SEO News

Why free Google tools?

The range of tools available to big agencies and brands can unearth a plethora of useful data to help understand SEO and content focuses. Tools like SEMrush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge and others can be massively insightful, but their cost can be preclusive to some.

In addition, they can require analytical, Excel-loving brains with many hours at hand to really drill down into the granular detail to extract benefits.

Many sole traders, small businesses and SMEs just don’t have the budget or resource to invest money and time into such data, so I wanted to help by talking through how it’s possible to be really targeted with your content work, using only free tools provided by our all-powerful overlord; Google.  

It’s never been easier to set your site up with Google Analytics and Search Console (nee Webmaster Tools). If you haven’t, do it. Now. Here and here. 

The content strategy process is a long one, driven by mounds of data from social and SEO sources, but underneath it all lies simple logic. It’s a linear process that starts with opportunity and results in what you can get from that opportunity, so you know what’s worth doing. Then it’s a case of doing it, measuring it, and learning from it. 

Simple, right? Honestly, it can be!

Trends analysis

So let’s start at the start. We’ll set out our stall by defining who we are for this example. In this instance, we are a sports retailer – clothing, equipment, etc. As a result, we want to populate our static content and blog content with material that is in demand and meets the needs of relevant searchers.

The first tip is to understand what has been popular in sport in the recent past. There are three Google tools that can help with this:

Google Trends

The Explore section of Google Trends can be massively useful in understanding previous search trends. If we are to look for a certain type of sport or sporting event, we can see relative search volumes and understand when people are searching for information on them. 

This is invaluable for insight on when to create and publish content. Remember, depending on the size and authority of your site, Google can take a while to crawl content, so be sure to publish in plenty of time for Google to crawl and index the content. 

Search trends for Wimbledon (2015), for example, clearly peak during the tournament (June 29th to July 12th). However, interest begins to rise more than a month before the start of the tournament.

This is interesting insight as it shows that demand for content is actually spread over a wider period than expected and therefore you may be able to cut through the noise by publishing unique content earlier.

Further down the results, we also see further information about related search queries, which can be additionally helpful.

For example, with Wimbledon in the UK, additional queries like Andy Murray, the BBC and Roger Federer are also popular, which can help inform the content you might create.  

Another really useful part of Google Trends is the Year In Search report, which looks back at the last calendar year and highlights the key events searched for during that 12 months. 

This report can be broken down into lists based on particular categories. Lists relevant to our sports brand might be People of Sport and Sports Events. 

This can be useful again to inform content subjects. A key question to ask is why these searches were so big. If it is because of a particular time-specific event, like Pedro’s transfer to Chelsea, then content around him perhaps won’t have legs in the future.

However, ‘evergreen’ high-demand sports stars like Ronda Rousey will provide much higher, more consistent, levels of demand over time.

The main Year In Search report lists the most popular search trends in the year, so leafing through this to identify search opportunities can unveil insight. The list for 2015, for example contains the Rugby World Cup, the Women’s Football World Cup and the Cricket World Cup, all of which are relevant to our sports brand.

We know that these events don’t happen every year, but it can direct us to look ahead at what sporting events are upcoming in the next 12 months, especially World Cups and Championships, and filter this into the future content strategy.

In 2016, for example, we know that Euro 2016 and the Rio Olympics are happening, and the Year In Search report indicates that these will drive high demand. 

YouTube Trends

Working in a very similar way to Google Trends, YouTube Trends gives insight into how people have searched YouTube over time. YouTube is, after all, the world’s second biggest search engine.

The most useful part of this tool is the Dashboard area. Many businesses (most, I hope!) will have an understanding of who their customers are, and this info can be used in Dashboard to drill down into YouTube behavioural trends.

Our sports retail brand is UK-only and most customers are 25-34-year-old males. We can input this data into Dashboard and see what videos are popular in that demographic. Straight away we can see that in the Top 10 results, there are two sports related videos.

This is useful stuff that helps to understand the content our target audience is consuming, and what we might create to target them.

Google Correlate

Now this one is a little leftfield as it is more data heavy and requires some data formatting to work properly, but Google Correlate is a clever tool designed to show other search terms that have similar search trends to your target term.

You can upload search trend data from Google Trends and the tool will reveal other terms that follow similar search patterns. 

The Draw To Search function is especially clever. It allows you to draw a trend curve (for your chosen terms) and produces a list of other search terms that match a similar trend curve. 

This can throw up some really random results – however, there is useful stuff in there too. 

The simple way to use it, however, is to just enter a relevant term in the search box and see what matches. A search in Correlate for ‘adidas trainers’ shows correlations with other search terms containing trainer brands like Nike, and Adidas trainer models like Superstar.

Really interestingly, however, there is also a correlation with searches for content about smartwatches. This implies there may be an audience link and smartwatch content could be of interest to our Adidas trainer customers. 

So, after a bit of research across Trends and Correlate, we will hopefully have generated a list of appropriate subjects and terms that we want to take forward into the next part of the process.

The next step is to validate those opportunities by starting to understand what we might be able to generate for our business in traffic terms.

Targeting keywords

Google Keyword Planner

Earlier, Correlate told us that we had a potential opportunity to target our costumers with smartwatch content, so let’s see what opportunity there is around that subject.

Keyword planner tells us that in the UK, over the last 12 months, there are 242 related keywords we should consider looking at.

Now, let’s be honest, our humble sports brand is not Mashable, Wired or Techcrunch, so perhaps going for headline terms like ‘smartwatches’ is not sensible. Let’s look at long tail terms (low volume, high specificity) to see if there are ‘easier’ opportunities to go after. 

If we export the results, and remove keywords with 1,000+ searches per month (the headline terms) or less than 100 searches per month (not enough potential), we’re left with:

In order to get benefit in a realistic timeframe, we also need to consider the difficulty of competing for traffic on these terms.

Keyword Planner gives us this information in the Competition column. If we sort this column and remove those terms with the most difficulty (1 is the highest), we’re left with: 

A bit of logic tells us that ‘smartwatch news’ isn’t relevant for us as that implies long term, regular content.

However, there are some clear winners here that we could create evergreen content around. ‘Top 10 smartwatches’ and ‘smartwatch apps’ are two in particular.

Of course, we can create relevant content around these subjects due to the link between smartwatches and sports-fitness apps, Strava, GPS tracking, pedometers, etc. An example post might be Top 10 smartwatch apps for running.

In 2014, Moz performed a study of organic search click through rates, and we can use this to calculate how many clicks we might expect to get from these two terms, based on the position our content ranks in and what the search volumes are.  

Applying this data shows us that if our content ranks in position 1 for these terms, which is viable if we have a healthy link profile and a well optimised site, then we can expect to see over 80 clicks per month for each of these terms. 

While this may not seem much, these are just two terms in what should be a plethora of opportunities. If we’re publishing a targeted piece every couple of days, based on the right data, then this number will very quickly accelerate. 

Another way of calculating click through rates, rather than using a study, is to look in another of Google’s tools…

Google Search Console

The Search Analytics section of what was known as Webmaster Tools will show you how many impressions and clicks a term has generated over a given time frame, plus the resulting click through rate and the average ranking of the term.

Accordingly, you can start to build your own study based on your own organic performance data.

If we look at Zazzle’s data for a long tail term such as ‘types of digital media’ for which we rank in position 1, we can see that for the chosen timeframe, the site received 94 clicks from 201 impressions, a CTR of almost 47%. 

‘Digital content types’, using the same methodology, gave a click through rate of 39% from position 1. 

Already we can see that some of our click through rates are different to those outlined in the study. With a bit of work, a study of your own average click through rates by position can be a useful endeavour, as it will mean your projections are accurate and tailored to you. 

I have created a cheat sheet that will allow you to use the study CTRs to formulate traffic based on search volume. I have also extended it so that for commercial brands, AOV and conversion rate can be added to calculate potential revenue from each term. It also includes an area where you can enter your own CTRs if you choose to do the analysis I suggested above. 

While you are in Search Console and looking at clicks/impressions by term, take a look at the same data by page rather than by query and try to understand any patterns with regards to which content types are working better than others.

Ultimately your current content performance is the best source of information on what your readers want to see and what will work best for you in the future.

Perhaps it is product reviews that work for you, or Top 10 lists? Perhaps it is more visual content… video perhaps? Understanding this and plugging it into the research data you’ve done in this process will only enhance your strategy.

Now we know what our opportunities are and what they could mean to our business in terms of traffic and revenue, we need to plan our content calendar.

Content planning

Google Drive

Another great tool from Googlem using Google Sheets as a home for a content calendar is great as it allows evolution over time via collaboration.

Multiple people working on the same document can be a nightmare, however Google Sheets mitigates that by constantly saving the document. It also gives you more control over who sees the calendar via sharing restrictions.

Here’s the calendar template that Zazzle uses (or Econsultancy subscribers can download Econsultancy’s Content Marketing template files, which feature a content calendar template).

Of course, when you’ve got all your data-led concepts in place and a template calendar in Drive, the next bit is quite important. Ideas…

Google Keep

Even if you already use an iterative, tried and tested ideation process, this still requires meetings of minds, imagination and creativity.

Google Keep is a great way of recording the output of brainstorming sessions, ensuring all of those creative juices are bottled and not lost post-meeting.

Measuring success

Google Analytics

Now that we’ve identified, planned and executed the content calendar, now it’s time for perhaps the most important part of all – measurement and iteration. 

Whilst Search Console is a great source of information, especially for search queries since the dawn of Not Provided, Google Analytics is the best way for you to understand the success of your content.

Below is a list of some really simple things to look at within GA, to give you a view of how successful your content is.

1. Acquisition > Organic Keywords > Select ‘Landing Page’ as primary dimension

This report shows you how much organic traffic has landed on each page during the chosen timeframe.

Ultimately, our aim with all of this is to improve organic rankings for relevant terms with targeted content, so the measure has to be how much traffic that content is driving to the site.

This report will also let us know how many of those visits are coming from new users (and therefore potential new customers) and how users are engaging with the content. If they are engaging well, we know what works. If they don’t then we need readdress the strategy. 

Finally, the report will also show any commercial impact from that traffic/content in the form of revenue, pending the setup of goal tracking, of course.

2. Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages

As above but for all traffic, not just organic.

Ultimately, other channels may drive benefit to your new content, especially social and referral, so it’s important to understand that. 

3. Behaviour > Site Content > All pages

Similar to the above but for all traffic, not just organic, and also gives extra information on engagement with the content.

Importantly, this report shows how many times the page is the last page a user sees before exiting the site. This can highlight issues or positives with the journey of the content and how engaging it is.

There is also another interesting metric in this report – Page Value – i.e. how much revenue each visit to each page is driving, based on transaction/goal tracking. 

Whichever reports you choose to use in GA, ensure that you’re applying those learnings right back to the start of this process.

As I mentioned earlier, your experience of what works for your brand and audience is as valuable as any insight data, so make sure you incorporate it. 

For more guidance on content marketing and SEO, see the following resources:

• Introducing the periodic table of content marketing
• Implementing Content Strategy: Digital Best Practice report 
• Training: content marketing for web, mobile and social media
• Digital Content Strategy Best Practice Guide

Why free Google tools?

The range of tools available to big agencies and brands can unearth a plethora of useful data to help understand SEO and content focuses. Tools like SEMrush, Searchmetrics, Brightedge and others can be massively insightful, but their cost can be preclusive to some.

In addition, they can require analytical, Excel-loving brains with many hours at hand to really drill down into the granular detail to extract benefits.

Many sole traders, small businesses and SMEs just don’t have the budget or resource to invest money and time into such data, so I wanted to help by talking through how it’s possible to be really targeted with your content work, using only free tools provided by our all-powerful overlord; Google.  

It’s never been easier to set your site up with Google Analytics and Search Console (nee Webmaster Tools). If you haven’t, do it. Now. Here and here. 

The content strategy process is a long one, driven by mounds of data from social and SEO sources, but underneath it all lies simple logic. It’s a linear process that starts with opportunity and results in what you can get from that opportunity, so you know what’s worth doing. Then it’s a case of doing it, measuring it, and learning from it. 

Simple, right? Honestly, it can be!

Trends analysis

So let’s start at the start. We’ll set out our stall by defining who we are for this example. In this instance, we are a sports retailer – clothing, equipment, etc. As a result, we want to populate our static content and blog content with material that is in demand and meets the needs of relevant searchers.

The first tip is to understand what has been popular in sport in the recent past. There are three Google tools that can help with this:

Google Trends

The Explore section of Google Trends can be massively useful in understanding previous search trends. If we are to look for a certain type of sport or sporting event, we can see relative search volumes and understand when people are searching for information on them. 

This is invaluable for insight on when to create and publish content. Remember, depending on the size and authority of your site, Google can take a while to crawl content, so be sure to publish in plenty of time for Google to crawl and index the content. 

Search trends for Wimbledon (2015), for example, clearly peak during the tournament (June 29th to July 12th). However, interest begins to rise more than a month before the start of the tournament.

This is interesting insight as it shows that demand for content is actually spread over a wider period than expected and therefore you may be able to cut through the noise by publishing unique content earlier.

Further down the results, we also see further information about related search queries, which can be additionally helpful.

For example, with Wimbledon in the UK, additional queries like Andy Murray, the BBC and Roger Federer are also popular, which can help inform the content you might create.  

Another really useful part of Google Trends is the Year In Search report, which looks back at the last calendar year and highlights the key events searched for during that 12 months. 

This report can be broken down into lists based on particular categories. Lists relevant to our sports brand might be People of Sport and Sports Events. 

This can be useful again to inform content subjects. A key question to ask is why these searches were so big. If it is because of a particular time-specific event, like Pedro’s transfer to Chelsea, then content around him perhaps won’t have legs in the future.

However, ‘evergreen’ high-demand sports stars like Ronda Rousey will provide much higher, more consistent, levels of demand over time.

The main Year In Search report lists the most popular search trends in the year, so leafing through this to identify search opportunities can unveil insight. The list for 2015, for example contains the Rugby World Cup, the Women’s Football World Cup and the Cricket World Cup, all of which are relevant to our sports brand.

We know that these events don’t happen every year, but it can direct us to look ahead at what sporting events are upcoming in the next 12 months, especially World Cups and Championships, and filter this into the future content strategy.

In 2016, for example, we know that Euro 2016 and the Rio Olympics are happening, and the Year In Search report indicates that these will drive high demand. 

YouTube Trends

Working in a very similar way to Google Trends, YouTube Trends gives insight into how people have searched YouTube over time. YouTube is, after all, the world’s second biggest search engine.

The most useful part of this tool is the Dashboard area. Many businesses (most, I hope!) will have an understanding of who their customers are, and this info can be used in Dashboard to drill down into YouTube behavioural trends.

Our sports retail brand is UK-only and most customers are 25-34-year-old males. We can input this data into Dashboard and see what videos are popular in that demographic. Straight away we can see that in the Top 10 results, there are two sports related videos.

This is useful stuff that helps to understand the content our target audience is consuming, and what we might create to target them.

Google Correlate

Now this one is a little leftfield as it is more data heavy and requires some data formatting to work properly, but Google Correlate is a clever tool designed to show other search terms that have similar search trends to your target term.

You can upload search trend data from Google Trends and the tool will reveal other terms that follow similar search patterns. 

The Draw To Search function is especially clever. It allows you to draw a trend curve (for your chosen terms) and produces a list of other search terms that match a similar trend curve. 

This can throw up some really random results – however, there is useful stuff in there too. 

The simple way to use it, however, is to just enter a relevant term in the search box and see what matches. A search in Correlate for ‘adidas trainers’ shows correlations with other search terms containing trainer brands like Nike, and Adidas trainer models like Superstar.

Really interestingly, however, there is also a correlation with searches for content about smartwatches. This implies there may be an audience link and smartwatch content could be of interest to our Adidas trainer customers. 

So, after a bit of research across Trends and Correlate, we will hopefully have generated a list of appropriate subjects and terms that we want to take forward into the next part of the process.

The next step is to validate those opportunities by starting to understand what we might be able to generate for our business in traffic terms.

Targeting keywords

Google Keyword Planner

Earlier, Correlate told us that we had a potential opportunity to target our costumers with smartwatch content, so let’s see what opportunity there is around that subject.

Keyword planner tells us that in the UK, over the last 12 months, there are 242 related keywords we should consider looking at.

Now, let’s be honest, our humble sports brand is not Mashable, Wired or Techcrunch, so perhaps going for headline terms like ‘smartwatches’ is not sensible. Let’s look at long tail terms (low volume, high specificity) to see if there are ‘easier’ opportunities to go after. 

If we export the results, and remove keywords with 1,000+ searches per month (the headline terms) or less than 100 searches per month (not enough potential), we’re left with:

In order to get benefit in a realistic timeframe, we also need to consider the difficulty of competing for traffic on these terms.

Keyword Planner gives us this information in the Competition column. If we sort this column and remove those terms with the most difficulty (1 is the highest), we’re left with: 

A bit of logic tells us that ‘smartwatch news’ isn’t relevant for us as that implies long term, regular content.

However, there are some clear winners here that we could create evergreen content around. ‘Top 10 smartwatches’ and ‘smartwatch apps’ are two in particular.

Of course, we can create relevant content around these subjects due to the link between smartwatches and sports-fitness apps, Strava, GPS tracking, pedometers, etc. An example post might be Top 10 smartwatch apps for running.

In 2014, Moz performed a study of organic search click through rates, and we can use this to calculate how many clicks we might expect to get from these two terms, based on the position our content ranks in and what the search volumes are.  

Applying this data shows us that if our content ranks in position 1 for these terms, which is viable if we have a healthy link profile and a well optimised site, then we can expect to see over 80 clicks per month for each of these terms. 

While this may not seem much, these are just two terms in what should be a plethora of opportunities. If we’re publishing a targeted piece every couple of days, based on the right data, then this number will very quickly accelerate. 

Another way of calculating click through rates, rather than using a study, is to look in another of Google’s tools…

Google Search Console

The Search Analytics section of what was known as Webmaster Tools will show you how many impressions and clicks a term has generated over a given time frame, plus the resulting click through rate and the average ranking of the term.

Accordingly, you can start to build your own study based on your own organic performance data.

If we look at Zazzle’s data for a long tail term such as ‘types of digital media’ for which we rank in position 1, we can see that for the chosen timeframe, the site received 94 clicks from 201 impressions, a CTR of almost 47%. 

‘Digital content types’, using the same methodology, gave a click through rate of 39% from position 1. 

Already we can see that some of our click through rates are different to those outlined in the study. With a bit of work, a study of your own average click through rates by position can be a useful endeavour, as it will mean your projections are accurate and tailored to you. 

I have created a cheat sheet that will allow you to use the study CTRs to formulate traffic based on search volume. I have also extended it so that for commercial brands, AOV and conversion rate can be added to calculate potential revenue from each term. It also includes an area where you can enter your own CTRs if you choose to do the analysis I suggested above. 

While you are in Search Console and looking at clicks/impressions by term, take a look at the same data by page rather than by query and try to understand any patterns with regards to which content types are working better than others.

Ultimately your current content performance is the best source of information on what your readers want to see and what will work best for you in the future.

Perhaps it is product reviews that work for you, or Top 10 lists? Perhaps it is more visual content… video perhaps? Understanding this and plugging it into the research data you’ve done in this process will only enhance your strategy.

Now we know what our opportunities are and what they could mean to our business in terms of traffic and revenue, we need to plan our content calendar.

Content planning

Google Drive

Another great tool from Googlem using Google Sheets as a home for a content calendar is great as it allows evolution over time via collaboration.

Multiple people working on the same document can be a nightmare, however Google Sheets mitigates that by constantly saving the document. It also gives you more control over who sees the calendar via sharing restrictions.

Here’s the calendar template that Zazzle uses (or Econsultancy subscribers can download Econsultancy’s Content Marketing template files, which feature a content calendar template).

Of course, when you’ve got all your data-led concepts in place and a template calendar in Drive, the next bit is quite important. Ideas…

Google Keep

Even if you already use an iterative, tried and tested ideation process, this still requires meetings of minds, imagination and creativity.

Google Keep is a great way of recording the output of brainstorming sessions, ensuring all of those creative juices are bottled and not lost post-meeting.

Measuring success

Google Analytics

Now that we’ve identified, planned and executed the content calendar, now it’s time for perhaps the most important part of all – measurement and iteration. 

Whilst Search Console is a great source of information, especially for search queries since the dawn of Not Provided, Google Analytics is the best way for you to understand the success of your content.

Below is a list of some really simple things to look at within GA, to give you a view of how successful your content is.

1. Acquisition > Organic Keywords > Select ‘Landing Page’ as primary dimension

This report shows you how much organic traffic has landed on each page during the chosen timeframe.

Ultimately, our aim with all of this is to improve organic rankings for relevant terms with targeted content, so the measure has to be how much traffic that content is driving to the site.

This report will also let us know how many of those visits are coming from new users (and therefore potential new customers) and how users are engaging with the content. If they are engaging well, we know what works. If they don’t then we need readdress the strategy. 

Finally, the report will also show any commercial impact from that traffic/content in the form of revenue, pending the setup of goal tracking, of course.

2. Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages

As above but for all traffic, not just organic.

Ultimately, other channels may drive benefit to your new content, especially social and referral, so it’s important to understand that. 

3. Behaviour > Site Content > All pages

Similar to the above but for all traffic, not just organic, and also gives extra information on engagement with the content.

Importantly, this report shows how many times the page is the last page a user sees before exiting the site. This can highlight issues or positives with the journey of the content and how engaging it is.

There is also another interesting metric in this report – Page Value – i.e. how much revenue each visit to each page is driving, based on transaction/goal tracking. 

Whichever reports you choose to use in GA, ensure that you’re applying those learnings right back to the start of this process.

As I mentioned earlier, your experience of what works for your brand and audience is as valuable as any insight data, so make sure you incorporate it. 

For more guidance on content marketing and SEO, see the following resources:

• Introducing the periodic table of content marketing
• Implementing Content Strategy: Digital Best Practice report 
• Training: content marketing for web, mobile and social media
• Digital Content Strategy Best Practice Guide

Posted by Dr-Pete

Summary: We analyzed 5 mobile phone buyer searches on Google across 5,000 cities (25,000 total markets) to find the winners and losers in both organic and local pack results. Best Buy dominated organic results and performed well in local searches. Sprint won the local pack results, but disappeared from organic entirely. Carriers Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T all performed well, but none covered more than 30% of local search markets.

The wireless industry in the United States is both massive and competitive. According to an IDC report, over 184 million mobile phones were shipped to US customers in 2014, with an estimated 191 million in 2015. The vast majority of consumers, even in 2015, report browsing products online but purchasing in-store (73%, according to PWC’s annual report). This trend may be even more dramatic in the wireless industry, where experts suggest that upwards of 9 out of 10 of all mobile phone purchases in the US still happen in a brick-and-mortar store.

In a competitive environment where most people research phones online but buy them in-store, ranking well in Google search results, especially local results, is critical. Local results can lead consumers not only to one brand over another, but to specific store locations in their area, surfacing store addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours.

For example, here’s a local 3-pack from a search for “mobile phone store” in the Seattle area:

Local packs in 2016 not only contain rich information, including directions, reviews, location, phone, and store hours, but they appear at or near the top of organic results and occupy a large amount of screen real-estate.

This report takes a Google’s-eye view of the mobile phone market in the United States. We ran thousands of searches to determine who were the big winners in both organic and local Google results, who were the losers, and where big brands had gaps.

Report methodology

For this study, we tracked 5 wireless industry phrases on page 1 of Google.com across the 5,000 largest cities in the contiguous 48 states (according to census data), measuring both organic and local pack results. The five searches used in the final study were:

• “phone store”
• “mobile phone store”
• “cell phone store”
• “wireless store”
• “buy cell phone”

We deliberately chose keywords that were likely to return both organic and local pack results. Based on initial analyses, we discarded product-specific keywords, like “buy iPhone 6,” because those didn’t typically return local results. Interestingly, searches containing “smartphone” also generally failed to display local results.

Finally, we threw out “phone shop,” because, even searching US locations on Google.com, that phrase tended to return UK-based results. Data was combined across the five keywords, with organic and local results analyzed separately.

Top 5 organic brands (by markets)

If we treat each of these 25,000 searches (5 keywords X 5,000 cities) as a potential market, we can get a sense of how well any given company is covering the total US marketplace. For this analysis, we’ll treat multiple listings on a single page of search results as one “market.” The question is just whether any given brand is represented in that market (not where or how often).

Here were the top 5 brands, by total markets:

Big-box retailer Best Buy and online retailer Newegg led the organic winners, followed by mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The Top 10 were rounded out by (in order): Walmart, Wirefly, Cricket Wireless, and Boost Mobile.

Surprisingly, Sprint was nowhere to be found in our organic data, showing just one listing (and that one was on a sub-domain). Keep in mind that this study looked only at page-one results. Used phone resellers, including Gazelle (#11), Glyde (#12), and Swappa (#16) made a strong showing in the top 20.

Top 5 organic brands (by clicks)

The “market” analysis doesn’t account for the varying impact of different ranking positions and the populations of the 5,000 cities in this study. So, we did a second, more complex analysis. If we take a shallow click-through curve (see below), where the #1 position gets the most clicks and then click-through rate (CTR) trails off, and then we multiply each of those CTRs by the city’s population, we can get a proxy for total click volume.

Obviously, not everyone alive is running these searches, and we’re going to cheat and assume clicks total 100% (they don’t, in reality), so instead of looking at total counts, we’ll rely on percentage of total click share. Here were the top 5 by click share:

Adjusting for CTR and population, Best Buy held onto the top spot, and most of the top 5 was the same. The notable exception was AT&T, which fell to #8. Digging deeper into the data, this appears to be a function of CTR. On average, AT&T’s rankings are appearing lower on page 1 than the rest of the top 5. Cricket Wireless moved up from #8 to round out the top 5.

Top 5 local brands (by markets)

Now, let’s look at just the local pack results for those same 25,000 markets. Keep in mind that local packs did not occur in all markets, and there are a maximum of 3 sites in any local pack (compared with up to 10 organic listings). Here were the top 5 local winners:

Sprint, nowhere to be seen in our organic data, led the pack in local results. Other major wireless companies rounded out the top 5. Best Buy maintained a strong position at #6, but organic leader Newegg.com fell completely out of the local results, having no physical storefronts.

Clearly, the biggest disconnect between the organic and local data here was Sprint — taking the #1 spot for local, but disappearing completely from organic rankings. Newegg flipped that around, dominating organic but having no local presence. This was a direct and obvious result of having no physical locations.

Another big difference between organic and local was Apple.com. Apple naturally has a strong presence for product-specific (i.e. iPhone) queries, but ranked #47 in our organic results for general phone-buying searches, appearing in only 95 (of 25,000) markets. Apple stores, however, ranked #8 in local markets.

Top 5 local brands (by clicks)

Like organic, we can apply our click share analysis to local pack rankings. The Top 5 local domains, weighted by CTR and population, looked like this:

Other than some position shuffling, the Top 5 were the same as the simpler local-pack analysis. T-Mobile took the top spot from Sprint when adjusted by CTR and population. It looks as if the major brands were distributed pretty well across a variety of populations and ranking positions.

Top 5 overall winners (by clicks)

What if we combine the organic and local totals, using the click share data across all markets? Here are the winners of the combined data:

Verizon and Best Buy were in close competition for the top spot, with T-Mobile just behind. Best Buy’s #6 spot in our local analysis was easily boosted by their #1 spot in organic, making the big box store a strong overall contender. AT&T squeaked into the top 5, hampered a bit by their #8 position in organic search. Cricket Wireless rounded out the top 5.

Winners, losers, and takeaways

Best Buy dominated our organic winners and took an impressive #2 overall, performing well in local searches. This matches Best Buy’s leading spot in real-world mobile phone sales, an advantage enhanced by representing multiple brands and carriers under one roof. Best Buy’s performance is even more impressive given that they have considerably fewer total locations than most of the major carriers.

Sprint was the biggest winner in local results, given their relatively small retail footprint compared to other major carriers. Publicly-reported location data shows Sprint having half or less of the locations that each of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T operate, which makes their local dominance even more impressive. Sprint’s recent acquisition of as many as 1,700 Radio Shack storefronts could double their retail locations and make them a force to be reckoned with in local search. Sprint does, however, need to address their complete absence from organic results for general mobile keywords.

Mega-carriers Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T performed well in overall results, as expected given their marketing budgets and massive retail footprints. Verizon struggled somewhat in local rankings, relative to other carriers, bolstered in the overall standings by their strong organic presence. AT&T had the opposite problem — they had a strong local presence, but trailed a bit in organic once CTR was taken into account. It appears AT&T has room for improvement in their ranking positions for general mobile phone terms.

AT&T can count a second win in their column. As of 2014, they own Cricket Wireless, who was our #4 overall winner and had a top 5 position in both of our click share analyses (organic and local). Cricket’s dominant position is undoubtedly good for revenue, although it can be argued that both their organic and local search share represent a branding challenge for AT&T.

No single major carrier dominated market coverage in local pack results. Of the 25,000 markets we studied, 21,143 displayed local packs. Sprint ranked in local packs in about 1/3 of available markets, AT&T and T-Mobile ranked in just under 30%, and Verizon ranked in roughly 20%. Given their retail footprints and marketing budgets, all of the major carriers have significant room for improvement in their local rankings.

Even as the competitive landscape in the wireless industry shifts, Google’s local search landscape will continue to evolve. Google’s current local 3-packs have only been in full effect since August of 2015, and the search giant is constantly experimenting with new formats and features. No one carrier or reseller dominates the entire picture, and all of them will have to fight hard for organic and local search share in the foreseeable future.

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