I am often bewildered as to why marketers who want to maximize their visibility in search engines do not employ a similar strategy. Instead of scouting their opponents, most just jump right in with no game plan, and start implementing tactics without understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Unfortunately, taking this approach always ends the same way. They discover that with some sweat and tears, they will see improvements in visibility, traffic, and resulting business; however, soon thereafter, they become frustrated with their inability to build upon their initial success.

It is always best to devise a strategy before you begin to deploy tactics, and the best strategies always involve an element of scouting your opponent. Let’s take a look at how this is applicable to both organic search and paid search.

Organic Search

There are a number of common critical success factors that a marketer can apply to an organic search campaign. The key factors that I advise clients to focus on is rankings (although with several caveats), site elements, linking, and presence in human-edited directories.

The first factor that most clients gravitate towards is competitor rankings (what positions do my competitors hold in what search engines). This is similar to a team’s won-loss record in that it is a good indicator of success, but often does not tell the entire story. I recommend monitoring rankings on a monthly basis. Your monitoring should focus on just a couple keywords in each of the following groups: branded terms, business outcome drivers, and CEO specials (the keywords that for whatever reason your CEO likes to check in search engines every once in a while and demands an explanation if your site does not appear near the top of the results).

I would encourage you to focus more on why your competitors’ sites are ranking well and determine what you can learn from this. I would start by doing an inventory of the sites that are outranking you on the most important phrases and make a checklist. Look at the URL to determine if it contains the keyword for which you search. Is the term in the page title? How many times and in what positions does the keyword appear on the page? No single solution exists, but understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ web pages will help you formulate your strategy for outranking them.

The next item to pay attention to is external linking — which is measured by the quality and quantity of links from other websites that point to your website. Focus on which sites are linking to your competitors. Is there an opportunity for you to obtain a similar link for your site? Also, look in directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ to determine if competitors’ sites are listed, and if so, in which categories and how frequently. Can you obtain similar listings if you do not have them already?

I also recommend subscribing to a service such as comScore or Hitwise (or asking if your search agency subscribes to one) in order to obtain competitor data. These services can provide information on not only how much traffic your competitors receive and what search engines it comes from, but also overall share of search. One note of caution: for small sites, the sample size of the panels used by these services is so small, that a site with little traffic may not yield enough data to make the data reliable.