In this final leg of the SEO Dashboard tour, you sharpen your client presentation skills — building urgency so they don’t miss these critical opportunities. 

You get two views of traffic share:

Both charts illustrate your domain’s piece of the pie: of all clicks captured amongst you and your competitors, how much of that audience did you command?

This is based on total traffic of these competitive domains, combined.

Pie Chart

Line Graph

How do you present this?

Talking about the competition—especially supported by facts —can be a powerful fire under your client. This particular factor plays a critical part in making Recon Files “reports that sell for you.”

Consider the selling story you’ve created so far. You started by showing your clients the value they gained through your work, in terms that relate to their bottom line. Then you enticed them with targets of opportunity within your reach right on the tail of establishing your place as someone who delivers.

If that wasn’t enough to get them to say yes to giving you more business, there’s one more tool on your belt to close the deal.

Thanks to your client’s competitors, you gain a powerful story that drives their sense of urgency and makes you appear more indispensable than ever before.

Delivery—Drive Urgency

Your snapshot of the most recent standings comes from the pie chart, but the timeline helps establish just how pressing the urgency is.

Can you imagine the urgency felt by the SEO manager representing the client with the red line in this chart? It might look like tough news on the surface, what with their once-huge gap eroding, but it’s a tremendous opportunity for action.

It goes something like this:

Blue Competitor is gaining. My plan is to improve your rankings on valuable, highly searched keywords so we can capture more traffic. (idea sinks in)

And oh by the way, here is exactly how I plan to do it. I happen to have a list of the keywords most likely to deliver big when we gain positions on them.

If you can commit $7,000 to me over the next few months, I plan to improve these specific keywords that should give us this much traffic before Blue Competitor beats us to it and locks in on next month.

CSTV.com has not dropped below a 50% share in the past year. Look at it this way. For all of the traffic that comes to these sites, at leastevery other person is visiting cstv.com’s page.

That kind of dominance can be numbing if the leader seems untouchable. Why even try? But look at the remaining pack.

Ncaa.com leads the domains fighting for the remaining traffic, and they’re enjoying a respectable lead. After a dip last month, ncaa.com is picking up steam again in traffic share while the others stay flat.

This trend perspective might play a role in planning sessions, offering a target goal based on where you’ve been.

Take cues from the commentary, too. NCAA.com’s traffic share is healthy but doesn’t touch the dominance of CSTV.com’s reach. However, just relying on the pie chart alone, we would have missed the insight that NCAA’s gains come at the expense of both CSTV and ACC.com.

Look to these domains as targets. Options you can act on now:

1.  Run a Recon Files report on your competing domains.

What would you do differently when you knew which keyword groups were their most successful, which new pages they rank on this month, or their site’s most powerful sections?

2.  Research these sites’ SpyFu data

Drill down into specific pages that appear as organic results. Understand the content that have given them traction. This focused attention reveals areas that will help you build your value next month.

Following the more detailed competition charts, this rolls up the traffic share and click changes into a summary bar.

Unlike the first summary bar, this one stays in place regardless of the mood—positive, neutral, or negative—surrounding the results. Why? Best foot forward ideas are important to assert your value, but sales thrive with a bit of nervousness from constant competition.

We want to keep that in the forefront, alerting your clients to threats moving into your space.

Competitors–there is a lot to be learned and gained from these unwitting advisors.