As specialized
SEO agency in Barcelona, we continued with the article series about the past, present and future of search engine optimization, to provide reflections that can be useful to the
digital marketing industry and our customers. Today I talk about the websites of comparators and their effect on our SEO.
There are certain trends in the market that have made that increasingly more consumers, before deciding on the purchase of a product or hiring a service, they consult the information about them and, above all, compare prices between them. This is because the comparators gives to the user time and money savings. This webs have boomed in recent years of crisis but the numbers indicate that it is a stable trend and is going to stay.
In fact, growth of the comparators in recent years has been exponential. At the present we can find this kind of websites for almost any business or market: insurance, travel, food, credit, phones and much more. The latest online behavioral studies indicate that 9 of each 10 consumers compare prices before purchasing a product or service. A clear example is Rastreator, one of the main comparators in the spanish market (originally an insurance comparator but it's beeing expanded to another markets and could become a full comparator), which reports that since its origins 14 million people hace used this comparator, with a repetition rate of 90%.
Does the rise of the comparators affect our SEO?
Yes, and a lot. It is logical because the amount of information and links to websites they have, and that provides a good organic positioning. And they often invest large amounts of budget in sponsored links, which makes the brands fight to occupy space on the first results page. Relationship search engines with brands is complex: the comparators are an opportunity to drive traffic and sales to the website by other channels. But in turn, the activity of the comparators involves a higher prices for leads or sales achieved by adding another link to the cycle of purchase. Faced with criticism of certain brands, the comparators are defended arguing that with its emergence should only suffer the brands that are not competitive with the rest in terms of value for money.
In any case, the competence of the comparators makes brands see that they are loosing positions in the rankings in SEM and SEO, losing visibility and opportunities for achieving the goals directly from the own site. However, as we said, this loss of SEO and
SEM can be compensated by sales through the comparators. We have the right to complain if we do not like these changes, but to be honest, we're can't change them. Perhaps the most reasonable approach is to look for the positive elements and take advantage: with the arrival of the comparators we have more possibilities to appear there where our potential audience searchs. So having comparators as allies it is presented as a much more attractive option than compete against them.
