BrightEdge Sharpen Competitive SEO Tactics with comScore Data

BrightEdge, an SEO software platform which prides itself on having an open technology platform has teamed up with comScore to bring panel-based competitive data to it’s SEO tool set.

BrightEdge has offered competitive analytics for SEO for a while now. Much like many other SEO platforms such as Searchmerics, Optify and Conductor, BrightEdge has focussed primarily on using closed-loop analytics to mesh two different data sets together to measure the impact of SEO tactics on search rankings.

However, this latest data collaboration closes the data loop on traffic targeting by tie-ing ranking opportunities and traffic estimations to real behavioral data.

Whilst comScore, as a standalone product, is a useful tool for identifying the actual traffic you should be targeting based on actual user behavior, it’s tough to then measure how easy the opportunity is to win that traffic via an SEO strategy. Furthermore, it is not easy to differentiate the opportunities in terms of competitor activity.

Equally, from a purely SEO perspective it is extremely difficult to evaluate which keywords drive the most profitable behavior without continual testing – even with an SEO platform like BrightEdge.

One of the luxuries of combining these two data sets is that customers of both services can now assess, via a single interface, the benchmark the potential of an opportunity against their direct competitors.

For example, the screenshot below shows click volume of search terms according to clickthrough rate and simultaneously, maps the clients competitive set to the keyword set to determine how strong the competitive foothold is in those search results pages (SERPs).

 

Such a data set stands in marked contrast to targeting search terms via query (or impression) volume and then having to make your own bets as to which term converts the most traffic in the SERPs.

Particularly noteworthy about this announcement is that comScore, an industry analytics company, is somehow allowing other services to mashup it’s data. This follows a trend of enterprise-class website analytics companies opening the doors to other service integrations.

I suspect we shall be hearing more announcements from comScore – and other industry analytics – companies very soon.