mission possible: become a search marketing spy through competitive analysis
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Presentation from Interactivity Digital Conference - Miami discussing the key competitive insights you should care about.TRANSCRIPT
@billhunt
Bill HuntBack Azimuth Consulting
Mission ImpossibleBecoming a Search Marketing Spy
Interactivity Digital – Miami - 2013
@billhunt
“If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, then you are a fool and certain to be
defeated in every battle.” – Sun Tzu
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4 C’s of Competitive Intel
• Collecting the right information • Converting to Intelligence • Communicate the Intelligence • Countering the Competitor Actions
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Who is your competition?
• Named Competitors– Typically management only cares about that compete with you
on sales and market share. – Who are your biggest direct competitors IBM vs. HP– The larger the company typically the poorer they do in SEO
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Who is your real competition?• Search Results Competitors
– These are the companies that rank in the top positions of search engines and may not be a direct competitor – like Wikipedia or a Trade Journal or even a partner
– Need to understand “why they are ranking” and if you can leverage their ranking via advertising or links
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DOD pages ranking well vs. traditional competitors
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What do you need to know?• PPC Advertising Spend & Cycles
– Insight on what your competition is spending on paid search– Do they have “dark cycles” or “strategic spends” – What keywords do they seem be be performing well for? – What ad messages are they using?
• Business & Actionability Value– Justify spending increases on media and resources– Alignment of competitive ads – Hijacking keywords and messages – Understand strategic initiatives
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What do you need to know?• Keyword Lists
– What keywords are they focused on using in PPC and/or ranking well for in SEO
– How are they performing for various keywords?– What pages are ranking well – home page or deep pages
• Business & Actionability Value– How are we doing for similar strategic keywords – Where are we seeing change in performance? – Competitive Message alignment and focus
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Competitor Ad Performance
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Smirnoff Paid Ad – Lost Intent
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What do you need to know?• Team Size and Bench Strength
– How do they manage program? In-house, agency– How many team members? Skills?– How big is the agency and their reputation?
• Business & Actionability Value– Leverage their team size to increase mine – Expect lack or quality performance based on team
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Search Team Size
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US Comp1 Comp2 Comp3 Comp4 Comp4
Structure Central Central/BU Central/BU BU/Central BU Central/BU
Paid Approach Agency In-House Hybrid Hybrid Agency In-House
Earned Approach In-House In-House In-House In-House In-House In-House
Global SEM Manager No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Team Size 4 32 25 15* 14 16
Paid 0.7* 18 8 5 2 8
Earned 3.5 8 12 5 6 5
Owned 0 3 2 1 3 1
Analytics 0 3 3 1 3 2
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What do you want to know?• Inbound Links
– What quality and relevant sites are linking to them? – What is the velocity of link acquisition? – What practices are they using?
• Business & Actionability Value– Leverage their link research to get my links– Justify resources for link acquisition
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Competitive Research Takeaways
1. Care about competitors once your house is in order
2. Monitor performance against your baselines
3. Use multiple tools to “Monitor” competition but don’t obsess over it
4. Spend time diagnosing site performance
5. Share any and all findings with wider audience!
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