The Competition and SEO

Next on the agenda is to get a better idea of competition I'll be dealing with before launching my little idea. I generally try to subscribe to the Amazon/Bezos theory of not worrying about your competition and focusing completely on making life easier for your customer. In my case, my keys to success include a lot of SEO and very little functionality. As a result, there's only so much I can do to make the user experience better, while there is a lot I can do in helping people find the site. As such, I'm going to use this opportunity to see who I will be competing with for search result rankings, while taking notes on how they are accomplishing their high rankings. Let's go through this step by step.

Tangent: Before we begin, I should mention that there's a reason I'm focusing so much on Google. That is because Google basically has a monopoly on search engine traffic. I think any effort at this point to optimize for Yahoo or MSN or Ask.com would be a waste of time. Sad, but true. On with the show...

Step 1. Determine keywords and phrases I plan to target (at least to start)

Coming up with a solid list of target keywords and phrases is probably the most important thing you can do in any SEO effort. With miss-aligned keywords you risk wasting a lot of time and resources, working in the wrong direction for little gain. With that in mind, my first stop was Google AdWords Keyword Tool:


Having entered the all of the possible search terms and phrases I could think of that users would use when attempting to look up international calling codes, I got back the following terms (in order of popularity):

• calling from
• international code(s)
• calling international
• international call(s)
• calling code(s)
• how to call from
• international dialing
• dialing code(s)
• dial international
• international dialing codes
• international phone calls
• international telephone
• call from usa
• calling uk

With this list, I can now begin to understand who the competition will be, and optimizing my efforts to drive traffic from these searches. I'll also add that this list is in no way final. But it's a great start.

Step 2. See who's winning the results for these keywords (and make a list of the competition)

Doing a manual Google search for each of these terms, I end up with a very small set of consistent winners:

1. www.countrycallingcodes.com (#1 for calling from, international codes, calling international, international call(s), calling code(s), international dialing, dialing code(s), dial international, international dialing codes, international phone calls, call from usa)
2. www.kropla.com/dialcode.htm (#1 for international code, how to call from, international telephone)
3. www.howtocallabroad.com (#2 for most of searches)

Just like that, we have a very useful list of the competition.

Step 3. Determine how hard it will be to win those keywords

Next I want to figure out how good a job these sites are doing at their SEO efforts, and how likely I am to unseat them. To help in this effort, I used a number of online services that give you insight into this very thing (for www.countrycallingcodes.com):

1. website.grader.com: This tool gives you a high level grade on the SEO efforts of the site. It got an 84/100. Not bad, but at least it isn't in the 90's.
2. SEOmoz Linkscape: Told me the site has 70k links pointing to the domain, spread across nearly 2k domains. Scary.
3. SEOmoz Term Extrator: Found that they are targeting the following keywords primarily: international, country, codes, calling codes, international calling
4. SEOmoz Pagerank: Ouch, they've got a PageRank of 7. Not good. Found that the other two competitors (www.howtocallabroad.com and www.kropla.com) have PageRank's of 6. Good for them!

Next I looked at the number of links pointing back to each of the three competitors:

1. Links pointing to www.countrycallingcodes.com: 1190 (including nytimes.com, crap!)
2. Links pointing to www.howtocallabroad.com: 68 (nice)
3. Links pointing to www.kropla.com/dialcode.htm: 321 (not bad)

Last but not least, a quick peek at the meta tags for www.countrycallingcodes.com:

• Meta Description: "Country Codes for International long distance calling made easy! Check all Country Calling Codes and Phone Area Codes FREE. Every phone country code and area code is updated. Call from one area to another in seconds. Fast and Free!"
• Meta Keywords: "country codes,country code,area codes,usa country code,international dialing,international calling"

I also found that www.howtocallabroad.com has no real meta tags on the front page, but they have really strong keywords and descriptions on the specific country to country pages (as does www.countrycallingcodes.com). For example, on the USA to Romania page, they have keywords specific to those countries. Sounds like they are targeting the specific niche locations, versus the generic idea of international calling codes. Genius.

Step 4. Conclusions

No doubt that www.countrycallingcodes.com is the site to beat. And it won't be easy. For god's sake, nytimes.com is linking to it! But it isn't impossible. My site will be 100x more user friendly, and maybe if nytimes.com stays in business long enough to see this to launch, I have a chance to swing them to my side.

Now that I have the due dilligence data, I need to begin to focus on actually implementing SEO best practices on my site. First I need to spend some time refreshing myself on the SEO best practices. Luckily I've saved a good set of bookmarks over the past few years. For your convenience, here's the cream of the crop:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/12-easy-mistakes-that-plague-newcomers-to-the-seo-field
• http://www.followsteph.com/2008/01/23/12-search-engine-optimizations-seo-you-should-always-do/
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seo_primer_improve_business_website_ranking.php
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html
• http://www.followsteph.com/How-to-Generate-Traffic-for-Your-Website-Sample.pdf
  

Then once I have something in place, I'll use these tools to see how far I've come:

• http://website.grader.com
  
• http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
• http://designm.ag/resources/free-page-analysis-tools/
  

As a next step, I think it would be wise for me to re-focus on the actual application for a bit. Probably think about the design a bit more, fix some bugs I've found, and get it to about 90% complete. Enough of the theoretical stuff, time to go back to coding!