As a newcomer, diving into the world of SEO can leave you stranded in the middle of cloudy waters, with waves of competition crashing down on you. Understanding where your content sits in relation to your competitors is crucial to outshining the competition and getting into clearer waters.
Because it is easy to get lost in a sea of content from similar creators and producers, you must understand the share of search concerning your brand’s content. While someone may search for products or services similar to yours, your brand will struggle to generate new online interest if you don’t stand out. It’s important to understand how to get your content to stand out in a tangled mess of competition.
This article will help you navigate share of search, its value, and how you can implement share of search tools with Demandwell.
To start, let’s dive right in: what is share of search, and why should it matter to me? Share of search measures the percentage of organic search traffic that your website captures for all the relevant keywords in your industry. It is a helpful metric to understand precisely where your brand sits compared to other websites, competitors, or content producers in the same field as your company.
There are two different ways to interpret share of search, and both have their benefits. The first interpretation is to measure the volume of organic traffic going to your website against the total organic traffic for keywords in your industry. The other interpretation is measuring the percentage of keywords you are ranking for compared to the total number of relevant keywords in your industry. These two numbers can be useful to compare side-by-side since you are going to rank for keywords before you generate significant traffic, and how these numbers measure against each other can inform you on what to do next.
Demandwell uses share of search as the cornerstone of our competitive analysis for organic search. We created our Share of Search Report to compare the percentage of organic traffic your website is winning and the percentage of keywords your website is ranking for compared to your competitors. With this information, the Share of Search Report dives into the top keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are missing out on and which keywords we believe you should target first for the most immediate impact on SEO performance.
What makes share of search such a simple framework for competitive analysis is the fact that it’s relative. With the Share of Search Report in particular, you are comparing your performance with the three URLs you believe represent your biggest competition. Does your company appear in the same search results as its competitors? Is your content getting the same visibility as the competition? It’s a great point of reference when evaluating where you currently stand with SEO compared to where you want to be in the future.
Whether you are entirely new to SEO or looking to monitor your competitive standing as your SEO program matures, share of search is a simple metric to help you benchmark how you currently stack up against your top competition. If you want a good place to start, you can request a free Share of Search Report from Demandwell and talk to someone about what we think you should focus on next with SEO.
