By Sarah Engel

It is a fundamental of modern business: If you have a product or service worthy of a customer’s attention and therefore search query, then chances are you also have competitors aggressively vying for that customer’s click. Of course, you know that your product is unique or better than anyone else’s, but how can you create a search strategy that ensures your competitive dominance? And what do your competitors know about keyword strategy, seasonality or consumer intent that you have not yet realized?

The advances in competitive search marketing tools, combined with the knowledge of how and why to use the available data, allow you to not only keep ahead of your rivals, but also create some competitive secrets of your own.

First, let’s look at a few of the types of competitive and keyword data available with tools like SEMRush:

• Competitor discovery – You may currently be tracking only your top three-to-five national competitors. This type of report will allow you to see who is truly usurping your position. You may be surprised to find it is a local advertiser or a marketer who only marginally competes with your products or services.
• Sheer number of keywords – Take a look at your competitive set’s keyword catalogs to determine if you are spread too thin or not covering enough real estate.
• Common keywords – This allows you to look for areas of overlap between you and your competitors and uncover opportunities for keyword ownership. It also allows a more in-depth understanding of your customers, by deciphering how they search and which keywords they use for your specific products or services.
• Top 20 analysis – These reports offer a wealth of information about the much sought-after Top 20 placements in Google. Scrutiny of this information will help you determine when it makes sense to bid big and when to save your money.
• AdWords traffic price – It is key to find out the types of budgets you are up against in whole and by particular keywords. By first analyzing your own site’s reported expenditure and comparing it with your actual budget, you should be able to:
  • Determine how much of your traffic is coming from the long tail,
  • Estimate your competitors’ budgets for your own planning.
• Actual creative – From phrase match reports to related keyword reports, this is where it gets interesting in building or perfecting a search campaign for your unique brand and ideal customer target. When you spend time to study the creative, you can engineer a campaign based on the myriad types of data, including:
  • how competitors are using brand names in creative,
  • promotional copy that truly works,
  • seasonality fluctuations you should be heeding,
  • determining the strength of your trademark,
  • and with the right research, plan and execution – how to make the leap from relevance to profitability.

SEMRush’s keyword tool allows you to identify not just relevant keywords, but profitable keywords. For example, if you are selling shoes, the keywords “free sandals” may be relevant but not profitable. That’s a more obvious example. But let’s say you sell piercing jewelry online. With SEMRush’s keyword tool, you’ll discover that ‘belly button piercing’ is not profitable, while ‘navel piercing’ is. Not so obvious — but a valuable piece of information that SEMRush will uncover.

Once you understand the types of competitive and keyword information available, the questions become: What other insights can we gain from this data? How can our organization maximize the benefit of this competitive intelligence? Who else can truly benefit from this type of data?

The study of competitive research is core for traditional search marketers, but the true implications for businesses are much more robust. Using a tool like SEMRush to gather competitive data (vs. just benchmarking your own site’s data) can give you the edge needed to move ahead in your business niche.

This type of data can be used to:

• Evaluate and monitor the success of your search team or agency: This is particularly useful for the CMO or digital director who needs a more thorough understanding of their team’s success relative to the marketplace, or a non-biased view of their competitive set. SEMRush estimates that approximately 25 percent of their users are management or administrative team members leveraging the service to monitor the success of their in-house or agency-led search teams.
• Learn about your competitors’ SEM budgets: Whether you are a search professional or a finance manager, understanding how your paid search budget compares with your key competitors gives you a reference point for your own campaigns as well as ammunition for budget increases.
• Analyze potential acquisitions or investments: Venture capital firms and investment bankers often use tools of this type to determine the validity of a young company or the health of a target organization. By determining if the company is getting an appropriate share of search traffic, if they are being found for relevant keywords, and how they are trending over time, you can gain great insight into their longevity and marketing prowess.
• Determine whether your competitors’ traffic is real or ‘junk’: Many a dubious company has been uncovered for buying ‘junk’ traffic to improve their apparent value during investment processes, earn outs or other purposes. Make sure you are measuring your success against real consumers’ searches before shifting your own strategy.
• Create a more comprehensive and precise local search campaign: By using these tools’ geo-location options, you can determine who’s spending locally on AdWords as well as their keyword and creative executions on a local level.

So, it seems the secret is out: By using competitive intelligence tools wisely, you can not only gain a more thorough understanding of your competitors, but also create the ideal strategy to turn those hotly contested searchers into your loyal customers.

Sarah Engel is a marketing strategy consultant and freelance writer. Previously she was Vice President of Communications at iProspect and Range Online Media.

About This e-Solution Spotlight…
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