Finding Competitors and Vital Keywords

The topic for this blog is to find the competitors for the company of my choice and identify vital keywords for maximizing online marketing. The Ford Motor Company is my choice for this exercise. Here is my analysis.

For my analysis I used iSpionage, www.ispionage.com, to help identify the competitors for Ford. The results of the search produced two types of competitors, Pay-per-click (PPC) and Organic. Here is a snapshot.

This search gave me the option use either Google or Bing/Yahoo for my data. I selected Google because they produced more results (14,791 v. 5,356). The top three PPC competitors are autotrader.com, ask.com, & kbb.com. For the Organic competitors, the top three are edmunds.com, motortrend.com, & auto.yahoo.com. The search also shows that there is some Overlap Keywords. The PPC competitors produced the largest amount of Overlap Keywords across the board with 7,740 coming from autotrader.com. The top Organic competitor, edmunds.com, produced 1,050 Overlap Keywords.

Based on this information I would advise Ford to continue working with autotrader.com, but also focus more attention on edmunds.com. Being the top Organic competitor, edmunds.com is also the fifth highest PPC competitor. This would allow Ford to maximize its efforts by maintaining a high SEO traffic value ($9,168,903) received on the Organic competitor side, but also build on the top five results from the PPC side.

PPC competitors were also higher in the overall in the total amount of keywords produced, 59,451 v. 11,599. Here is a snapshot of the keywords for both types of competitors.

PPC Competitors:

Organic Competitors:

These results show us that the top three PPC keywords are: “extended warranty for auto,” “extended warranties for cars,” and “ford easy care warranty.” The top three Organic keywords are: “pick up f,” “ford 150 2012,” and “ford 250 2012.” Overall, Organic keywords had the highest average for search volume numbers and the number PPC keywords were greater in both search engine categories.

Based on these finding, I would advise Ford to continue with focusing their resources on PPC competitors. Even though the cost-per-click (CPC) is cheaper with Organic competitors (0.05), PPC competitors produced over 5 times the overall results at a comparable price (ranging from $0.05 - $6.58).

Reference: http://www.ispionage.com/research/default.aspx?q=ford.com&lc=1&type=0&c1=gm.com&c2=dodge.com - tab-2,smtab-1,kcotab-0,kadtab-0,aktab-0,smbsrc-facebook,comppckw-0,compadv-0.