Analysis of Top-Ranking Sites and Pages

Analysis of Top-Ranking Sites and Pages

There are many reasons to analyze top-ranking sites, and particularly those that rank at the top in your market space. They may be your competitors’ sites—which is reason enough to explore them—but even if they are not, it can be very helpful to understand the types of things these sites are doing and how those things may have helped them get their top rankings. With this information in hand, you will be better informed as you decide how to put together the strategy for your site.

Let’s start by reviewing a number of metrics of interest and how to get them:

1. Start with a simple business analysis to see how a particular company’s business overlaps with yours and with other top-ranking businesses in your market space. It is good to know who is competing directly and who is competing only indirectly.

2. Find out when the website was launched. This can be helpful in evaluating the site’s momentum. Determining the domain age is easy; you can do it by checking the domain’s whois records. Obtaining the age of the site, however, can be trickier. You can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to get an idea of when a site was launched (or at least when it had enough exposure that the Internet Archive started tracking it).

3. Determine the number of Google results for a search for the site’s domain name (including the extension) for the past six months, excluding the domain itself. To get this information, search for <theirdomain.com> -site:<theirdomain.com> in Google. Then append &as_qdr=m6 to the end of the results page URL and reload the page (note this only works with Google Instant).

4. Find out from Google Blog Search how many posts have appeared about the site in the past month. To do this, search for the domain in Google Blog Search, then append &as_qdr=m1 to the end of the results page URL and reload the page. 5. Obtain the PageRank of the domain’s home page as reported by the Google toolbar or a third-party tool.

6. Use an industrial-strength tool such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or LinkResearchTools to analyze backlink profiles. These tools provide a rich set of link data based on their own crawl of the Web, including additional critical details such as the anchor text of the links.

7. If you are able to access a paid service such as Experian’s Hitwise or comScore, you can pull a rich set of additional data, breaking out the site’s traffic by source (e.g., organic versus paid versus direct traffic versus other referrers). You can also pull information on their highest-volume search terms for both paid and organic search.

8. Determine the number of indexed pages in each of the two major search engines, using site:<theirdomain.com>.

9. Search on the company brand name at Google, restricted to the past six months (by appending &as_qdr=m6 to the results page URL, as outlined earlier).

10. Repeat the preceding step, but for only the past three months (using &as_qdr=m3).

11. Perform a Google Blog Search for the brand name using the default settings (no time frame).

12. Repeat the preceding step, but limit it to blog posts from the past month (using &as_qdr=m1).

Of course, this is a pretty extensive analysis to perform, but it’s certainly worthwhile for the few sites that are the most important ones in your space. You might want to pick a subset of other related sites as well.

As valuable as website metrics are, brand names can sometimes provide even more insight. After all, not everyone is going to use the domain name when talking about a particular brand, nor will they all link. Thus, looking at brand mentions over the past few months can provide valuable data.