SES London: Competitive Research

Speakers: Allan Dick (Vintage Tub&Bath), Cam Balzer (Performics Inc), Nilhan Jayasinghe (Spannerworks), Heather Hopkins (Hitwise UK)

Most of the things discussed in this section are pretty obvious. There are however some useful tools that deserve to be mentioned.

Allan Dick’s toolkit is alexa.com (and alexaholic.com), archive.com, marketleap.com, watchthatpage.com, see what competitors are selling on ebay and reputation management (see who says what about you).

There are some useful Google searches:
1. site:yoursite.com your term / site:competitor.com
2. intitle:manufacturer + product
3. phone number search
4. first and last name of competitor’s employees

Cam Balzer says to explore what competitors are doing in paid search using Adgooroo to monitor the visibility for each search term and see what the competitive position is. Check the ranking for these terms also in the natural listings. Understand the level of engagement of competitors and see how well they are doing.

Heather Hopkins asks these questions:
- How well am I performing against my competitors?
- What search engines perform strongest for my competitors?
- Which search terms drive traffic to competitors?

Technorati tags: ses - search engine strategies - search