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.

2 New Google Mobile Search Tests: Larger Titles & Info Cards

Google has made some changes to how they are displaying mobile search results, and if you're currently ranking number one for your queries and have sitelinks, your click-through rate (CTR) from mobile devices on those searches might get significantly higher.

Larger Titles for Websites with Sitelinks

The first mobile search test reported by Google Operating System is one that will make those webmasters with many sitelinks quite happy.

When the top search result features a site that has multiple sitelinks, Google is increasing the size of the font for that title. This means that on many mobile phones, users will only see that first result on their screen, pushing all other results further down (e.g., Google News) so they are barely visible on the screen:

The title does get truncated significantly more than it would with the regular search results without the title being enlarged. However, the larger title is definitely eye-catching and should significantly increase CTR, so long as the truncation isn't causing the result to seem like a poor match to the searcher.

This new change seems to affect multiple search queries and both Android and iOS devices, including both Google Chrome and Safari.

Website Info Cards

Google is also testing site info cards within mobile search results. While the site info cards are fairly common in desktop searches, they are new to mobile.

These new mobile info cards also give the first search results significant real estate space on a mobile device, including the entire screen on mobile phones. If the listing has sitelinks, they are shown beneath the info card.

The test with these site info cards is currently only being shown to those who are not signed into a Google account, so make sure you're logged out before testing it with your own search queries.

Twitter Now Supports Animated GIFs: Why This Is Good For Marketers

Twitter made an announcement today that many of us have all been waiting for: You can now share and view animated GIFs on Twitter.com and on Twitter’s iOS and Android apps.The announcement came in the form of a tweet from Twitter’s Support team, and appropriately enough it included an animated GIF as well.

Previously, if you wanted to share a GIF on Twitter, you had to upload it to a third-party (like Imgur) and then share the link. Starting today you can upload and view them directly on Twitter.

GIFs won’t animate automatically in your feed like they do on Tumblr, for example. When a GIF is shown there will be an overlay of a white play button, simply click on the GIF to play it right in your feed.

Why this is good for marketers?

The ability to tweet animated GIFs presents new opportunities for content marketers on Twitter. Take a look at how businesses are using Vine to market themselves, those 7 second videos can easily translate into animated GIFs.

GIFs stand out in the Twitter feed just like images do. They can capture the attention of your audience and communicate your message in a way that’s quick and easy to digest.

Perhaps one of the best things about GIFs is that they can communicate emotions. Anyone who spends even a small amount of time on Reddit knows how GIFs can be used to convey the emotion behind a situation. It’s difficult to capture emotion in 140 characters, adding a GIF to your tweet now makes it easier than ever.

Facebook gives users the tools to remove ads based on topic

Facebook is about to launch a new ad preferences tool that will allow users to block ads by excluding specific topics. They say this will makes ads “better” because the viewer will have control over what they see and what they don’t. They say they’re making this option available because “soon” they won’t just be monitoring what you do on Facebook, they’ll also be including data from “some of the websites and apps you use.”



When you see an ad you don’t like, click on it to get an option menu:

From here, you can choose “Why am I seeing this?”  This leads you to another screen with a long explanation about how you did things related to (INSERT TOPIC) on Facebook and so now we assume you like things related to (INSERT SAME TOPIC). If you don’t really like (INSERT SAME TOPIC) and you hit those pages by accident or have decided that you’re no longer into (INSERT SAME TOPIC) you can remove this topic from your ad preference list and we won’t show you these ads again. . . probably. . . maybe.

Google Preparing Large Update? Shifts On May 2nd & 7th

There was some chatter about a Google update on May 2nd but now we are seeing even more chatter and signs of flux in the Google search results on May 7th.

These signs of shifts in rankings, spikes in crawl rates, often, but not always, are early warning signs of a major Google update happening in the near future.

Here are flux/volatility charts from MozCast, SERPS.com, SearchMetrics and Algoroo:

1.MozCast chart:

2.SERPMetrics chart:

3.SearchMetrics  chart:

4.Algoroo:

All show similar patterns for the most part, including the ongoing webmaster world thread follow these patterns also.