By John McCarthy, Director Search Engine Optimization
WebMetro offers several consulting services to help clients with a variety of business needs including SEO and paid search campaign assessments. Assessments which are sometimes referred to as campaign audits, are employed by clients for a number of reasons. About 75% of the time these assessments are for clients that have full time SEO or paid search staff. While clients employ campaign assessments for many reasons, typically they fall into two major categories:
- Solve a particular problem (e.g. dropping in ranking or traffic, how do I improve my quality score, how do I improve my conversion)
- Confirm a strategic direction (e.g. we are thinking of doing this).
I recently performed an assessment of an SEO campaign for a client in the medical field. As luck would have it, I worked with this client’s largest competitor about 3 years earlier and developed that SEO strategy. Although I had hands-on experience in this market, as a best practice we begin all assessments as if we don’t have any experience whatsoever. We assume this position so we don’t make unfounded assumptions or worse yet – decisions. In addition, strategies need to evolve to address the marketplace changes, particularly in search.
As we began the Discovery session of assessment, the client stated that he is only concerned about Google. He does not care about Yahoo or Bing. He said they have been performing both SEO and paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo and Bing and have found that Google dominates the traffic according to his analytics data. As a result the client wants the strategy to focus on increasing traffic and conversions from Google. Based on my experience with their largest competitor and our experience with most clients, I responded that chances are Google would likely be the focus – but as a best practice we would perform both market and competitive intelligence to guides us.
Following the Discovery session, I jumped immediately into researching the data and first tackled keyword research. After reviewing the keywords in the buy funnel we found the assessment will focus on two major keywords “bioidentical hormones” and “testosterone replacement therapy”. As documented by Google, the search volume ranges from 9,900 to 60,500 and cost per clicks ranging from $2 to $3.
Next, I launched one of my favorite market and competitive analysis tools Hitwise. Albeit an expensive investment for certain, Hitwise is awesome and perhaps a mandatory set of research tools for those involved with search engine marketing.
Hitwise market intelligence showed that for the past 12 weeks Google dominated the search landscape with 90.27% market share for the keyword “bioidentical hormones”. This definitely supported the clients belief that Google is the dominate search engine in this market.
I then continued my market research and looked at the keyword “testosterone replacement therapy”. To my surprise, Hitwise showed that Google was not the dominant search engine for this keyword. Instead it was Yahoo with 58.11% of the traffic.
Next I performed competitive analysis and discovered some interesting data as well. For the primary competitor, Hitwise reported that Google was the largest search engine with 63.5% over the past 12 weeks. Yahoo had 18.63% and Bing 11.7%. While overall Google was still the major traffic source, to focus all of their efforts on Google would not be a best practice as it would leave traffic and revenue opportunities from Yahoo and Bing.
In the end, performing market and competitive research provided invaluable business intelligence for this client as it does with all WebMetro clients. By only relying on assumptions and perceptions could prove to be very costly in search engine marketing. Instead it is a best practice to regularly perform market and competitive research to confirm beliefs and identify new opportunities.