Competitive Analysis: Online Competition Vs. Offline Competition

Who are your competitors? Most companies we deal with answer this question quickly. They will name three or four companies who they consider to be their biggest competitors. The competitors they name are almost always their offline competitors not their online competitors.

You might be thinking this makes a lot of sense in your world as SEO consultants. After all that is why companies are coming to you to figure out how to compete in the online world. And this is true for the most part. Occasionally someone will ask if we mean online or offline but not too often. We don’t qualify the question at the beginning by asking who their main online competitors are because we really need to know both: online and offline competitors. They are the best resource to tell us who their offline competitors are. We look at the online marketing activities of the offline competitors both to determine their level of online marketing activity and to compare their web site to our clients. We learn a lot from this exercise; good content ideas, key phrase ideas and deep linking opportunities to recommend for our clients web site.

Our research determines who their online competitors are. The first step is keyword research. We don’t start online competitive research until we know what key phrases we will be optimizing for. We then determine the top 10 websites they are competing against in Google, Yahoo and MSN for each keyphrase both in the organic listings and sponsored listings. We choose five competitors for both organic and sponsored listings based predominantly on this information after weighting of the results.

The major things we look at for each competitor web site are:

1) On page optimization – page title, meta description, keywords, etc.
2) Off page optimization – blogs, social media optimization, video optimization, etc.
3) Linking – the number of external links, quality of these links, etc.

The goal is to see what the competition is doing and determine the best search engine optimization strategies to implement to get our clients web site to achieve higher search engine rankings than their competition.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Change in Google Keyword Tool

Google has made a very welcome change in their keyword tool which until recently was only available to adwords account holders. They have made this an external tool which can be accessed at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

The keyword tool now reports search volume. Previously it only showed bars next to the keyphrase showing search volume. There wasn’t any way to quantify this. It now shows numbers. Google’s adwords.blogspot.com states “you’ll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network”.

This is big change for a couple of reasons. Google has always been very private about sharing search volume numbers so this is a major policy change. Another reason is to have real search volume numbers even if they are approximate. The two other keyword analysis tools used predominantly by SEO’s are keyword discovery and wordtracker. Both of these tools estimate search volume and the big unknown has always been the accuracy of these estimates because they only gather data on a small percentage of the actual searches being done. A guess is being made based on these estimates.

Google commands about 78% of the global market for search right now. It has access to a huge amount of data on real searches. Now that the external keyword tool shows search volume internet marketers for the first time have real data to base their keyphrase decisions on. This information can be used to drive organic or pay per click search campaigns.

It is too early to determine the accuracy of the approximate number of search queries the tool is reporting. There is a lot of skepticism as to google’s motives for the unleash of this data. Time will tell how it changes how keyword research is performed and how it will effect the two major paid keyword research players: Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.