Agorapulse — Competitive Analysis
In this Article, I’ll be analysing Agorapulse competitive landscape aiming to provide a list of actionable recommendations they can easily implement to take their business to the next level.
I normally perform this sort of analysis to better understand those companies having success on a particular niche/vertical as it helps me refine my strategy and better understand what the algorithm is ranking at the keyword level
Horizontal Competition: Competitors Offering similar or substitute products similar to what we offer.
According to G2.com Agorapulse biggest Competitors Performance in Terms of Customer Satisfaction (X-axis) and Market Presence (Y-axis) are Buffer.com, Hootsuite.com, and Sproutsocial.com.
The Table above shows a significant gap in between Agorapulse and its high-end terms of Keywords Indexed, Estimated Traffic/Month and Estimated Traffic Value — Breakdown Bellow
- Hootsuite Estimated Traffic Value Is 2x Higher than Buffer and Sprout Social — This Suggest Hootsuite is prioritising Topics/Keywords with higher Commercial Intent
- Buffer has 35K+ indexed keywords than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite has a Keyword to Traffic ratio of 2.1 vs 1.1 form Buffer — This suggests Hootsuite is prioritising Topic/Keywords with higher demand (Volume)
So Far Hootsuite looks like the biggest and most successful competitor. Now let’s try to find how much commercial value ($) each keyword is bringing to each competitor
Hootsuite & Sprout Social’s Value Per Keyword is 6x higher than Agorapulse
It is interesting to see how Sprout Social’s Value Per Keyword is pretty close to Hootsuites’ even though it has way less traffic and keywords indexed in Search Engines.
How is this happening?
To better understand both sites overall content strategy let’s have a look at the relationship between Traffic value and Site Structure (Url path) to see if there are any differences between Hootsuite & Sprout Social.
Hootsuite’s Overall Structure is quite complex as it is using multiple subdomains to serve a different kind of channels, users and content i.e blog, ads, etc
- Hootsuite’s most valuable paths from an organic perspective are the Blog Subdomain and /
The intent behind their most popular sections is mixed which show us how they are targeting users at different stages of the buying cycle
- How to — Informational
2. Hootsuite — Navigational/transactional
3. Create Facebook Business Page — Informational
Sproadsocial’s Overall Structure is simpler than Hootsuite (Subfolders vs Subdomains) however there’s a significant amount of content linked to their most valuable content
SproatSocial has a similar strategy and it is targeting mixed intents however it looks like they have been more strategic when targeting Informational topics because the demand for these topics is higher
Now that we understand Agorapulse’s horizontal competitors most valuable sections/content and have a good understanding of what sort of topics/articles they are prioritising and covering on their websites. Let’s have a look at Agorapulse’s Vertical Competition
Vertical Competition: Competition happening along the Customer Journey, where each stage of the Customer Journey contributes to Sales
Note — Keep in mind that for sites within the “Consideration” Stage of the Buyer Journey” I have analyzed only their Social Media Sections Which is the reason why figures in terms of # of Keywords Indexed and Traffic per Month aren’t that big.
Websites producing content to address Users at the early stages of the buying Cycle (Awareness) tend to have more Keywords indexed on Search Engines as the normally cover Topics/Articles with an “Informational Intent” which basically means these sites attract users who are more interested in Education rather than Buying something.
On the other hand websites on the “Consideration” stages of the buying cycle tend to produce pieces of content covering Topics/Articles o Pages with a “Commercial or Transactional” Intent.
For particular instance, we can see sites like G2.com and Capterra.com having fewer keywords indexed on the Social Media vertical, But their value ($) per keyword is 3-7 times higher than sites like SMExaminer & SMToday targeting users on the “Awareness” stage of the Buying cycle via Content with an Informational intent. (See Chart Below)
Capterra’s Value Per Keyword is almos 8x higher than Agorapulse
How is this happening?
Let’s have a look at the actual pieces of content Capterra is using to get such an impressive Value Per Keyword Ratio.
Here’s what Capterra’ is doing from a Content/SEO perspective to have great Value Per Keyword ratio
- Taking advantage of other products brand efforts at scale
Capterra has almost 400+ pages indexed under their social media section — Most of them are Comparisons between different products.
This is a strong tactic that definitely contributes to their bottom line while provides incredible value for Users that aren’t ready to buy and are after an “Objective” comparison.
These comparisons are highly interactive and customisable which definitely Adds incredible amounts of value — These pages are a great example of good UX and SEO cause they aren’t heavily optimised from a content perspective ( We are not in 2010 anymore) they are satisfying the User Intent.
Recommendations
If you’d like to get the full list of recommendations I have created as a result of this analysis please contact me on Linkedin
