Finding ecommerce competitors: SEMrush and SpyFu compared

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

May 16, 2010 [7679 views]

As part of my project to look at improving my experimental business the MarketQuarter a shop to buy French food, cheese, wine, classic dishes, duck confit, snails and foie gras online, I need to locate my competitors.

These are other online shops in the UK who sell what I sell and either rank highly in the search engines for the product keywords or advertise using the same keywords.

I already know a variety of tools that may help:

Unfortunately Adplanner does not provide data for smaller sites. It is good for larger brands in identifying some keywords and competitors but I am not in luck. Adplanner is free.

My experiments with SEMrush are more successful and the tool reveals a number of potential insights: it predicts my best performing organic keywords (40 suggestions including foie gras recipe, duck confit and french food at home), some of my Adwords keywords (comte cheese, buy foie gras) plus 384 organic and 16 Adwords competitors. SEMrush provides the top ten results for free but as I have signed up for an account I can see the full results and export them to a spreadsheet.

SpyFu performs a similar job to SEMrush with 55 Ad competitors and 38 organic competitors. The keywords identified are also similar but not identical (Adwords: foie grass, duck fois gras, buy raclette, organic:recipe foie gras, foie gras entier). I also have an account for SpyFu so once again I am able to export the full data.

I have not used KeywordSpy before but their results look similar. Like SpyFu and SEMrush they have access to UK data. Their site revealed 76 Adwords keywords (raclette swiss cheese, raclette where to buy, whole foie gras), 131 organic keywords (the market, foie, cuit, mousse de). These organic keyword phrases did not feel like things customers would type but they were still interesting. KeywordSpy revealed 95 PPC competitors and 895 organic competitors.

At the moment I will continue to use SpyFu and SEMrush unless I feel that either can be replaced by KeywordSpy.

The prices for these tools are:

SEMrush from $49.95
SpyFu from £49.95
KeywordSpy from $89.95 (free trial available)

How accurate are the tools for keywords?

Each of the tools generates a list of keywords for which MarketQuarter is likely to rank highly in Google. By looking at my analytics data I should be able to see whether each prediction is accurate. I therefore exported the keyword data for the last month into another spreadsheet.

The results are interesting with both SEMrush and SpyFu generating sensible lists of likely terms but 29 of the predicted SpyFu keywords (out of 73) had generated in-bound traffic against 22 for SEMrush (out of 40).

By using both tools I can predict 36 of 500 inbound search terms but interestingly the traffic from these accounts for 41% of my inbound searches; they predict popular phrases that are likely to generate more traffic. Each predicted 37% on their own.

Insights into my organic competitors

SpyFu and SEMrush both generate a list of organic competitors with 38 and 384 entries respectively. Each list reveals the number of shared keywords and it is here that SEMrush appears to find more interesting sites. SpyFu finds sites with a maximum of 2 shared terms while SEMrush’s results overlapped with MarketQuarter on between 1 and 41 terms.

The next priority will be to take these competitors and analyse what they are doing to achieve high rankings in the search results.

I am interested to see if MarketQuarter is considered to be a competitor of theirs as this would really indicate that we have similar businesses. It will also be interesting if it proves easier to find competitors by studying those companies that buy the same Adword key phrases.

Pay per click competitors

Spyfu generated a list of 41 sites who share at least 2 keywords in the PPC campaigns while SEMrush’s list is only 9 (although some of the sites with only 1 shared term look from inspection like competitors).

If I look at the combined list I find about 20 sites that I consider likely to genuinely compete (excluding sites such as ask.com, eBay, pricegrabber and shopziller).

There is however no overlap between the organic lists generated by these tools and these 20 sites. Perhaps this indicates both the power for Google to persuade smaller shops to advertise and the difficulty of achieving high search engine rankings for such small businesses.

Conclusions

This step of my project set out to find my competitors and I now have a list of 20 companies to study further. In the process I evaluated 2 tools I have used regularly and found another competitor offering the same sort of information. Both SEMrush and SpyFu seem to be fairly accurate in generating a useful list of organic search terms for a site although they predict only a third of the terms for MarketQuarter.

Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter

I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter