How to Use Share of Search
While Share of Search is a relatively new metric for gauging a particular brand’s presence within a given market, it is a powerful tool that can help guide future SEO and marketing initiatives. But what is Share of Search exactly, how is it calculated, and how can it help your company? Essentially, your company’s Share of Search is the percentage of searches within your specific industry that involve your brand. To calculate your organization’s Share of Search, simply divide your organic searches by the total sum of organic searches within your market.
Demandwell’s Share of Search Report provides a wealth of information with straightforward data visualizations to empower your company amid highly competitive marketplaces. With a Share of Search Report, your company can see the percentage of organic web traffic your sites experience and compare that with your direct competitors. This can supply your marketing and development teams with valuable details about which keywords are working well for you, what’s working well for your competitors, and other keywords searchers are including in queries related to your brand’s marketplace.
Competitive SEO analysis can enable your marketing team to see data about which keywords are working well to support your organic traffic numbers and which keywords are lagging behind. When your SEO team has a better understanding of what keywords are working and what keywords aren’t, they can re-optimize old content to perform better and more adequately plan future content that can potentially wrest potential customers away from your immediate competitors.
At the end of the day, though, Share of Search does not identify how many searches lead to purchases. It can, however, provide your company with an accurate depiction of its brand recognition and insights into keywords and relevant queries within the market. Share of search can also be a valuable metric to assess how your organization stacks up with your competitors.
Since Share of Search can be a valuable metric for tracking and understanding your company’s brand perception, it’s important to know what tools to use to gather as much accurate information as possible. A free tool like Google Trends is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. A free tool like Google Trends can give you detailed information about your company and several competitors with just a few deft keystrokes.
When it comes to Share of Search vs. share of voice – what’s the difference? While Share of Search refers to the percentage of searches for your brand within your company’s market, Share of Voice is more frequently used to describe the intangible share of your brand’s recognition within that same marketplace. If you search ‘share of voice’ using your preferred search engine, you are likely to find several different definitions, although many of them are similar or interchangeable.
Other tools like Google Keyword Planner can help your company identify new keywords within your market. To develop successful campaigns, your team needs access to as much keyword data as possible to not only identify the strongest keywords for your campaign but also to consider recent keyword trends within your industry. Share of Search tools enables marketing teams to adapt to keyword trends and develop stronger campaign keyword lists for future initiatives.
It’s important to learn how to calculate Share of Search for your company. How you’ll learn to calculate Share of Search depends on your organization’s market and who you consider as your main competitors. You can utilize a helpful Share of Search tool like Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner to gather more information about your company’s Share of Search and related keywords to queries about your brand.
For a quick and easy-to-access and understand overview of your company’s Share of Search – Google Trends works sufficiently. Understanding your company’s Share of Search is one matter, but using that information to make informed marketing decisions and devise effective keyword strategies to productively challenge your direct competitors is another. Demandwell can provide competitive analysis for organic search which can help increase your company’s Share of Search and enable your organization to discover more effective keywords to continue to drive traffic to your site(s).
While Share of Search is still a fairly new metric that can track the success of your company’s digital footprint, it’s lauded by many as an effective tool for many reasons. With just a few dozen keystrokes, you can see where your company stands in your industry and the precise keywords that are bringing customers to your doors.