Last week on June 20th, Google Trends for websites was launched to allow a look into competing sites and aid your plans for worldwide domination. Similar sites, like Compete (my favorite) and Alexa already exist, but this leverages the power of Google’s simple, yet masterful use of analytical data.
Anyone can use it to find out the keyword or website competition for a site they want to start, but what’s really quite interesting is the competition going on in big industry. In our case, that would be… the CAD industry.
If you take a look at Google Trends for the major 3D CAD/PLM companies in the world you can get a good idea of which are getting the most traffic. In the chart below, Autodesk (AutoCAD, Inventor) and Siemens(SolidEdge,NX) clearly come out ahead of 3DS(Catia, SolidWorks) and PTC(Pro/E, CoCreate).
What’s does this show?
Now to be fair, it’s hard to gauge what CAD/PLM products come out on top, because most products are under the main company domain. For example, AutoCAD is a sub-section on AutoDesk.com. SolidWorks is the only one that stands on its own, with it’s own domain. Even Catia.com leads back to the Dassault (3ds.com) website. Even though, this shows you where the traffic is going online and why online competition for keyword density and search engine result pages (SERPs) can even be important for CAD vendors. Which, by the way, SolidWorks currently maintains the #1 SERP for 3D CAD. Goes to show you what search engine optimization (SEO) and backlinks can do for a company, but that’s a whole other mess.
Note: I also searched for SpaceClaim and Alibre’s ranking with these others. SpaceClaim does not show up and Alibre falls a fair bit below SolidWorks.com. You can get a better look at this and sites with smaller traffic on Compete.com.
Side-note:On a side note, according to Compete, SolidSmack.com passed Dassault (3ds.com) in daily/monthly Page Visits in April. That means absolutely nothing, since I’m not competing with Dassault for web presence and page views, but is kinda neat.
