Sample of a Professional SEO Analysis Report

Hey gang,

I believe that in the SEO business, there are too few examples of what a complete competition and ranking analysis report should look like. I've created the most comprehensive report I could for a search market sector, and I thought it was worth sharing with the SEO community.

http://www.socengine.com/seo/guide/commercial-real-estate-searches.html

The report is very detailed and measures the following:

1. 24 search terms in the industry
2. The top 10 results from each (240 pages)
3. Re-Occurence of pages/sites
4. Statistics like BLs, PR, size, age, allinanchor position, etc.

It attempts to make several conclusions and even a hypothesis about ranking criteria. I'd love to hear your feedback and see what other things you do for your reports, etc.

Hopefully this can help serve as a good example for SEOs new to the business on how to examine the search results for more information on how to succeed for yourself/your clients.

Holy moly! Randfish. When they start creating academic seats for SEO work...I expect to see you up there.

Lots of work and lots of in depth information. Also I worked in the commercial real estate industry for a long time. I'm more familiar with the first topic then all the lending phrases...but somewhat familiar with them also. I recall when a few of the sites ranked in the top ten for commercial real estate were getting started...Pikenet and loopnet among them were pure internet plays. They wouldn't be around without the web.

In that vein I'm surprised at what is missing in the the commercial real estate top ten and surprised at the results for the top ten for commercial finance.

For commercial real estate neither the largest property owners, developers, or brokers are amongst the top ten. CBREllis is ranked 14th and is probably the largest commercial broker and possibly one of the largest property managers. I didn't see any of the largest owners identified for the phrase, nor significant developers.

Among the largest commercial lenders I saw GE and Bank of America. Many large lenders were missing.

These are side comments reflecting my knowledge of the industry not on the elements of high ranking for a phrase.

In that vein though I add a thought to your analysis and insights. Not only might age be a factor, but it could be that an age related effort that reflects consistent focus on web ranking either from a very early stage or from whenever the effort was initiated as opposed to a "half hearted effort" might have some bearing. It would be interesting to investigate the long term effort of certain sites with regard to their current ranking.

It might well be that the "answers" are in the details; i.e. quality of factors (links), unknown elements, age of links, etc. that were not tested.

I also noted that for some terms (the hard money loan terms, there were more sites within the top ten that were started post 2000 than others, somewhat reflecting the more recent popularity of the term. Also within the top ten there were sprinkled sites that were both newer and smaller, as you noted. Of note steelheadedcapital was generally smaller in size, backlinks, and younger in age than competitors yet tended to rank high for allinanchor. Could it be that certain factors that played well in the past assisted older sites in retaining high rankings while newer sites used more current methodologies (such as allinanchor) that also served to work.

This all may suggest there is more than one way to get a top ranking.

In certain regards I suspect that the major volume of business in both the commercial real estate business and the commercial lending business are hardly dependant on the web which is reflective of how it is very much an "old boy industry". I would be very interested in the volume of business that these companies do that stems from the web versus pre-web methods.

It might be interested to do sample in depth backlink and internal linking work on a few sites with very different characteristics to see if there are other factors that might play here.

All in all great work. I'd keep looking at these results and try and turn up other sets of reasons that might reflect high rankings. What I get out of this is that "there may be more than one way to skin the cat".

Dave

I'd love to see more comments on this. Its very comprehensive in terms of analysing a particular industry and keyword phrases for that industry. The initial thought that grabbed me was that there seems to be more than one way to get to the top of the rankings.

Randfish identified age as a common characteristic from among high ranking sites. I've personally had success with anchor text and seen it work elsewhere...but he identifies that its not a key component of high ranking across the board in this analysis.

I'm just curious as to how the rest of you view this information.

Dave

EP,

Hate to say it, but I doubt there will be much feedback due to the season All the pros are on holiday (hopefully).

I do, however, think the anchor text discussion is an important one from a theoretical approach standpoint. For example, the connection you propose between stemming and anchor text is a very good one, and is due for some testing. I'll see what I can come up with.

Guys, this is all way over my head My IQ seems to stop at 156... LOL

Geez Wit; with your great responses I thought your IQ was at least 166 which is still 2 to three times mine even after eating a week's worth of brain food! And you have such a nice survey of ways to determine backlinks.

Randfish put together a large and comprehensive analysis of top ten competitors for a variety of related phrases for a certain industry. Ignoring the industry stuff, what struck me, especially considering the comments at the bottom of the analysis, which identified age as a common characteristic of high rankings, was that there are exceptions to that factor.

Also with respect to allinanchor, I had commented to Randfish in a PM, (not referenced) that in some cases there appear to be high rankings for phrases wherein they have high allinanchor ranking for a stemmed phrase not the phrase identified. (I've seen that in my area and some other areas. - I suggest that in addition to an allinanchor ranking one might check rankings against an "almost anchor text/allinanchor ranking...or serps versus allinanchor ranking and/or stemmed versions of the allinanchor ranking).

But most of all I'm wondering what fresh eyes see in this large amount of data...especially those of someone with an enormous IQ and very many helpful comments.

Merry Xmas.

Dave

I have too say Randfish I alway enjoy reading about what your working on. I have gone through your site and read a bunch articles and use your tools all the time. Thank you for your input.

Thanks for the feathers EP, although in some parts of that sentence I was only joking... ;) ;)

Anyway, FYI, Googling for allinanchor:~somestemmedkeyword etc. DOES actually seem to work. Then again it might be just a tad TOO vague and uncontrollable*)... IF I try allinanchor:~ping pong I get lots of results mentioning tennis as well as table tennis. But it might come in handy...

*) can't add quotes for example...

P.S.: good thing PK taught me the word "stemming" a couple of days ago. Otherwise I would have looked like a complete a55.

Yeah wit, there are a lot of terms thrown around that leave me in the dust. First time I heard about stemming I thought it had to do with plants. I'm not a programmer. I had to look up things like IMHO etc. to have any idea what you guys were speaking about. I had to read your last sentence a couple of times to get what you were saying. Happy new year.

Dave

Impressive! Makes my typical analysis in Word look pretty amateurish!

How much of the report in generated automatically, or is it mostly done by hand? Are you using a program like Crystal reports?