Online Competitor Analysis at Search Engine Strategies Conference London
While attending the SES Conference in London a few weeks ago the level of interest in competitor research was evident. Search is the one medium where you can find out exactly what your competitors are up to. Some members of the audience were intrigued as to the online marketing ethics of this practice, but the expert consensus was that competitor information is readily available on the web and your competitor is most likely trying to find out exactly what you’re doing anyway, so why get left behind!
One interesting tool mentioned at the conference that’s being currently developed by Yahoo! is Yahoo! Mindset. This is a beta version at the moment, but could prove to be very useful for analysing competitor websites, as well as improving search results from a user perspective. It allows the user to sort search results for a particular search query into whether sites in the SERPs are commercial or non-commercial. If a user is looking for a purely information-rich site they can change the search results so that no commercial sites are listed at the top of the SERPs. This development highlights the fact that search engines are trying to get into the mind of the user and adjusting their results accordingly, certainly making the future interesting for search engine optimisation efforts.
Aisling Blake, Search Marketing Account Executive, Interactive Return