In the search engine marketing industry, it's common knowledge that something's popularity often correlates with how frequently people search for it. For example, "ugly sweater" parties didn't really exist before 2006, but since then they've grown in popularity according to Google Trends, a tool that measures the popularity of search terms in Google over time.

If you're looking at different website publishing platforms, consider search engine trends when looking at Squarespace and competitors for your blog or website.

Squarespace's Growth in the Market

When it comes to Squarespace's popularity, the web publishing company has grown every year since it started in a college dorm in 2004. Now Squarespace powers over 1.4 million websites, and is positioned well against its competition to continue increasing market share since they released their next generation platform last year, Squarespace 6.

The Squarespace Competitor Landscape

When looking at the different blog and website platforms out there, consumers typically look at two main types of competitors:

Big Players in the Web Publishing Space

Platforms like Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger, and Typepad are competitors often considered alongside Squarespace because they already have millions of users each. Of all of them, Squarespace and Typepad are relatively smaller players. Blogger is in the middle of the pack, and Tumblr has become extremely popular since starting to grow in 2009. Wordpress is also shown to be a very popular choice (note: consider Wordpress an outlier here for purposes related to how people search for it relative to other platforms.).

True Squarespace Competitors in the Visual Web Building Niche

While similar in some aspects, comparing Squarespace to Wordpress is ultimately like comparing apples to ferns. Yes, they're both plants, but that doesn't make them all that similar in the long run. Wordpress typically requires more in-depth code knowledge and your own hosting.

Squarespace is positioned in the market place as the premiere solution for web publishers that prefer fully hosted websites built using intuitive, WYSIWYG design tools. In that sense there are far fewer direct competitors to Squarespace.

Virb, Edicy, Site Kreator, Plebu, and Drupal Gardens compete much more closely with Squarespace than do the big players in web publishing like Wordpress. Of these, Squarespace is the clear winner and dominant player in the "premium web publishing" niche.

Squarespace has led this part of the market for the last five years, and continues its trajectory as the segment leader. Squarespace is positioned to exceed its 2009 campaign popularity with its baseline monthly interest, and has passed the segment's #2 Virb's historical high-point from back in 2007.

By all accounts, Squarespace owns this market segment, and continues to earn more total web publishing market share as news of Squarespace 6 spreads and the premium web publishing segment grows as a whole.

What Squarespace Competitors Have You Found?

Are there other Squarespace competitors that you've found? What do you like about Virb, Wordpress and all the rest compared to Squarespace? Where does Squarespace shine? Be sure to share your thoughts and we can chat it up in the comments.