Finding Competitors and Vital Keywords – Module 7

In order to assess which company’s GMI considers to be its competition, I simply accessed our intranet and viewed that data – which is directly available to all employees. Naturally, the company lists competition you would expect, and some you may not, including:

Kellogg’s

Campbell’s

Nestle

Frito-Lay

Danone

Of course, we also have what the company considers to be “indirect competition,” or “market players,” 

including:

Pepsi

Proctor and Gamble

Hostess

In order to find vital keywords for this competition (since we cannot easily use a tool like Insights or Compete), we can simply search for common things like company brand names (i.e. General Mills), products one of the companies produce, (i.e. Twinkie), or even something like “best chocolate cereal,” where we are subsequently presented with a paid Google ad for Chocolate Cheerios. (Someone in our search-marketing department is on the ball :-P)

Screenshot 1

We can also see from that same search that several blogs and news sites are the top organic results, including Miami New Times, Serious Eats, Candy Addict, and Bodybuilding.com.

This leads me to three very important questions:

   

   1.)  Where is the actual GMI page for Chocolate Cheerios, and why isn’t it the top result?

   

   2.)  Do we currently advertise on the relevant blogs/news sites/etc – and if not – would it be advantageous for us to do so?

   

   3.)  How do we best cannibalize this search term to ensure competition like Kellogg’s Krave cereal isn’t shown when searching?

While we cannot possibly due a full CI assessment with our limited tool set, we can see that things like product name, perception, health, and brand are all important and vital keyword categories when considering GMI from a search context.