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Brian Kaminski is client services director of iProspect, where he leads the activities of the firm's client-facing search teams as well as the strategic direction of each client campaign. He works with clients such as Circuit City, Cingular Wireless, Allegis Group and Sharp Electronics. Also responsible for new employee training and development, Kaminski monitors iProspect's overall search engine marketing process, ensuring that the company continues to innovate and achieve superior results

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Search Engine Scouting: How Sizing Up the Competition is the Key to Survival

Written on
March 10th 2006
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by Brian Kaminski  |
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Paid Search

As more companies enter the arena of paid search, the space continues to become increasingly competitive. Those companies who are able to effectively master the intricacies of pay per click advertising have a considerable competitive advantage. The two key factors to monitor about your competitors are keyword strategy and ad creative.

When monitoring keywords you want to understand what types of keywords your competition is bidding on. If you identify the terms on which your competition is not participating, you have the potential to capture users that they are not. To do this you need to understand if they are bidding on only exact terms or if they are using a different match type which allows them to capture a wider audience. For example, if you are selling cars and both you and your key competitors are bidding on the term “bmw”, check the paid search results to see if they are also bidding on specific terms like ” bmw 330″, “bmw sedan”, and “2006 bmw”. Bidding on these terms might be a good way to gain a competitive advantage.

While monitoring keywords is important, the biggest opportunity to gain and leverage learnings usually exists in the area of “creative.” Creative is the text that is displayed to searchers when they view your ad in the paid search results, and it plays a huge role in determining if someone clicks on your ad, or on a competitor’s. Pay attention to your competitors’ creative. If they are emphasizing an offer such as a sale, free shipping, or a free gift then you probably need to consider a similar offer yourself — or you will quickly see the clicks gravitate towards their offers. In Google AdWords, these offers and additional details are even more important as they lead to a higher click through rate which allows you to potentially bid less than your competitors and helps to drive your all-important cost per acquisition down.

So Now What?

You have done your scouting and have assembled considerable information about your opponents’ strengths and weaknesses. How do you take this knowledge and use it to inform your strategy? It seems simple, understand in what areas your competitors are lacking and focus first on improving your performance where your competitors are falling short. This is the fastest way to improve your results. For example, you might understand that many of your competitors have large networks of partner sites which you do not have and therefore, you will never be able to approach their status in terms of link credibility. Well, (just like a football team who has a sluggish offense must build a solid defense in order to stay competitive) this means that you must make sure that you are particularly strong in URL structure, content , meta data and all other “on the page” items.

You would need to build-up this strength to offset your weaknesses. You might also find that your competitors have very strong sites, but are collectively weak on the linking front. This provides you with guidance on how to attack. Maybe you have little resources to address organic search and therefore need a larger budget to play more aggressively in paid search. The scenarios are almost countless, but understanding the other teams allows you to make informed decisions.

Success in search is predicated on a long list of factors, and unfortunately there’s no silver bullet. However, you can improve upon your weaknesses and hopefully build upon your strengths by scouting your competitors on critical variables such as: linking, directory presence, site content and structure and paid search terms and creative. Having this competitive intelligence also enables you to set expectations within your organization about what business results to expect from your efforts. Overall, the more competitive your particular online marketplace, the more intelligently you will have to build your playbook in order to dominate your competitors.



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Reader Comments.

I like the article on Competitive Analysis - esp classifying the keywords your monitoring into Branded, non-Branded, etc.

When I do SEO for a client I also suggest we do a Competitive Analysis to better understand the competition - specifically the technologies and traffic methods they use.

Currently, I’m also using MSN Ad Center to do Geo-Demographic targeting a Site Audience reach and keyword effectiveness.

During a study for well known Online Tattoo site I came up with key competitive marketing information that you can read in the following posts on my blog http://www.webmetricsguru.com

Posted by Webmetricsguru | 7:49 pm on March 10, 2006.

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