stronger links, while Majestic says our links are not as strong. This is actually one of the first times that I see SEOmoz Rank and Majestic AC Rank not correlate in a similar fashion.

What this tells us anyways is that, based on Moz Rank, our links are strong enough, and actually sticking out a little bit already. AC Rank tells us we should get stronger links. Links of AC Rank 7. That’s what I would suggest.

Is that all? Will that make us a number one? Let’s quickly look at the keywords because that’s a really funky thing. You know, the difference is brand, versus money, versus other keywords. The money keyword is flights, as you see here.

We do categorize a lot of the links already, so 64% of the anchor tags are already classified by us. But you can classify more in a separate tool, or do it right on the page.

This is a good example to learn. Flights is a keyword for cheapflights, cheapflights.com. And cheapflights.com, it is, of course, a money keyword. Airline tickets, this is not a brand, it’s a money keyword. Cheap flights ticket, is again a money keyword. Cheap flights bracket I-E, cheap flights from Ireland. Car hire, travel supermarket. Good question. I mean I would say it’s a money keyword for somebody who wants to rent cars, but we’re cheering for cheap flights, so I would give this an other. Key words are keywords like clear here or cool site. Cheap airline tickets, again, is a money, and that’s the way it goes on.

And this tool here, you can actually do it a lot easier. Flights is a money keyword. Airline tickets is a money keyword. Cheap flights is, OK, you see all these examples, British, European, cheap flights. Cheap flights, put together, is a brand. No, it’s a money keyword for bmibaby. Bmibaby is the brand. I think you get the idea.

Let’s go back and really look into this chart because that’s where the funky things happen. Based on a 64% of the classified anchor texts, we see that the brand keywords that bmibaby has, the orange one, is the highest level of all. It is a lot higher than the first page.

If we look at our money keywords, we only have 6%, versus the top three have 9%, and the top five have 90% money keywords. That looks a lot like SEO, right? What this tells us is that actually we do have a strong link profile according to Moz Rank. We could need a couple more AC Rank 7 links, but we do have really great theme links. We’re simply missing enough money keyword links.

So if we would go, and let’s say, go to some blogs and get some links for, say, cheap flights, that would not only make this profile here more natural. It would also give us more money keyword links. And we can do a lot more. I mean 6% to 9%, at least. I would say 8% to 9% is a very fair amount of money keyword links that we could do without overdoing it.

Is this always the case? No. It could be the other way around. It could be that we have over-optimized already and have 33% money keyword links. Then we would have to build brand links.

The cool thing is now we know. Did you have this information at your fingertips before? I did not. I was a tedious research shop with a lot of different research reports to compare against. This is past.

This report and this analysis for cheap flights took us 10 minutes to understand that somebody at bmibaby should really go and get some juicy money keyword links, without overdoing it. But we still got some space left.

As you see, researching into SEO competition got to a whole new level today. And the CLA, the Competitive Landscape Analyzer of the LinkResearchTools helps you do that.

Thank you very much. I’m Christoph Cemper of CEMPER.COM. Bye-bye.