Competitive Intelligence For SEO – SimilarWeb PRO Review

Search traffic is the main pipeline for online marketers to draw traffic, whether it’s from paid or organic sources. Competition over keywords and SERP real-estate is fierce and constant and you have to adjust yourself to the ongoing changes of algorithms and policies by Google.

In order to be able to stay on top, online marketers are forced to use multiple tools, track competitors and optimize their paid and organic campaigns accordingly. This takes time and money and can be, at times, a bit frustrating.

A few words about SimilarWeb PRO:

SimilarWeb PRO is a platform that shows you the analytics of any website. This includes all traffic sources, including the number of visits per source, the referring websites, referring keywords and even engagement metrics such as time on site and bounce rate. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus just on the Search.

Step 1 – Define Your Competitors:

Most good marketers can list their top 5-10 competitors, but online and especially for Search definitions become more complicated.Your first step will be to understand which competitors you should be researching. In order to do that you can start running multiple related search queries in Google and try to identify competitors that are ranked for most of them. You will need to do this for both the paid and organic results.

Step 2 – Estimate Your Competitor’s Organic and Search Spends

In order to figure out which keywords your competitors are targeting you need to run search queries in Google and estimate the amount of traffic according to their rank and the search volume given by Google keyword planner. You can also use tools that tell you the ranked words of a website, such as SEMRush and again, estimate the potential traffic from each keyword. Alternatively, you can go to SimilarWeb PRO and see exactly how much traffic your competitor is getting from each referring word.

Step 3 – Find Out Which Keywords Refer Traffic to Your Competitor

In the same section, ‘Search’, scroll down to the table of keywords. A good best practice is to check the ‘Exclude branded keywords’ box, which will filter out the branded terms and bring up the good stuff. In the top of the list we can already see some interesting keywords such as ‘used books’, ‘cheap textbooks’ and ‘international edition textbooks’. We can see how much traffic each keyword brought by multiplying its traffic share percentage with the total search traffic AbeBooks.com got. We can also see which keywords were recently pushed by examining the ‘Change’ column, which shows you the change percentage in traffic share compared to last month:

Step 4 – Find out Which Ads Your Competitor is Using Per Keyword Group

There are tools out there, including Google keyword planner, that can tell you which keywords have the biggest potential to bring you paid search traffic by showing you their search volume, estimated bids and competition level. However, none of these tools will show you the exact keywords used per ad. SimilarWeb PRO gives you this information and more – it shows which ads match to different search terms.

Conclusion: Competitor Intelligence Pays Off

Search marketing is a never ending battle to claim supremacy over keywords and SERP rankings.  Because of the highly competitive nature of the industry loads of data and proven strategies are out there just waiting to be used. Competitor intelligence will show you both the strategies and tactics that have proven to work.
The 4 key takeaways from this article will give you a good head start when launching new campaigns or looking to enhance existing ones.

1. Define your competition, both business and keyword based.
2. Find the organic and paid strategies that exist among you competitors to take advantage of underutilized channels.
3. Learn from the keyword level tactics before you make investments to save on costs.
4. Find out which creative are being utilized to develop a strategy that will beat your competitors.

Google Making Maps App More Competitive With Yelp

Google Maps has updated its app for iPhone and iPad. The new version adds features and content and even makes the app more visually appealing.

The new version includes the following improvements:

·         Search results appear with descriptions on the map

·         Easy switching between map and list view of results

·         Reservations via Gmail indicated on map (and list view)

·         Improved Explore browsing experience (based on nearby locations)

This is not mentioned among the official upgrades (maybe I missed it previously) but I just noticed the capacity to filter search results in various categories such as hotels, restaurants and rental cars. I found this also extended to some service business categories such as “landscaper.”

All of these changes aim to make Google Maps a more useful local search and nearby discovery tool, not simply a way to get directions and navigation from A to B. In so doing Google is taking increasingly direct aim at apps such as Yelp and even Hotels.com or TripAdvisor (e.g., hotel prices are posted in results).

While Google Maps isn’t yet a complete replacement such apps, Google’s ability to integrate your search history, Google Now/notifications, location and Gmail content gives it a potential competitive advantage over time.

According to the most recent comScore data, Google Maps is the 6th most popular/widely used app in the U.S.

 

Google Hits Poland Again With Link Network Penalties

Four months after Google’s first link network penalty in Poland, Google has targeted an additional two Polish link networks this morning.

Google’s Karolina Kruszynska, a spam fighter, posted on Twitter that the most recent wide spread manual action targeted two link networks in Poland:

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed this as well on Twitter after Bartosz Góralewicz showedevidence on of massive manual actions being sent out in Poland. Bartosz posted a screen shot of manual actions received by webmasters over this link network slap: Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, responded that Google indeed took action in Poland. Adding he didn’t “tweet about it because people have been asking us to be more positive.”

As I covered at the Search Engine Roundtable, Bartosz feels that this actually hit more than two link networks. He told me it hit at least four including Statlink.pl, Gotlink.pl, e-weblink.com and seopilot.pl. I asked Google to confirm which networks were hit but they have yet to reply to my request by the time I have posted this story. Bartosz added that Google doesn’t really know how many networks they hit because it “wasn’t too severe and spread across all the major networks.”

Google also posted details on the Google Poland blog about how to submit reconsideration requests after you’ve been hit by a manual action.