Myriad Search: A Cool Tool For Local Competitive Research

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 5 of May , 2008 at 9:51 am

Debra Mastaler asked a great question on her blog, Link Spiel:

what’s better at giving us the quick qualifying factor like the PageRank toolbar?

In other words, she wants to know if there is a resource that webmasters can turn to in order to find information on authority - a kind of one-size-fits-all way to determine which sites are the greatest authorities within their niche. Then she recommends Myriad Search.

I hadn’t heard of Myriad Search until I read Link Spiel’s post on it. Then I tried it out. It seems a bit limited, but it does do what it promises to do and deliver results from the four top search engines for a particular key phrase. It looks like a good tool for competitive research.

Just for giggles, I performed a search for “Gettysburg Pennsylvania.” I wanted to try the local angle to see what would happen. You can see the results of that search here.

If I were truly interested in building a website to search the local market of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and wanted to use that place name as my primary keyword then this search for that key phrase is very telling. Here’s what I see:

• The most authoritative site for that key phrase is www.gettysburg.com. Not surprising.
• The most authoritative site for my key phrase is No. 1 on 3 of the top 4 search engines.
• It is also No. 2 on the fourth search engine (Yahoo!).
• The second most authoritative site for the local place name I’m interested in is a government website (the National Park Service) - very important to know that for competitive analysis!
• The Gettysburg Welcome Center’s website is the the third most authoritative site on the local key phrase.
• Also, GWCs website has only half the authority as the No. 1 most authoritative site - great information!
• Coming in below GWC are Gettysburg College, Wikipedia (who’d have thunk?), the local newspaper, and various nonprofits, tourism websites, and local businesses.

Now I know what the competitive landscape is for my key search term. But what if I wanted to compete locally for the key phrase “auto mechanic?”

Well, I tried using my first key phrase along with “auto mechanic,” putting both key phrases in quotes and all I got back was a bunch of useless websites. So let’s try it without the quotes. Here are the results of that search.

I can see who the most authoritative site in Gettysburg for the term “auto mechanic.” It truly is a competitor and I know where he ranks in each of the search engines. It doesn’t look like any of my other competitors are even close. After Mike’s Towing and Recovery, it’s government websites and the Chamber of Commerce of Gettysburg. The next real competitor is an About Us page for Eagle Software, which makes software for auto shops. It looks like I have an in here if I was an auto mechanic in Gettysburg.

So you can see how useful this tool is for doing competitive research at the local level. I hope you get some use of it.

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