Step Wise SEO

Here you’ll play “spot the PPC ad” to get a sense of your competitors’ activities in the PPC arena.

It can be challenging to find competitors’ pay-per-click ads. Even if you go looking for a particular ad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find it.

Some PPC services “rotate their inventory” so that you might not be able to view a certain company’s ad if you happen to be looking at the wrong time of day.

Or your competitor may have an ad with such a low bid that you’d have to spend too much time trying to unearth it from 20th-page results.

And, of course, your competitors can turn their ads on or off at any time, so you may never know if there’s really a PPC campaign with your competitor’s name on it.

Regardless, it’s worth it to look because if you do find something, it can give you great insight into what matters most to your competitors. Here’s how you’ll do it:

• Moving one by one through your Big competitor list, perform a search for each competitor’s company name on Google.

• Scroll through the top two or three pages of results. If you find an ad for your competitor, mark “yes” in the PPC column.

• If you don’t find your competitor’s ad, search for a specific product or service that they offer.

If that turns up no ads, broaden your search to a general term related to what they offer.

If you still don’t find your competitor, you can feel comfortable marking “none found” in the PPC column.

• Repeat with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.

Remember to look at sponsored listings only, not organic search results! If you do find something that looks like a competitor’s ad, click on it to make sure it actually goes to your competitor’s site.

There are lots of PPC ads put out by affiliate sites and resellers, and if that’s the case with the ads you find, then it’s not really your competitor’s ad.

For example, do a search for any well-known brand-name medicine, like “Claritin” (or, if you don’t mind your colleagues seeing what you’ve got on your monitor, “Viagra” or “Rogaine”).

There are lots of ads with that brand name, but only one is for the company that actually makes the product.

If you have time, you can learn a lot about your competitors by checking to see if they have directory listings.

Do you have any other thechniques where by you get a sense of your competitors’ activities in the PPC arena?