SEO Share Of Voice ®
SEO share of voice is a somewhat elusive concept. Still, there are interesting opinions amongst clever DIY practitioners as to how marketers should measure SEO SOV progress against organic search competitors.  New SEO share of voice tools also tell marketers what actions to take in order to grow SEO prominence. It’s been many years since tools like WebPosition Gold were rendered obsolete by personalized search and Google pogroms.
Those were the days – when page critic solutions told SEOs what to fix to win against competitors and then measured share of ranking voice.
There was a tools-void for a number of years. SEOs learned how to fly with blinders and page critic tools barely existed or were cheesy. Now, with the advent of big data, savvy SEO curators are pulling down competitive data. These SEO competitive intel-toolmakers are among the fastest growing privately held companies in America.
Conductor, BrightEdge & Spyfu Recon are the best known tools that gather data points about your website and competitors to formulate SEO recommendations. Spyfu Recon and AdGooroo are very different tools than the aforementioned first two. Still, the concept of Recon and AdGooroo portend the next gen of competitive reports.
Remember that public/private data mix? This generation of SEO tools assimilates private and public data, including keywords in SERPs, competitors’ keywords in SERPs.   Both BrightEdge and Conductor offer a workflow solution that prioritize fixes and assign tasks to teams. Keyword KPI goals are tracked against performance. Program filter presets and study your site amongst the competitive landscape by vertical. Parse all of that into a share of voice concept we can show the boss. The image below shows Conductor’s market share against closest competitors.
BrightEdge did a better job of self-promoting their SOV algorithm than Conductor did.   The algo may or may not be better. They’ve got heavy investors, including Intel Capital and Insight Venture Partners backing them.
That said, Conductor ranks #38 on the 2013 Inc. 500|5000 list with Three-Year Sales Growth of 6701%. Obviously their approach to SEO is working and they’ve got customers. BrightEdge and Conductor are similar conceptually, each with it’s own scrappy metaphor, pros and cons.  One service may have more features than the other. Either way, the holy grail of SEO is to use Share of Voice measurements tied back to the performance of SEO strategies and tactics. Then map corrections to take if needed. Here’s one of the BrightEdge SOV reports. It’s beautiful.
Below this paragraph is SpyFu Recon Traffic Share report. What’s cool about Recon is that marketers don’t even need to enter any keywords. The system knows applicable keywords as evidenced in the competitive landscape. In the alternate, enter a huge list of KWs for competitive traffic tracking. Use the tool to surface algorithmic competitors or enter them manually. The Recon traffic share is a thoughtful, trended SOV metric to believe in. The editorial in the green box is automated. Copy and paste the text. Send it to your manager. No data is perfect but this is sweet information, a true SOV data point as evidenced by keyword traffic. Nice.
There are also interesting insights for creative marketers in Recon’s more granular, keyword-level reports. Below, we’re looking at the top KWs for top organic competitors, by month. Organic overlaps are noted. Interestingly, the PPC expenditure for the same competitors are tracked. Find organic money keywords with no PPC competition. One way to think about this is as competitive PPC/SEO gap analysis. Find the seams of opportunities. Exploit them.
SpyFu Kombat offers an overall SEO SOV report of sorts. Here is a graph showing competitive trending for keyword count in SERPs for each domain. We tested REI.com, Cabelas.com and DicksSportingGoods.com.  This speaks to the quantity of KWs in organic search engine results pages.
Some SEOs might consider SpyFu’s new Organic Keyword Ranking History report a share of voice concept. The “Voice” at hand is about which domain owns the organic SERPs real estate for specific keywords. This report is pretty cool in that it also flags major Google organic algorithm updates. You can see that Panda 23 killed Cabela’s for a short while for the KW “goretex hiking boots,” the most common misspelling of Gore-Tex®.
AdGooroos Natural Executive Overview report is a portal into a world of organic data. Use it to flag top competitors, measure top keywords’ trends, or monitor the progress of an SEO campaign.  That meets the definition of share of voice for me.
The linking universe is another voice of which to seek share. SEO marketers still need a small and beautiful constellation of inbound links to make their websites go bang in the SERPs. There are only so many links which will be doled out during any time period.  One company can get more link share than another. Certainly, competitive link metrics amount to a share of voice.
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