Searchmetrics Suite
There are literally hundreds of SEO metrics tools on the market and thousands of SEO experts, but in one fell swoop, Searchmetrics.com interrupts the market with a tool that boils everything down into understandable terms for any user. The Suite compares your site against other websites and gives you in depth and immediate analysis of the visibility of your site, other sites, and profiles on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and StumbleUpon.
The goal is to be able to instantly understand what content from your site (or your competitors’ sites) is the most popular and measure the impact of social media campaigns with weekly and historical data.
Searchmetrics has been around since 2007 and was founded in Berlin as analytic software that monitored the social impact of large companies like Crate & Barrel. Their new Searchmetrics Suite measures SEO/SEM, has PPC monitoring, and measures social visibility. What sets Searchmetrics apart is that it is not panel based meaning it is not like Alexa.com or other monitoring services that only give analytics and data based on users’ browsing history that have opted in to be measured (which is extremely inaccurate). Instead, Searchmetrics’ data is read from Google result pages given that it measures search, a much more accurate set of data points.
All metrics suites help users to see where they stand, but Searchmetrics aims to help you dig deep into the data of your competitors so you know where your site is weaker, what hot spots they have discovered, in an effort not to “leave money on the table,” Searchmetrics CEO Horst Joepen told us. To demonstrate the suite, Joepen showed us the full service and the power of the tool was immediately apparent as we looked at Trulia’s website.
Instantly, there were some interesting tidbits we saw together about Trulia that Alexa and various other suites would never have revealed. Take a look:
Traffic and competitive keywords sample
You can see above that the system knows Zillow, Realtor.com and Homes.com are Trulia’s top competitors and the large orange circle shows that Zillow shares a tremendous amount of competitive keywords with Trulia but Realtor.com (ironically the large green circle) is shown to have substantially larger traffic amounts than the others.
Visibility overview
Above shows that Trulia has risen in organic search through the search engines and while their paid search success is performing positively, SEO visibility is down. The top subdomains are shown with Trulia.com taking the top spot and interestingly, a Trulia search page on an Indiana news station takes second place.
Social visibility
We found these results to be the most interesting- trulia.com/crime is almost as visible in social networks as trulia.com itself. If a competitor were to see that, they would likely amp up their offering in the crime reporting arena, and Trulia would likely continue to invest effort into promoting their offering. It’s not highlighted above, but what was extremely interesting according to Searchmetrics, is that Trulia has an unnatural distribution across social networks with no measured visibility on LinkedIn yet nearly 178,000 links on StumbleUpon. Trulia would use this information to improve their visibility in other social networks (most importantly, Facebook) and competitors would study why they are excelling on StumbleUpon and nowhere else.
So scary good
Some companies would be quite upset if their competitive information was this readily available to their competitors. And it is. It’s scary good information and goes beyond anything Google or the Alexas of the world can offer. If someone not trained in SEO can so readily see weaknesses and strengths internally and with competitors, imagine what your professional SEO staff could do with a tool like this? It’s better than having a spy at your competitor’s office.
AGBeat is not affiliated with Searchmetrics.
Lani is the COO and News Director at The American Genius, has co-authored a book, co-founded BASHH, Austin Digital Jobs, Remote Digital Jobs, and is a seasoned business writer and editorialist with a penchant for the irreverent.