For seo agencies and digital marketing agencies it is essential to have a good web positioning. Both to serve potential customers and to serve the customers of our potential customers.
However, web positioning is very difficult for a marketing agency that starts in the Spanish market. Whether it is web positioning in Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia or Bilbao, there are well-positioned agencies against which it is very expensive to compete.
For this reason, it is necessary to learn how to find market niches within the digital marketing sector itself. In addition, it is necessary to investigate and discover the good and best web positioning practices that seo agencies have used throughout Spain.
With this purpose, we have carried out a traffic and web positioning investigation in which we included 19 digital marketing agencies that are positioned in Google among the first 30 results for the search term. digital marketing agency.
Surprisingly, among these agencies there are both some whose website is more than 10 years old and others whose website is only 2 years old. In fact, although this selection includes well-known agencies such as BigSEO, the agency that has attracted the most web traffic in the last six months is a very young agency. Better still, that agency in such a short time had the courage to change brands and did not lose the traffic it had obtained.
In this article we talk about good web positioning practices and market niches in the digital marketing sector in Spain.
Web traffic ranking 2022
This is the 2022 web traffic ranking of digital marketing agency sites that are positioned in Google among the first 30 results in Spain for the search term digital marketing agency.
I repeat this clarification because the selection criteria used determine the agencies that enter the study. This is not an article about the best agencies, but a data analysis article looking for knowledge about good practices in the sector.
The ranking of the first half of 2022 in itself is of no use to me. Another thing would be to determine the growth rate of web traffic by comparing the first half of 2021 with the first half of 2022.
Web traffic growth rate ranking 2021 to 2022
Now if interesting things start to appear. For example, the growth of the website rodanet.com is practically enormous compared to the others. Let's see it better in a bar graph.
The growth of all the agencies is situated slightly above or below the growth of the average agency which was 16%. However, the growth of rodanet.com is practically an anomaly in the dataset.
I do not know each of the thousands of digital marketing agencies in Spain, nor am I looking for the best ones, nor is any agency paying me to appear in this study. In fact, who pays me, which is Precise Future, and I need as much objectivity as possible in this data analysis. Because the goal of Precise Future is to use the results of this analysis to improve its own positioning and increase its web traffic.
So I wonder how rodanet.com was able to grow so much more than the average agency?
Rodanet.com market niche
The rodanet.com site has been positioned among the first 100 Google results for 748 keywords. Those 748 keywords express how the Googlebot defines rodanet.com. But, following Pareto, 80% of the web traffic that rodanet.com receives comes from only 7 of these 748 keywords, that is, 1% of the keywords.
In other words, for the Google bot, rodanet.com is a recommended seo agency, it is a seo consultant from Barcelona and deals with web positioning in Catalonia.
Observe the kpis of the rodanet.com market niche, that is, with only 7 keywords it achieves a total web traffic of 6,559 monthly visits. The site has the strength of being positioned in the first place in 6 of the 7 keywords of the niche. It also has the strength that the niche has high payment entry barriers with an average CPC of 3.58USD.
However, it has two threats. The niche remains attractive to other competitors because rodanet.com only satisfies 6,559 out of 19,490, or 33.7% of the total niche search volume. The second is that the organic barriers to entry are very low even because the average positioning difficulty is only 32%.
I can continue to characterize the niche with three kpis out of the sleeve. But what interests me now is to understand why the growth of rodanet.com is so great compared to the rest of the sites included in this study.
Again, niche kpis tell me nothing until I have something to compare them to. Therefore, we are going to compare the market niche of rodanet.com with the market niche of espartadigital.com, which is the second in growth.
Market niche of espartadigital.com
The site espartadigital.com has been positioned among the first 100 Google results for 796 keywords. Those 796 keywords express how the Googlebot defines espartadigital.com. But, following Pareto, 80% of the web traffic that espartadigital.com receives comes from only 29 of these 796 keywords, that is, 30% of the keywords.
In other words, for the Google bot, according to the algorithms it has implemented, espartadigital.com is a digital marketing agency in Valencia and knows very well the relationships between Instagram and Facebook.
Look at the kpis of the market niche of espartadigital.com, that is, you need 29 keywords to achieve a total web traffic of 670 monthly visits. In other words, you need 4 times more keywords to achieve traffic 10 times less than that of rodanet.com.
The site has the strength of having branded traffic and attracting 80% of traffic for the digital sparta keyword. But that traffic is only 127 monthly visits and that is the keyword that provides the most traffic. When an agency is starting out, their brand traffic is small and they must look for other sources, which is why both sites rank for more than 700 keywords.
It also has the strength that the niche has high payment entry barriers with an average CPC of 1.80USD.
Here I have to make a caveat. The terms high or low are meaningless as long as there isn't a full scale of all CPCs across all niches. That's what I'm working on. When I say high, I mean that there are niches whose payment entry barrier is less than 0.50USD. However, as this study progresses, I am sure that I will find niches with barriers to entry of more than 8.00 USD.
So, a barrier to entry of $1.80 is high for a new agency like Precise Future that does not have a significant budget for paid positioning, but it may be negligible for agencies that compete in niches with barriers to entry of more than $8.00.
On the other hand, it has two clear threats. The niche remains attractive to other competitors because espartadigital.com only satisfies 670 of 76,590, or less than 1% of the niche's total search volume. In short, espartadigital is not the owner of the niche in which it is trying to position itself and it does not have a high market share in that niche, and that is a serious threat.
The second is that the organic barriers to entry are very low, because the average positioning difficulty is only 32%. This happens for all new sites that we must settle for positioning in niches with organic entry barriers or keyword positioning difficulty of less than 40%.
Let's try to compare the quantitative characterization of the rodanet.com niche with the quantitative characterization of the espartadigital.com niche.
Quantitative comparison of two market niches
Before starting the quantitative comparison of the market niches of espartadigital.com and rodanet.com I need to explain the kpis that I use.
I have used 13 kpis in total. The first five characterize the niche in which we are trying to position a website. It seems good that the niche has a high search volume. In this kpi, the espartadigital.com niche surpasses the rodanet niche.
It also seems good that it has low keyword difficulty and low cpc. In these two kpis again, the market niche of espartadigital.net surpasses the niche of rodanet. However, we know that there is a negative correlation between volume and cpc. There is also a negative correlation between volume and kd (keyword difficulty). Therefore, if we want a niche that is rich in search or in high demand, we cannot settle for cpc and kd that are too low.
But what is high and what is low? Better yet, what are the optimal volume, cpc, and kd values to look for in a niche market?
Continuing with the niche characterization kpis, I have defined two performance kpis or ratios. The first one expresses how big the volume is with respect to the positioning difficulty and the second one how big the volume is with respect to the cost per click. Once again, the kpis for characterizing wealth, goodness and availability of the espartadigital.com niche market outperform those of the rodanet.com niche. Let's think of a mine with abundant ore, low difficulty of extraction, little competition and low costs.
These 5 kpis will help me find optimal values when comparing the niche markets of the top performing agencies.
SEO performance characterization kpis
The second group of 8 kpis characterizes the results and performance. Like the previous group, it includes absolute kpis or effectiveness and relative kpis or efficiency. I define the objective of SEO as: obtain the highest web traffic at the lowest cost and in the shortest possible time.
So, it seems that it is better to rank for a large number of keywords. In this, espartadigital.com continues to lead rodanet.com. Because it is positioned in 29 keywords, while rodanet.com only in 7.
From here the surprising results begin.
The superior performance of rodanet.com
The average position of rodanet.com in its market niche is position 2, while the average position of espartadigital.com in its market niche is position 8. This despite all the advantages that espartadigital's niche seems to have .com about the rodanet.com niche.
The total web traffic, which is in my opinion the first objective of seo, is 6,569 for rodanet and only 670 for espartadigital. Almost 10 times greater than the first. Because? That is the answer I am looking for in this data and I will continue processing it until I find it. But I highly doubt I'll be able to find an objective answer without having finished comparing at least the 19 sites whose data I collected with SEMrush.
The following KPI is a ratio that characterizes the share of web traffic that each site attracts within the total volume of searches for its niche. Here rodanet monopolizes the 34% of the volume which makes it an important competitor within its niche. This makes it easier for you to defend your positioning in the coming months.
However, espartadigital.com only reaches 1% of the search volume, which means that there are other much stronger competitors in the niche that you have chosen to position yourself.
I will conclude for now by looking at another kpi. The Total Search Volume/Average Keyword Difficulty ratio expresses how many times the volume of the niche is greater than the positioning difficulty. For me it represents something like the positioning potential that I have.
Then, the Total Traffic/Average Keyword Difficulty ratio characterizes how much the real traffic reached by the site has exceeded the difficulty level. I'm going to reproduce two rows of the niche comparison table to show you how I interpret it and what many kpis do for me.
The site espartadigital.com has reached 0.9% of the positioning potential of its market niche (21/2,400 see the values of espartadigital in the previous table). On the other hand, rodanet.com has reached 33.6% of the positioning potential of its market niche (21/2,400).
In both cases, I would recommend continuing to work on the SEO of the pages that have managed to position themselves in the niche. But without having read those pages, these kpis tell me which site needs to improve the most.
Frequency study of this article
My initial goal is to attract web traffic to the Precise Future site from companies and agencies that may be interested in niche market research. However, the frequency analysis tells me that the article should be positioned in the coming weeks not only for niche, but also for other keywords such as rodanet, espartadigital, web traffic, web positioning.
It is inevitable that digital marketing agencies compete with each other. But in future articles I want to show from the advances in microeconomics, economic equilibrium models and game theory that it is possible and necessary to collaborate with each other.
In this way, discover together what is rational in the digital marketing sector in Spain and what forms of management allow us to grow together through states of equilibrium without going through depressions or crises.
Competition can be a game with clear objectives and rules where we all win and we all have several lives to learn how to play to win.
Disclaimer
The definitions, formulas, and results of this study are still pending review and testing. Therefore, Precise Future is not responsible for any use made of them in the process management of digital marketing agencies that influences their web positioning.
