Business owners: if you geo-target your search ads, or if you’ve ever wondered about your paid search competition in a particular city, then you need to check out SearchMuffin.
SearchMuffin is a very cool and simple-to-use search engine that I’m betting you’ve never used before. To use it, all you need to do is enter a keyword and select a city in the US from a dropdown (there are more than 250 cities to choose from). In return you get a view of Google’s search results for the city you selected. In other words, you can see the ads exactly as they appear as if you were a user in that city.
This is extremely valuable for a couple of reasons. First, you can find out who your competition is in any city. It’s very possible you’ll find competitors you never knew existed. To me, that’s always a positive thing because, good or bad, we can always learn something from our competitors.
Second, you can piece together your competition’s strategy. Are their ads the same in every city, or do they change? Do they bid more aggressively in one city over another? Do they even bid in the same cities as you do?
One more tip: compare what you see in SearchMuffin with the stats in your analytics. Now that you know who is bidding against you in a city, keep an eye on how your conversion rate in that city compares to other cities in your campaign.
So, go try SearchMuffin and let me know what you think.