Keyword Espionage

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Asi Erenberg

A little spying on your competition can often help

As we figure what precise keywords we should choose to draw people to our website, it makes a whole lot of sense to also get really savvy about what our competition might be doing in this field.
The great guiding principle in picking keywords is of course sheer logic. Our job, after all, is to figure out just what the customer has in mind when he or she is searching, and that is best figured out logically. But it helps, too, to know what keywords the opposition uses and finds effective — and of course what words don’t work so well.

It’s all essential intelligence (in the sense of industrial espionage) and thankfully there are a choice of spy systems for hire. The Trellian Company’s Keyword Discovery has for about four years been collecting data on keywords from a couple of hundred search engines, taking a lot further, and analyzing in more sophisticated detail, what the humbler British-owned Wordtracker has been doing for 11 years now.

Size does matter, for in any given survey Keyword Discovery will return thousands of results, compared with the hundreds that we’d previously bee used to working with. On top of that, while other programs may track daily or monthly search frequencies, Keyword Discovery will give you the yearly usage of a key word or phrase, providing a fuller basis for comparison between word-choices. It can produce a trend analysis for any given term, one that will reveal seasonal patterns over the course of a year.

The more sexily-named SpyFu (I guess) takes the espionage notion (and martial arts, it seems) a bit further, building on its developer, Velocityspace’s earlier, and free, tool called Googspy. SpyFu makes a point of offering aggressive drilling-down into your competition’s efforts, showing for instance, their estimated daily advertising budget, their total clicks per day, the average cost per click, average ad position, incoming links to their sites, and so on.

Just to confirm the overall competitive “Cold War” feel of this world, there’s also a tool that fuses the above names - KeywordSpy. But why go on? - it’s clear that focusing your effort on just the customers you want is a highly competitive business if you want to conduct it at the most efective level — and that means availing yourself of really well-captured, reliable and detailed information … lots of it.