Caribou Coffee Versus Starbucks

In order to test the application of SEO to intelligence analysis, I decided to do a comparison of two different popular coffee shops, Caribou Coffee and Starbucks, using the information derived from SEO Websites. I had originally wanted to use two different suspected terrorist sites to collect data on, however I chose not to follow through with this as I thought it best not to visit those sites while I was going through the security clearance process.

I chose these particular coffee sites because of their similarity in product. Not only do they both provide similar food and drink products, they both offer customers a trendy place to enjoy those products. My collection requirements centered on the kind of information I would want to collect if I were examining the terrorist Websites. In particular, I focused on collecting page rank information, site background information, number of sites linking in, visitor demographic, and visitor behavior information.

In order to organize the information collected, I decided to enter the information into a page on my Google Site. The page used a two-column layout, allowing me to compare the two coffee sites’ information side-by-side. I used a Snapz Pro X, a screen capture software designed for Macs, to save any relevant graphics as pictures. The pictures were then embedded into each column of the Google Site. To compare the amount of site changes for the two coffee companies, I inputted the information into an Excel spreadsheet and created a graph to visually display the information. Once all the information was displayed in a side-by-side fashion, I was easily able to compare the two sets of information to find similarities and differences.

Analysis of the two coffee Websites revealed many similarities and some expected differences.

One of the major differences between the two Websites was between page ranking. Caribou Coffee’s page rank was only 44,860, attracting 42.2k visitors a month worldwide...