PPC in 30 Days, Day 4: Researching a Competitive Landscape

Who else is out there? Assessing the competition can help structure your PPC campaign.

Business isn’t just about providing a product or service and waiting for the community to instantly turn into customers after the organization is advertised in the marketplace. Organizations must also engage in a process of researching the competitive landscape so that other entities do not take away potential customers simply because they are better at marketing. For law firms, a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign is essentially about grabbing the attention of potential customers through the power of the Internet and hopefully turning their clicks into sales.

Keeping the results of the keyword research you performed in mind, find the answers to the following three questions.

Who is out there?

Researching the competitive landscape is not just about technological tools. Some assessment of competition is just about coming up with a list of area competitors. Obviously this gets complex in a digital environment, where companies are not necessarily restricted to a small geographic area. However, there is still value in doing traditional research and using word-of-mouth to assess the current list of major players in a given field. Simply asking someone for their opinion of which Clearwater personal injury attorney they would go to gets you new information.

Who is coming up in searches?

When organizations seek to research their competitors, they can test various keyword searches and see what appears on a regular basis. This is also a good way to test potential keyword lists because it will give companies an idea of what keywords have already been purchased and who might be using them. If a competitor has a viable presence on the Internet, chances are that they will not be hard to find with a few searches.

What tools do I want to use?

Aside from manual tracking, there are various software tools available. As Joel Burslam notes in “How To Research Your Competitors’ PPC Advertising Campaign,” there are various packages that can be used, but not all will be complete or totally accurate at a given moment. In addition, companies have to decide how much time they want to spend assessing their competitors versus working on their own campaign.

Once you’ve mapped out the competitive landscape, it is time to set up the structure of your account and campaign. Day 5 of PPC in 30 days covers this very topic.