Marketplace Potential

The Marketplace potential (or Competitive League Table) is a component which can be used for market research and competitive gap analysis.

In order to produce this table, we take all the keywords which are currently bringing you traffic (this requires you to have setup Google Analytics integration of course). We then analyse the results from Page 1 of Google and collate the results into this league table.

Once we have done this, because it is generally perceived that higher rankings generate more traffic and that the top ranking result in most searches will receive approximately 40% of the click through, then you can use such results to estimate the traffic received by each site ranking for those keywords on Page 1.

Your own site on the system will always a traffic index of 1.0 and by extrapolating the overall ranking results and using historical data on the CTR for various positions on page 1, you can estimate the resulting traffic your competitors (and other sites) are getting for your target organic keywords. 

So, for example, any site above you will generally be getting more traffic; similarly, any site generally ranking below you should get less traffic. So a site showing a traffic index of 1.5 will generally be getting 1.5x the amount of traffic you are currently receiving.

In order to get the most out of this component, you will need to ensure that you have setup the branded keyword filter in the monitored keywords component. It's under Competitive Position tab here. The reason for this is that if you don't filter out your branded terms, this table may give you a misleadingly flattering picture of your share of (organic) search as it is assumed that you should rank well for your domain, your trademarks and your other branded terms anyway.

Of course, this table can be exported into Excel as part of the Competitive Position report. It is exported into its own worksheet quite helpfully as you can see.

So what does it tell you? Well, it will give you a way in which you can estimate your site's 'share of organic search'. It also helps to identify competitors you may not have your radar and ones which you may not be monitoring in the particular campaign you've setup for this site.

It is also helpful in determining overall marketing strategy as you will normally identify link prospects here as well as blogging, forum and expert advice sites which could be directing traffic on to your competitors' websites through forum posts, blog posts or banner adverts.