
Great question. You could adjust the formulas but I find it easier to highlight the full report (after it is populated with your data) then copy it and paste "values only" this way none of the formulas break. Then go into the navigation of google sheets and select "Data" then "Filter". You will now have filtering options on all of the headings. Then you can simple select your website and uncheck "Yes" so you only see the domains that do not link to you. Give that a shot and let me know if it works for you.
Think about what else is around you. Don’t just think about where you are; think about what’s around you. Are you a restaurant near a stadium or an airport? Encourage people to stop by after the big game, before that Ed Sheeran concert, or for a graduation celebration in your ad copy. If you’re a boutique fitness studio, advertise to people who are health-conscious and attending the farmer’s market nearby. Put these suggestions into your copy to increase in-store events.


Gather Competitive Information Secondary sources of information are recommended as an excellent starting point for developing a competitive and industry analysis. Secondary sources include information developed for a specific purpose but subsequently made available for public access and thus alternative uses. For example, books are secondary sources of information as are articles published in journals. Marketing reports offered for sale to the general public also are considered secondary sources. Although, they have been created for a purpose other than your current need, they are still excellent sources of information and data. With the ever increasing speed of document identification and retrieval through electronic means, secondary sources are not only an inexpensive source of information but are readily available soon after publication. Sources of information include:

All sorts of companies in all sorts of industries can make use of geo-targeting.  By refining the ad copy to include the city name and a reference to the current weather – for example, including the words “start sleeping cooler” in an ad during periods of hot weather – Purple Mattress, an ecommerce bedding brand has been able to generate higher click-through rates by online shoppers. In an effort to update its aging "Let's Go Places" campaign,  Toyota incorporated city-specific information into each of its Google ads, encouraging consumers to go to places and attractions near them.  Whole Foods targeted ads to the smartphones of consumers visiting nearby supermarkets, encouraging them to come to a nearby Whole Foods nearby exchange for better deals.
Attribution. Use attribution data to prove the influence of PPC on conversions either cross-channel or within the channel. For instance, you might learn that certain campaigns don’t convert well, and the instinct is to turn them off. However, if they lead to conversions in other campaigns, you’ll want to allocate budget to keep the conversion path open.
It’s good for searchers – Research indicates that searchers click on paid search ads more often than any other form of digital advertising. This means that people really don’t mind being advertised to, provided that the products and services advertised actually fit the searcher’s needs. And because we use search engines when we’re looking for products and services, the results, including the ads, are generally highly relevant to what we’re looking for. Plus, Google has developed an excellent formula for ensuring that PPC ads meet the user’s needs.
Thanks Ramon! You can easily add more tabs to input more backlink data for additional competitors and then adjust the query formula to use the new tabs. I often increase this to 10, 15 or even 20 competitors for larger clients. The beauty of Google Sheets templates is the ease in which you can make these adjustments. Let me know if you need any help with that.
Strategy is more than a bundle of cultivated tactics. When we onboard a new client, we have a whole arsenal of tools to use and reports to run that help us understand the account better. It is easy for us to pat ourselves on the back and say “this is a good strategy for learning the account!” Pardon my language when I say: That ain’t no heckin’ strategy.
Next, indicate with a check mark which of your competitors has which features. Features are fairly straightforward, either a product has a feature or it doesn't. Benefits, on the other hand, are not as simple and should only be recorded based on customer feedback. For example, company B may claim in their company literature that their copier is fast, but a user may feel otherwise. Or, company B may indeed have a copier that by industry standards is fast, but you may have a copier that's even faster. 
Geo-Fencing refers to drawing a virtual barrier around a location using your devices global positioning system (GPS) or Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is just like your virtual address.  Ads inside of geo-fenced areas can be seen on computer, tablet, or mobile devices as potential customers are browsing the web.  Technically, geo-fencing can be any size radius from a particular location, anywhere from a mile to state-wide.  But most people when they are referring to geo-fencing are looking for a very tight radius around a location.   A misconception with geo-fencing is that once inside the fence you receive push notifications, or text messages to the device, which is not accurate.   What geo-fencing does instead is show ads to the person inside the geo-fenced radius if they are browsing the web, to alert them of a local deal or the distance you are from a particular store location.

The other option is to follow up with page visitors outside of AdWords. To do this, you’ll want to create an opt-in page (like the templates above) that offers visitors something of value in exchange for their email address or other contact information. Our dishwasher vendor could offer a free guide on the best way to prolong the life of your dishwasher.

Overall score: Finally, you simply add up the scores and divide by the number of columns you have. This will give you an overall score. Then you can sort your keyword list by overall score and voilà, your keywords that are likely to perform the best for you bubble up to the top. You can weight each column if you like based on which factors are most important to you.
John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, one of the top digital marketing agencies in the nation and the number 698 fastest growing company in the USA in the 2017 Inc. 5000. As a digital marketing expert and in-demand public speaker, Lincoln is consistently named one of the top influencers in the industry. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Search Engine Land "Search Marketer of the Year" award. Ignite Visibility crafts custom digital marketing strategies for clients, including services in SEO, social media, paid media, email marketing, Amazon and more.
Every company has those dreaded competitors they cannot stand, no matter what you do they are always using your ideas and taking your potential customers. Whether you are a local, national, or international company there is probably someone in your company, specifically the sales and marketing teams, that can quickly rattle off your top competitors as well as what differentiates them from you.

As I consult and train people on Internet marketing, I typically ask whether keyword research is a strategic function or a tactical one. Often people think it’s tactical because of the tedious nature of the work. I submit it is not only strategic but also foundational to all marketing channels you will use. If you take the time up front to outline a killer keyword strategy, you will find your campaigns will be higher performing and more successful. In this column, I will outline seven tips for developing a killer keyword strategy you can use to take your campaigns to a higher level.
Also, click on the “CTR” checkbox at the top of the graph. That will display a line graph overlay that displays your click-through rate for search. If you see that it’s dropped recently, it might be a good idea to check your meta description tags to make sure that they haven’t changed. It’s possible that people aren’t as “tempted’ to click on your link in search results because there’s not a very good description of the page contents.
Now as searchers start to gather information, they begin to refine their search and start using more specific terms. Then finally they begin to use very specific terms. They have switched from information gathering to a transactional mode. If someone searches on the term “canon eos mark III,” what does that suggest about their intent? That they have done their research and are ready to buy. So do you send them to your home page? Absolutely not. You need to send them to your product page that has the product, its features, maybe related products, the price, and most importantly the “buy now” button. They don’t need more information; they’re probably price shopping and are looking for a trusted source with the best price.
Say our real estate marketing business really starts to blow up. We make a few new hires and start to divide Manhattan up into regions, with each new employee responsible for a new section. Each one is responsible for marketing within their region. We can easily carve out an “excluded” area within any local awareness region to, for example, exclude a particular zip code that we’re not responsible for from our ad’s targeting. That lets us save money by not targeting customers that we don’t really want to be attracting:
Your conclusion should be presented to other business stakeholders especially when you’ve decided the next steps. For example, you may alter your Product Roadmap as a result of the competitor analysis. Sales and marketing teams may benefit from summaries that contrast your product with key competitors and emphasise your product’s strengths so that they can take this message to market.
On the other hand, version B not only communicates the valueof the cyber security business (protecting other business’s data from hackers and cyber attacks), but also acknowledges the potential customer. The copy in version B also addresses the fact that what the viewer is likely looking for in such a company is a sense of security, and caters to that with the words “protect” and “safe”.
Use Google Keyword Planner and your list of potential search ideas to create a list of terms/phrases that align with your brand and that, ideally, aren’t highly competitive. Google ranks competitiveness in Keyword Planner, seen above. You can also get an idea of how competitive a keyword search is by looking at the price of the suggested Adwords bid. Competitive search terms are typically much harder to rank for.

2. Voice Search Comes into Its Own: It’s time to start optimizing your ads for voice search: The ease of use and prevalence of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, as well as Google’s Voice Search (“OK Google…”) make using vocal search utterly quick and convenient. Voice search accounted for 20 percent of mobile searches in 2016, according to a Kleiner Perkins study quoted by CNN. Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home are on many Christmas Wish Lists this year. Grab the voice searcher’s attention by using the first person question format in your ads and content. Most voice searches are geographically specific, so use correct and popular names for your local neighborhood(s), city, county, and region in your PPC ads.
Take advantage of location extensions and call extensions to make it as easy as possible for local prospects to contact and reach you. When location extensions are enabled for your search ads, prospects in your specified, targeted areas will see your street address. A call extension, alternatively, provides either your phone number or a direct link to a phone line. Landing pages are often referred to as the leakiest part of the marketing funnel, and extensions such as these help cut out the middle ground and prevent the lead leakage.
When an ad mentions the target customer’s region or city, such as Chicago, this approach has proven to deliver a much better response rate than running a national campaign that doesn’t include a location. “It goes back to the messaging aspect,” Fritz explains. “Your geolocation ad targeting is much more effective. That’s because it connects more deeply with prospective customers than a generic advertisement. You are running a social advertisement that is very specific to someone in a particular place. This could be Cleveland, New York City, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, or whatever area you have targeted.”

If your competitors are using a social network that you may not be on, it's worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help your business, too. To determine if a new social media platform is worth your time, check your competitor's engagement rates on those sites. First, visit the following sites to see if your competition has an account on these platforms:
To give you an extra boost, we’re also giving away two landing-page templates designed especially for PPC campaigns. These templates have powered hundreds of successful PPC campaigns, and with a little customization (some coding’s required if you’re not a LeadPages® customer), they can do the same for you. Click below to download them now, and we’ll talk about why they work and how to use them in a bit:
John Boyd, a famous military strategist, thought a lot about how competitors change the way that we strive for our own goals. The concept he popularized around the OODA loop talked about making decisions faster than your competition as a way to win. It was also key to understanding what your competitor values so you can find other ways than fighting directly.
According to Nielsen Norman Group’s “User Experience Careers” survey report, 61% of UX professionals prefer to do the competitive analysis for their projects. But what exactly is competitive analysis? In simple language, competitive analysis is nothing but a method to determine how your competitors are performing, what they are offering and how well they are doing it.

It has also become remarkably difficult to distinguish direct competitors from indirect threats - and when you do, you find competition often comes from surprising places. In fact, competition in the SaaS and tech industries is increasingly coming from indirect competitors, whose core technology enables them to invade adjacent verticals and industries.
Using negative keywords in PPC campaigns is an often overlooked but highly effective strategy. These are keywords that you add to your campaign that you don’t want to target. Adding negative keywords will let Google know that it should not show your campaigns in searches that include these words. This is a crucial step in order to make sure that you don’t waste money by displaying your ad for irrelevant searches.
Reason: If visitors find your website with a certain keyword but you have a high bounce rate, that’s enough to know that something is not going as it should. Ask yourself and test if it is a problem with content quality, appearance, etc. There is often more than one explanation for a high bounce rate, and there could be more than one solution. If you are totally lost at this point, a feedback session with five potential users might provide some insightful ideas.
Once your campaign is established you must review the analytics data and look for ways to optimise the campaign. Setting clear goals and measurements are absolutely critical to allow the campaign to be reviewed against each stated goal, in which you will consider ad performance, keyword performance, ad placement performance, campaign structure, and campaign targeting. This chapter highlights how to analyse and optimise your PPC campaign for success.
Typically, VCs make just one bet in a product category to avoid cannibalizing their investments. You are either an Uber or Lyft investor. This is a commonly accepted view in the Valley. If you see a VC’s name missing from the category you’re competing in, they might be a good candidate to approach for fundraising. They missed the chance to invest in your competitor, but now they have the opportunity to work with you.
Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B or, better yet, healthcare, isn't quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. In this video, we'll cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize.