Assessing Search Marketing Competition

Introduction

If you know anything about digital marketing, you know that getting a feel for the competition is pivotal to success. It’s important to collect as much information about your top 3 or 4 competitors as possible, especially when it comes to search marketing or SEO. You can improve your own digital marketing strategy by understanding the keywords that competitors are using, their account structure, as well as any advertising partners they may have. We wanted to extend your assessment of the competition by elaborating on some things in search engine results pages or SERPs.

Pay Per Click Ads

We touched on this briefly the other day with our post on online examples of search marketing, but if you haven’t seen it, then you should be aware of the advertisements that are placed at the top and right side of Google search results when typing in a keyword phrase like “st. louis digital marketing consultants.” You might see something like this:

There are a couple things to take note of in the image. First, you’ll see that a lot of the phrases in the ads have copy that correlates with the search query. The phrases here and copy in the ads should have weight on what you’ll consider in your own search marketing campaign. Secondly, a lot of PPC ads can give you an idea the terms competitiveness as well as how many people are spending money in SEO. Remember, PPC is a great short term strategy in SEO, and it’s a great way to get small businesses on top of search results while their long-term SEO strategies are being executed.

Complete Phrases

The more PPC ads you see with the full phrase you searched for, the more competition. In the example above, you can see that the third, sixth, and ninth ad positions have the term “digital marketing” in the ad copy. A good practice is to glance at the organic listings too. They often give you an idea of how companies are focused on the exact term you’ve searched for.

Bold Keywords

Focus your attention on how many bolded words you see for the search term and how often long-tailed keywords are tethered. Bold words in each page result’s link indicate that someone has been optimizing the pages. A lot of the bolded links are meta tags, so the more often you see them in an ad or listing, the more often site owners have been placing keywords in meta tags.

Local

All of the major search engines interpret some searches as local results. As explained in Get Found Online in Your Town, these listings show companies that have localized their businesses by getting listed on their extended networks. Search engines have ways of knowing your location, through IP addresses, your set location on browsers, and you search query. In reference to the above image, that particular query did not trigger local results to appear in the search results. My guess, the query phrase didn’t correlate well enough to the local index and “digital marketing consultants” isn’t exactly a brick-n-mortar retailer, restaurant, or hotel.

Why is competitiveness important? For competitive terms, creating a few optimized landing pages isn’t enough. You must have links pointing to the site, and you also might need more content pages. For less competitive terms, you may be able to create good landing pages and rank well. Having a good PPC manager is also a big deal when trying to rank higher in search.