Your Competitors Are Watching

Do you monitor where your competition spends their time and effort with paid search? Did you know that they are likely watching exactly what keywords you are bidding on? Even roughly how much you are bidding on those keywords. If you are not monitoring the same thing, you are giving the competition a major advantage. In addition, you're not able to see where they have weaknesses that you may be able to capitalize on or perhaps your strengths that you should double down on.

A couple of techniques are critical when monitoring your competition. First, identify your competitors and then understand where there is overlap in the keywords that they are bidding on.

Once you have identified the overlap, dissect the keywords for opportunities. At Sapphire Trail, we use a tool that can identify the following:

• Average ad rank (which ad position is typically displayed for each competitor)
• Search volume for each keyword
• Keyword density (# of bidders)
• Average cost per click
• Competitors' ad copy
• Competitor's specific landing page for each keyword

After reviewing this, you should be able to create a strategy for the keywords where you are trying to outperform your competition. You should be able to identify where you want to double down, stop bidding in some cases, or maybe just adjust your positioning and ad copy. This directly enhances your credit union’s performance at the expense of your competition.

Next, it is important to review the keywords of your competitors and determine if there are any missed opportunities. Typically, you can find some keywords that have proven successful but for some reason, you haven’t been competing with them. This allows you to review their approach to those keywords and develop an approach to steal market share.

At the end of the day, if you aren’t monitoring your competitor’s search engine marketing, you are likely leaving money on the table or even worse, letting your competition take money out of your pocket. At Sapphire Trail, when we manage a credit union’s search engine marketing, this competitive evaluation is where we begin and from there, it's all about optimizing your strategy (which we can help you create or adjust, as necessary) to ensure maximum efficiency. Learn more about our Paid Search offerings.